Cool Drain

Concerned human

[Olivia H. Scharfman @OliviaHelenS]

We started cleaning our water and waterborne disease (e.g. cholera, typhoid) basically disappeared from the West.

We can do the same thing for air.

[cholodoomer 🍉 @cholodoomer]

Today my wife spoke with a friend and former colleague who we have not seen in years. She's a normie, the 1st type @PacoOnPause aptly describes in this video.

She recently got infected. Let me tell you about it. 🧵

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

Health systems are clinging to an outdated map, using droplet dogma against airborne disease.

Drs. Ungrin and Keegan sound the alarm.

[⛓Naomi Black || SF⛓ @DominaNaomii]

When I called COVID airborne AIDS during the first year, I was told I was blowing shit out of proportion.

Idk how to tell them I told you so

[Conor Browne @brownecfm]

Articles like these are emblematic of the institutional amnesia surrounding Covid-19. A pathogen that emerged less than seven years ago, which can cause fatigue during the acute infection and as a common long-term effect, not even mentioned.

Conspicuously absent.

[Dr Kelly Jones 🦋cleanairclassrooms 🇵🇸 @DrPops3]

Remember this Australia??? Then we disappeared it…

[Hiroshi Yasuda (保田浩志) @Yash25571056]

People don’t fully understand that SARS-CoV-2 partially impairs their understanding.

[Liesl McConchie @Liesl4CleanAir]

Remember this event from last year?

Well, we are ONE WEEK away from the 2nd annual UN event on indoor air quality.

This year's focus is on school indoor air quality.

Here are the details on how to attend in person or livestream from home:
🧵 1/

[BirdieBittern @BirdieBittern]

After The Masks Came Off

Act I: "A Nasty Cold" 😷

Act II: Pneumonia, sepsis

Act III: "6 weeks in critical care-6 weeks in infectious diseases unit"

The End: Lifelong reduced lung & kidney function, amputation

You can run a 10K w/a prosthetic leg😇
https://t.co/nq4Uxz0AUt

[The Lone Masker @wonderartsy]

Still masking! #MaskUp

[tern @1goodtern]

❤️❤️

[Linn Järte @LinnJarte]

The last 6 years epitomised in a single poster…

(from a cc friend who works in the NHS)

[Jess ꩜ @BlueLotusBlunts]

Me & my portable air filter

[Dr. Sean Mullen @drseanmullen]

You’ve got to hand it to them.

They changed the language.
Changed the guidance.
Changed the metrics.
Changed the dashboards.
Changed what counted.
Changed what we counted.

Spent months arguing droplets while the virus rode the fucking air.

Then eventually

Oh.

Ventilation.
Filtration.
Aerosols.
Indoor air.

Who knew.

They declared emergencies over and people heard:

Disease over.

They retired dashboards.
Relaxed reporting.
Stopped testing.
Stopped counting as carefully.

Then pointed at the numbers we stopped collecting and said:

See?

Better.

They took a systemic problem and privatized it.

Your mask.
Your vaccine.
Your test.
Your risk.
Your kid.
Your elderly parent.
Your immunocompromised neighbor.

Your problem.

A virus transmitted between human beings became a matter of personal responsibility.

Amazing trick.

They watched vaccine confidence erode.

Watched misinformation metastasize.

Watched people go from lining up for vaccines to treating basic immunology like a fucking personality test.

They taught a generation that infection is inevitable.

That repeated infection is normal.

That protecting other people is neurotic.

That staying home sick is unreasonable.

That wanting clean indoor air is somehow more radical than breathing sewage through a HEPA filter would be.

They turned “living with COVID” into pretending COVID had stopped living with us.

Meanwhile:

People still get COVID.

People still get hospitalized.

People still die.

People still develop Long COVID.

Kids develop it.

Healthy adults develop it.

Workers leave the workforce because of it.

NIH keeps spending hundreds of millions studying it.

The Department of Defense studies it because chronic post-COVID illness can affect military readiness.

Read that again.

We can’t talk about COVID at Thanksgiving without somebody rolling their eyes,

but the fucking Pentagon is worried about what it does to readiness.

That is where we are.

COVID became something that “happened.”

A historical period.

An aesthetic.

Zoom school.
Sourdough.
Tiger King.
Masks.
Lockdowns.

Remember COVID?

Yeah.

I remember polio too.

Still wouldn’t lick the fucking iron lung.

We performed perhaps the greatest linguistic disappearing act of the pandemic:

We ended the emergency,

and somehow convinced ourselves

we ended the disease.

The virus didn’t sign the memo.

SARS-CoV-2 did not attend the press conference.

It did not agree to the new terminology.

It did not care that everybody was exhausted.

It did not care that prevention became politically inconvenient.

It did not care that the economy wanted 2019 back.

It just kept infecting people.

And perhaps the most astonishing part is how thoroughly we normalized the contradiction.

We’ll spend billions studying Long COVID

while acting embarrassed to say “COVID.”

We’ll fund biomedical research into post-viral disability

while designing schools, workplaces, hospitals, restaurants and public buildings as though airborne infectious disease is somebody else’s problem.

We’ll tell disabled people:

We believe you.

And then build society around maximizing opportunities to create more of them.

We’ll tell parents they’re free to send sick children into classrooms.

Tell workers they’re free to come to work infected.

Tell everyone else they’re free to breathe the same air.

Freedom everywhere.

Except freedom from preventable exposure.

Six and a half years.

And where is the reckoning?

Where is the investigation into what we learned?

Where is the massive clean-air infrastructure program?

Where are the ventilation standards people can actually see?

Where is paid sick leave worthy of an airborne pandemic?

Where is the cultural norm that says:

If you’re infectious,

don’t fucking infect other people?

Instead we got amnesia.

We got euphemisms.

We got “summer flu.”

“Something going around.”

“Just a cold.”

“Mystery illness.”

Anything except the word that might remind us we made choices.

[Dr Elisa Perego @elisaperego78]

Letting a SARS virus spread through the population would a factor, right?

[Kelly @broadwaybabyto]

Refusing to hide our disabilities is not the same as making them a central pillar of identity

I hid mine for years

I was afraid of losing friends and being judged

I was right. I’ve lost so many people since publicly embracing my disabilities.

That’s ableism. Investigate that.

[tern @1goodtern]

There is none.
Absolutely none.

[Plague Poems @PlaguePoems]

After he warned me
that he is sick
(and his whole family is sick)
my work friend told me
that he hopes
he doesn’t get me sick too,
and so I handed him a mask
and told him
to do more than hope.

[The Yeti of Kananaskis @kananaskinyeti]

I don’t have any appetite to attend social events knowing that Covid is going to be there as well. I don’t care how fun it sounds. It’s like knowing that there is shit in the swimming pool, I don’t care how hot it is or how refreshing the water looks, I ain’t swimming in shit.