Sanctuary State of Denial

This excellent column is from the UK Guardian, but it may as well have been written about America's own non-response, minimization, and denial of COVID.

Frances Ryan's headline is:  "Covid’s back, you say? As disabled and vulnerable people know all too well, it never went away. The government’s policy is to pretend we’re getting ‘back to normal’. The result is millions of us live in fear of losing our lives."

She starts out this way: "It is 1.35pm and I’m having to explain coronavirus transmission to a nurse. I am due an appointment at 2.30, and I’ve been phoned because I say I’m clinically vulnerable. I ask whether the nurse has an N95 mask (as they’re proved to be most effective). She does not. I ask whether she and the team are taking weekly lateral flow tests, like her colleague said. She is not, and is unsure why that was promised.

“'We don’t need to do that any more,' she says breezily. What she means is: she has no official duty to do so any more. Clinically vulnerable (CV) patients still 'need' the Covid-19 protections. They just don’t get them.

"We don’t really talk about this. We don’t really talk about coronavirus at all. More than three years on from the start of the pandemic, there’s understandably a desire to 'move on', to bury painful memories of lockdowns and watching loved ones dying on iPads. This has only been encouraged by the government, which has honed the message 'Covid is over', as if saying this somehow makes it so."

If you've been COVID-cautious from the start of the  pandemic in 2020, please keep reading.. If you think COVID is a hoax & just a cold, and that smart people wearing masks are mentally ill  fearmongers, stop reading, because you know it all.

They ought to make Florida a sanctuary state for COVID-deniers, since their useless Surgeon General is telling  everyone not to wear masks or get the vaccines. Good luck to them.