Tizzy

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.