Covering COVID in the Invisible Pandemic

Israel’s latest push in genocide began with Hamas’ counteroffensive launched on Oct. 7. It’s been a month since then. In that time, Israel has killed over 10,000 Palestinians, with just over 4,000 children included in that figure. Israeli ministers have called for everything from “sterile zones” to nuking Gaza. Our governments ignore demonstrations and rallies for a ceasefire that the majority of Canadians support.

The horror is unending. As a citizen in the imperial core, if you aren’t feeling some level of guilt for our labour and taxes being used to fund Palestinian genocide, then there is something wrong with your humanity.

In the midst of this cataclysm, another lurks silently in the background. One that has evaporated from news coverage, discourse or labour demands.

Yet the only places I have seen calls for masks have been from select organizations promoting their usage for Palestine rallies.

Between October 22-28, 140 Canadians died of COVID. Tara Moriarty, who has been following and updating COVID numbers, posted on X (Twitter) that COVID infections in Ontario are currently 25x higher than at their lowest point. Hospitals are having the rigorous debate of whether to implement masking during a deadly pandemic. Even in the needle-in-a-haystack article about the possibility of more general mask mandates being implemented, they’re discounted. Infectious disease specialist and associate professor at McMaster University Dr. Zain Chagla told CTV News that pandemic fatigue and “the context of wide-scale immunization, immunity, therapeutics” dissuade them. Despite this, Chagla still said individual masking would help.

All this taken together would be alarming, if anyone cared. Global News reported that the majority of Canadians aren’t planning on staying up-to-date with their COVID immunization. Of those surveyed, 52 per cent said they’ve stopped following COVID news and government recommendations, 44 per cent said COVID was no longer a concern for them and 31 per cent agreed with the statement that new variants were no longer dangerous to anyone.

Of the 48 per cent who claimed they were following news about COVID closely, we can only surmise what this means, as the subject has almost completely dropped from the societal conscious, barring the occasional blip on the news media radar.

As COVID continues to kill, disable and damage, our public health has been completely abandoned. We’re witnessing the burying of this information in real time.

The best I can do is direct you to Canada Health Watch or privately run newsletters that cover COVID from data they’re able to access. But what happens when governments feel that reporting on COVID isn’t necessary anymore? With declining coverage, falling public concern and no pressure from mass organizations or trade-unions, it’s inevitable that we’ll eventually be left in the dark.

The pandemic will never be over. The fascists railing against masks, vaccines and baseless conspiracy theories have won the public health debate.

We let them win.

It’s extremely important that whoever reads this understands that this is not a personal failing. You have not, personally, let the pandemic ravage our societies and healthcare systems. The reduction of COVID spread to personal choices is exactly the framing that has gotten us to this point. That’s why it’s not enough to forgo mask mandates, and choose a personal risk-assessment method. How can one assess a risk without all the information? This isn’t a name and shame exercise.

You should absolutely be wearing a KN95 mask or better when in crowded and indoor settings. Choosing not to when you are perfectly capable is spreading COVID. Whether or not you change your behaviour based on that fact is irrelevant. That being said reducing masking to an individual choice is exactly the framework that has led us to this point.

What I mean is that, by failing to make COVID a priority, we have collectively ceded ground to the capitalist entities that our lives are not worth protecting.

In an exhaustive and meticulously crafted editorial by the John Snow Project, they lay out the death of public health. In one section, they point out that the only control being applied is to information, not the virus.

Another lesson of the pandemic is that if there is no testing and reporting of cases and deaths, a huge amount of real human suffering can be very successfully swept under the rug. Early in 2020, such practices – blatant denial that there was any virus in certain territories, outright faking of COVID-19 statistics, and even resorting to NPIs out of sheer desperation but under false pretense that it is not because of COVID-19 – were the domain of failed states and less developed dictatorships. But in 2023 most of the world has adopted such practices – testing is limited, reporting is infrequent, or even abandoned altogether – and there is no reason to expect this to change. Information control has replaced infection control.

The piece also depressingly addresses the lack of care applied to children and labour in COVID infection. Any mitigations to protect children from infection have been completely abandoned, and any labourer not fortunate enough to work from home has similarly been robbed of infection protections. As the piece notes, “Can we realistically expect existing safety precautions and regulations to survive after that precedent has been set?”

If you take nothing else from this piece, it’s that you should read the article in its entirety to gain an understanding of how we got here, and the implications for the future.

In many ways, this failure is not on the businesses and governments that have happily sacrificed worker safety time and time again. Failure, as I’m quick to remind people, means being unable to reach a goal. The goals of these entities is not to ensure the health and safety of the common people, it’s to create profit for the market and perpetuate their own existence. No, the failure rests with the communities, unions and organizations supposedly working towards a better world. This cognitive dissonance lays out the unfortunate truth. Any organization not prioritizing the continuing pandemic cannot be trusted.

That’s where the collective “we” comes in. Though the failure to address COVID is not unique, or dependent on an individual level, the organizations in which we are part are where we have failed. That’s why we share the collective responsibility for this failure. Our society has reached a point where, in an average week, over a hundred people die from a disease that dominated headlines less than two years ago. The evidence of COVID’s damage is seemingly endless, yet the work of following updates and sharing resources has dwindled to an increasingly insular community.

So here we are, three years into the most devastating global health event in modern history and we have failed to demand the most basic of health protections. What confidence does that leave? Are we to expect that we’re able to tackle the complicated intersections of reactionary politics, climate change, imperialism, bigotry and settler-colonialism that lie ahead?

I, and many others, will do our best to keep up with the numbers, the risks and the current state of COVID. We will likely do this until there’s no information to share. But it’s clear at this point, it isn’t enough. Minds will not miraculously change to understanding the current threat of COVID.

Perhaps I’m venting in a vain delusion that this piece will change minds. Maybe I’m just preaching to the choir. But if I’m being honest with myself, I don’t know what the fuck else to do.