We Hate You Now
By: Quinn Norton
Tags: Wear A Mask, Aftertimes, Covid 19

We Hate You Now

SARS-CoV-2

I finally lost it when someone asked me about the new variants. Friends and acquaintances who relied over the last year on my research and knowledge asked me what it meant, and how dangerous it was, to have these new more transmissible and/or deadly strains circulating just when we’d hoped the vaccines would soon end the pandemic. “It means nothing,” I told them, “Everything will be fine, because masks, social distance, hand washing, and common sense still work just as well against these versions of the virus.”

Of course, the variants do mean something. Variants are just what happens when there’s enough mutations to make a difference in the disease. Mutations happen every time someone catches Covid-19. Variants happen when so many people have caught the disease that it’s evolving to act differently inside the body. This virus has had so many bodies to mutate through that it has evolved several new ways of attacking cells and evading the immune system. In other words, so many people got infected that the virus got better at attacking us.

That’s why variants finally cracked me, because that’s what humanity let happen over the last year. But mutations don’t make it any better at being a virus: it still falls apart in alcohol and soap, and with time. It still can’t power through a mask. So all you have to do, I told friends, and am telling you now, is all the things you were supposed to be doing for the last year.

If people were doing those things, we’d be fine.

But we’re not fine, are we?

Ha, remember back when 400,000 was a lot of dead people?

I am not fine. I am vibrating with anger these days, and while for me it was the variants, for others it was the number of cases or the deaths or relentless pace and incoherent rule changes over most of the world. Like many people, I knew masking and distance and hand washing worked by last March, and before we knew fomite transmission wasn’t much of an issue, I wiped down everything that came in the house. We knew ventilation was important. We knew getting out of the house to exercise was important. I would walk my teenage daughter to see friends, masked, from more than six feet away to fight the loneliness and teenage isolation the pandemic caused while preventing transmission and death by Covid-19. I did everything I could to help her with remote education, but it was still stupefying and confusing. She’s finishing High School without ever seeing a teacher in person, without hugging a single friend in a year. When myself or my family have had to travel, and we really have had to, we wear (home) fit-tested masks and eye protection. We don’t eat or drink with anyone outside our house. We hand sanitize every time we go in or out of any place, touch anything, put on or take off a mask. It’s difficult and unpleasant, but it’s safe, not just for us, but for anyone around us.

I’ve watched friends who work in medicine struggle with exhaustion. I’ve heard the same stories you’ve heard: of medical staff burning out, getting Covid-19, some quitting, some dying of the disease, some committing suicide under the pressure. And it goes on in relentless ups and downs, despite the fact that we’ve known for a year now how to stop it. Despite the fact that in places like Vietnam, New Zealand, Bhutan, and Taiwan, they did stop it, because they did the things we all knew worked a year ago.

Do the new variants matter? They shouldn’t matter, they wouldn’t matter, they wouldn’t even exist, if folks had actually done the right thing. But instead, we’re nearing 120,000,000 confirmed cases, mostly because folks didn’t do the right thing.

After a year of care and patience and sacrifice in my family, with cases still going on relentlessly around the world, I personally have lost it with you people. I don’t think I’m alone. I’m pretty sure everyone else who just spent a year at home, or only going to an essential job while doing everything they could to prevent transmission have also lost it with you people. We may not know who you are, we may never know, but we hate you now. You did this to us.