Post COVID-19¶

"Post COVID-19" is not a thing. Post-ACUTE Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), also known as Long COVID, is a chronic condition. Its onset is triggered by infection with SARS-CoV-2, ramping up after the ACUTE phase has passed. The damage of each subsequent infection is cumulative. https://t.co/AhMirVvtPK The framing of this disease as "post-COVID" is not accidental. It is carefully curated by public relations experts. Attempts to rhetorically distance the disease from its cause are nothing more than a cynical exercise in exonerating the perpetuators of this mass disabling event. PASC is an inconvenient phenomenon for the ruling class. In their effort to erase COVID as a locus of working class mobilization, they have promulgated eugenicist rhetoric to foster an individualist "survival of the fittest" mentality that breaks apart working class cohesion. The project of painting the devastation of COVID as one of the weak, the disadvantaged, the unproductive, the noncompliant, the "other", requires a corresponding narrative that exempts individuals who are "deserving" of an end to the pandemic. They have done this masterfully by contracting all pandemic response down to a single, optional, affirmative action taken by the individual: get the vaccine, and the pandemic is over -- for you. If you get sick anyway, you must have been weak and undeserving all along. People -- especially able-bodied people already privileged by society -- are very bad at conceptualizing their own vulnerability and precarity. Study after study demonstrates the omnipresent inclination to underestimate personal risk and overestimate capability. So it's an appealing narrative, one which has very successfully become hegemonic.

PASC destroys the narrative entirely. It is common, crushing, and undiscerning with its victims. Vaccination doesn't save you. "Hybrid immunity" doesn't save you. The only prevention is avoidance. As the pandemic rages on, even a tiny risk of developing a life-altering case of PASC accumulates rapidly throughout the population. The effects compound over time. One billion days of lost labor become two billion, then five billion, and so on. The social strain will only grow. The myopia of the ruling class in this regard can be matched only by the willful blindness of "the left," which, as a fragmented, shambling mass, continues to retreat from the cataclysm unfolding right before our eyes. When will there be a reckoning? Who will lead the charge?