Link: Chuck Wendig's rant about the The Great Surrender

[sonia]

The Great Surrender: How We Gave Up And Let COVID Win by Chuck Wendig.

I feel like I’m seeing and hearing how bad the pandemic is presently, how the systems are straining, how teachers and healthcare workers are quitting in droves and are pushed to their limits, how friends and family are seeing workplaces and schools hamstrung by all this shit, and then, at the same time… I’m seeing nobody do anything about it. Like, not a fucking thing. In fact, less is being done.

We’ve given up.

We’ve surrendered.

This is the Great Surrender.

It's good to see someone lay this out, so I don't feel quite as alone with my bewilderment. I started requiring boosters in my practice, and steering new clients toward mid-February rather than seeing them now. I'm not shutting down my practice (yet), but between cancellations for not being boosted and cancellations for having symptoms, it got pretty quiet already.

There's also You're not doomed to get Omicron by Erin Kissane, who is writing a "Calm Covid" newsletter. She says, "This surge is probably a sprint, not the kind of marathon that's worn us all to shreds." I hope so, because I definitely feel those shreds flapping when I look at the astonishing Multnomah County case curve, which goes straight up, completely dwarfing other surges by a factor of four.

Comments

[rosefox]

Erin's a friend of mine and did wonderful work with the Atlantic's Covid Tracking Project. I trust her assessment completely. I'm glad to hear her newsletter is helping you get through this hard time.

A lot of individual people I know haven't surrendered. We pulled our kid out of school. Our afterschool sitter is here full-time to watch them, because her morning family is huddling with no outsiders allowed. A lot of other parents I know are finding ways to keep their kids home—not all of NYC's ~25% drop in school attendance rates is because of illness. Many schools and businesses are going or staying remote. Government is failing and fucking up left and right, but many of us ordinary humans are still out here in N95s doing our best.

[sonia]

How cool that you're friends with Erin! Good to hear that you trust her assessment.

That's a good reminder that lots of individuals are not surrendering. I'm struggling with my own decisions, but I suppose uncertainty and nuance are not the same as surrender. Definitely wearing N95 masks, and handing them out to clients!

[rosefox]

Uncertainty is totally understandable in the absence of good public health information from trusted sources.

[asakiyume]

I don't think I know anyone personally who's surrendered. I feel like among the people I know, they're maintaining the same degree of caution they've always maintained (which is to say, some are very careful and others are less so). I do see more depression than I did see, though, among both the very cautious and the less so.

[sonia]

That's good to hear.

I think part of what's hard recently is that omicron demands a rapid increase in caution, and we're not collectively adjusting that fast. And depression, yes. We're all getting worn down.

[silveradept]

I can hope this ends up being a sprint, because I'm seeing those signs that Chuck is talking about everywhere, and at some point, we're going to go back to that time period where people were seen as weird for wearing masks, even as some of us still continue to do it because work and family and children and such.

[sonia]

It seems like people are trying to say "lalala I can't hear you" to a *pandemic*, which would kind of be okay if they were only affecting themselves. And then there's the Supreme Court encouraging that behavior, SIGH.

[silveradept]

Yes, the Court certainly had an opinion on that matter, didn't they? As if the idea of avoiding a highly infectious and harmful disease were merely a matter of personal choice that only affects the chooser.