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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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I think if COVID was leaving people paralyzed it would never have been what it became. The fallout from COVID was bad but maybe not bad enough.
I remember semi trailers being used as morgue extensions at hospitals. Every ventilator in the nation being claimed. People rasping out a good bye over FaceTime before going on a ventilator to probably die. It claimed a million people and the only reason that isn't the official number is because Trump and the GOP refused to count the bodies.
It was absolutely bad enough. But humans are capable of great self deception.
The problem was it was too quick: if you died of COVID, you were dead. You could be memory-holed and everyone would simply forget you and move on.
If you had Polio, though, you were paralyzed and stuck in a metal tube and kept alive.
Can't forget your not-dead kid who lives in a tube, and thus it was treated as more of a thing that should be fought because there was a clear and visible reminder of what this disease was doing to everyone's kids.
If COVID left a couple million people living in tubes, then we absolutely would have treated it differently, but it didn't.
(Alternately, if COVID had killed 10 or 20 million people, we would have also treated it seriously: it just wasn't sufficiently deadly OR left a wake of broken, but living, people.)
Also, older people were more prone to dying from Covid. That left a lot of room for conspiracy theories regarding what actually killed them. Heard of lot of conservative family members say "oh, it was probably just a bad flu that killed them." And when the vaccines came out that quickly changed to "the vaccine killed them."
My dad died due to COVID and one of the dipshits we hired to help load his stuff into a moving truck kept going on about how incredulous he was that anyone would die from "the flu". These people, they are not intelligent.
Yeah, I remember the 'grandma wanted to die for the economy!' ghouls.
And the 'it's just a flu!' people pissed me the fuck off. Like have you morons never HAD the flu? It's not like the flu is somehow pleasant and fun. You don't want the flu! Nobody wants the flu! You idiots got a flu shot, get your damn covid shot.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome might not be quite as bad as paralysis, but it is pretty fucking scary..
COVID is leaving people dead...and long COVID is definitely a thing as well.