Not just because it's objectively ridiculous to minimise an illness which has a 10% chance of doing lasting damage with unknown long-term consequences.
But because so much of it is coming from doctors and health workers.
And it's active, aggressive, hostile, reality denial, which attacks simple and effective common sense measures like public/medical masking, air filtration, and so on.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2023/08...
It's sad how during the pandemic the public zeitgeist was all about public health, taking care of your mental health, and having more empathy for one another (once toilet roll was back on the shelves), and since we've returned to normality it's back to outright hostility for those who're struggling.
Yeah, it worked that way when we were all in it together. Life presents struggles for everybody, but it became apparent post-COVID that this concept is lost on the more-vocal elements of the disabled demographic. The struggle is only real for them.
You literally get free money from the government and special benefits as members of a protected class. Your wages can't be garnished. You can stall the eviction process. You get reserved, preferential parking. You can force businesses to make accommodations for just about anything. You optionally work 15 hours a week and have nothing but free time after that, but you don't have time to hear about anybody else's problems-- but we're expected to hear about how much worse your problems are, for hours, every time we cross paths. I'm living paycheck to paycheck and facing a layoff; I don't know what my family is going to do if that happens, because AI will be doing my job before I can recover, and I can't take out any more student loans to retrain. Tell me more about your chronic Lyme though.
The fucking best part--here's the real kicker--is when you stick your neck out by offering to help someone like this. "You're facing homelessness? Shit, that won't do...come live with me! Say, you're eating a lot of our food, incurring bandwidth overages and running the AC during peak hours-- do you think you could help pitch in for some of the bills?" That always goes over well. You're not allowed to ask anything of the disabled; god forbid anybody think they're able (pun intended) to do or help with anything.
It's like Seven Samurai come to life-- yeah, the marauders are bad guys, but there's an even worse villain in that story.
And then:
> God forbid you have something nice while on minimum wage or benefits
You're already getting something nice. It's called "a low-risk lifestyle and income you didn't have to work for." FFS. Assemble the Hague over the fact that people might get upset that you're driving a Lexus to your EEOC hearing for a part-time position at Ralph's while your neighbor was trying to resuscitate their 2002 Kia so they could race to get to work at the call center on time, get verbally abused by customers at some shit customer service job for 8+ hours and hopefully retain the privilege of doing it all over again tomorrow before she, too, is replaced by AI. Tell her how hard you have it with your fibromyalgia.
It's been said that high school bullies inevitably end up on the disability payroll after failing at everything else. In my experience, this checks out. The only people I know collecting it can only ever be described as abusive (in or out of high school), and the people I know with obvious disabilities (everything from amputation to PCOS to Downs) would be offended to be labeled as such. Makes one wonder what the goal of someone going out of their way to identify as vulnerable might be, since that tactic does not lend itself to survival in nature unless you're a predator feigning distress.
> Polio is a viral infection that used to be common in the UK but is now rare.
> Most people who had polio would have fought off the infection without even realising they were infected.
> Some people with polio would have had paralysis, muscle weakness and shrinking of the muscles. But usually these problems would have either gone away over the following weeks or months, or remained the same for years afterwards.
> Post-polio syndrome is where some of these symptoms develop or get worse many years or decades after the original polio infection.
> During 1951-1954, an average of 16,316 paralytic polio cases and 1879 deaths from polio were reported each year
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00056803.htm
> An estimated 1.3 to 4 million people around the world get cholera each year and 21,000 to 143,000 people die.
https://www.cdc.gov/cholera/general/index.html
> COVID-19 was associated with approximately 244,000 deaths in the United States during January–December 2022.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7218a4.htm
So no, not really.
I don't think you understand the cost of installing and maintaining that level of air filtration in every single public and office buildings on a world scale
Plus you'd have to do it for personal homes and flats too
But notnwe have hand sanitiser which is not even relevant.
What bothers me is that the co2 presence hardly impedes work. I think it's still useful to have one to say "hey, too much co2 is eating our attention span, let's open the windows a bit". But clearly they removed it as a performative act ("there is no covid anymore"). And I am also pretty sure they also removed it because the denial/minimalist crowd sees it as an "in-your-face" symbol that covid is real/still a problem and that crowd was the most vocal at my workplace and the people who took covid seriously were seen as trouble makers when asking for masking in office. Or something.