A Covid Memoir

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This is only going in the RSS feed because it’s hard to have a rational discussion about the events of 2020. If you’re in the same camp, please reach out. Being skeptical without being lost in conspiracy land is a lonely position.

The first stirrings of trouble

I was already following events in Wuhan in January 2020. I had to go to Israel for work and had a trip to the US planned for February. I remember checking Twitter and thinking that this could end up being far more serious than the talking heads seemed to think. The official opinion was any foreboding was anti-Chinese racism.

The trip to the US went off without a hitch. It was great actually as I got married. My wife and I made fun of a guy who was wearing a mask on the plan back to Ukraine. Yeah, this virus looked ominous and was on the news, but come on.

March 2020

I still think the initial lockdowns and mask mandates (we had them right away in Ukraine) were the right call. Better to overreact and then roll back measures later.

In March I came down with the worst flu I remember having. It was curious since I had gotten a flu shot. The doctor commented that I had “really nasty virus that’s going around”. I tested negative for Corona, but it was one of the early rapid tests of dubious reliability. I spent four days not leaving the couch. So who knows.

I panicked at this point. It really felt that something apocalyptic was happening. Working from home and first lockdown meant that I barely left the house and read a constant stream of doom and gloom news.

Summer 2020

I’d always though of myself as an introvert and dreamed of working remotely. A few months into the WFH era and I was going stir crazy.

I started going back to the office a few days a week, Ukraine quietly gave up on lockdowns and life approached something akin to normal.

This is when I started to sense something was off with the whole thing. Bodies weren’t piling up in the streets. I’d joke that Ukraine didn’t have it that bad since most of the at-risk population was already dead anyway.

I also started to notice some people were losing it. They were terrified, constantly watching the news, didn’t leave their houses and had wrapped up their whole identities in being pro-lockdown and anti-Trump.

I was still firmly part of the anti-Trump hysteria (now I’d classify myself as simply anti-Trump without the pathos), but my faith in lockdownism was shaking.

Winter 2020

Ukrainian winters are tough as it is. Each year I plan trips to Thailand and Arizona to get some sunshine. This time around travel was off the table.

It was a miserable, alcohol filled affair. We had our second lockdown, I gained a few kilograms and averaged 3k steps a day.

Spring 2021

Something clicked. I took a trip to Egypt, got some desperately needed sunshine, completely turned off from work for the first time in a year and came back a new man.

I have zero personal fear of Covid. I’m going to live my life as normally as the political situation allows. Among my circle of co-workers and friends, most have already had Covid. Not a big deal.

When either the mRNA or deactivated vaccines become more readily available in Ukraine, I’ll be grateful to be vaccinated. Even the much maligned Chinese vaccines have been fantastically successful at preventing hospitalizations and deaths. But, given my age and lack of other risk factors I can wait.

Reflecting on the year

It’s frightening to watch the manipulation and misinformation that happened in all of this. I still don’t fully understand how Covid became a partisan issue in the US.

We haven’t moved to a world beyond disease, death and risk — a Fukuyama like end of history. Pretending we have and trying to create a perfectly safe world is instead laying the foundations of a dystopian future.

Besides age, the number one cause of death has been poor health. This should have been the end of the processed food industry, corn subsidies and a radical reexamination of the low mobility, low vitamin D and obesity inducing way that we live.

My trust in the scientific establishment is shattered. Politics trumps science. We can’t address what’s causing deaths from Covid in younger people (that’s fat shaming), whether the lab leak theory is acceptable or not depends on who the president is and public policy is being dictated not based on results but wanting to look anti-Trump.

The media are a truly awful institution. The fear and panic they’ve spawned for profit is reprehensible. When I talk to people who are plugged into the news, it’s a constant cycle of terror over the latest variant, which all the vaccines protect against in any case.

The emergence of the biopolitics that Foucault predicted doesn’t bode well. We’ve lost our privacy and given our employers the right to make medical decisions.

China and Russia are going to vaccinate the developing world, not the prosperous and democratic United States and European Union. Chinese and Russian vaccines look to be entirely effective at preventing serious cases and death. The vaccine passports that the Left is clamoring for will likely not accept Chinese and Russian vaccines. This is a de facto ban on brown, black and poor people entering the West. It’s AOC championing the Trumpian dream.

All of the vaccines provide almost miraculous protection from Covid, yet there are millions of fully vaccinated people in quarantine and indefinite lockdown around the world.

Lockdowns were a product of Silicon Valley thinking. Without delivery apps and Zoom, the upper middle classes never would have pushed for lockdowns. The NYT made forcing other people to bear the risks a virtue.

As for all the theater of hand sanitizer and standing six fee apart, scientists knew from February 2020 that it was nonsense.

Florida did a better job at protecting the elderly than New York and overall CA, NY, TX and FL had the similar outcomes despite radically different lockdowns and hygiene theater levels. For that matter, Sweden’s done just fine. But this was never about science.

This has made me reconsider where I live. Ukraine is functional yet essentially failed state. This meant fewer and lighter lockdowns, but it also means that we still don’t have access to vaccines. On the other hand the prospect of living in the EU, Canada or parts of the US that have been under de facto marshal law for a year is daunting. I don’t know.

My take aways from the pandemic:

In the end I’m left hopeless not because of the virus itself. The path society has chosen to take and where this is going to lead don’t look good.