Your Sick Friend, volume 2
"Masks off"
Hi everyone, Beatrice here! I’m so excited to bring you the second Your Sick Friend by Casey Wait on Blind Archive, an ongoing series documenting life with chronic illness during the era of pandemic normalization.
Each installment of Your Sick Friend is a unique blend of original insight and reflective analysis. Through these columns, Casey shares their experiences as a medically vulnerable person just trying to stay alive another week during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your Sick Friend offers a profound way of thinking about the passage of sick time under the thumb of capitalism’s death drive, offering both immediate perspectives and thoughtful retrospection a year later. Thank you to The Montague Reporter, who graciously permits us to archive, reprint, and share this invaluable work here on Blind Archive.
I also want to just extend my deepest gratitude and sincerest thanks for the outpouring of support in response to our episode about what has been going on with my Medicare Part D drug denial. This post was originally supposed to come out in April, but unfortunately sometimes the administrative state has other plans for your time! Anyways, now I’ll pass things off to Casey and let them take it from here. Solidarity forever! xB
[image description: Color photograph of Casey, a pale white nb with freckles and lucite frame glasses, wearing a yellow hat and 3M VFlex N95 mask standing outside in soft light that is filtering through a green tree. The words “Your Sick Friend by Casey Wait” are handwritten in white all caps lettering over the image.]
Hey sickos :)
Your Sick Friend, Casey here with the second installment of my column! I write to you from my girlfriends apartment in Kyoto, Japan. From her balcony I can see cherry and dogwood blossoms and the verdant bushy slopes of Mount Hiei. I will be here til the middle of May and will return home to a country where the pandemic has been, once and for all, declared over. I half expect look out the plane window to see a giant “mission accomplished” sign spread out over the patchwork of suburbs, cities, and landscapes that make up America.
[image description: pharmacy sign in Kyoto, Japan. There’s a little cartoon guy holding a pill bottle, looking up with his mouth open to catch a red and yellow pill that’s in motion in the air, arcing towards him. On his arm he’s wearing a green band with a white cross on it, indicating that the store is a pharmacy. The word “drug” is in English and the name of the pharmacy is in Japanese below.]
Reading back through my second YSF article, written more than a year ago, feels surreal. March 2022 is when the “March to Normalcy” really began in earnest. National and local mask mandates ended, with the weak caveat that masks would be brought back in during surges in cases (they weren’t). Conveniently, this was the same month that the CDC rolled out their new “Community Transmission Levels”, completely changing how they measured Covid presence in communities and making it nearly impossible to determine when an actual surge was occurring.
Up until this point, I’d only contracted covid once and that was back before we even knew the virus had made it to America. Since mask mandates were revoked and covid tracking all but ended, I have gotten it twice, both times leading to lasting health issues—despite my “personal choice” to continue wearing N95s in all public settings, PCR testing weekly, and limiting social interactions. As my Death Panel comrades have said many times: one way masking does not work! There is no such thing as true “individual personal responsibility” in a pandemic. You “doing you” impacts me and vice versa. We either eliminate the virus together or we don’t—and those most vulnerable pay the consequences. The only way forward is, as usual, together. As I say in this piece:
We can’t give up on each other. We have to remain steadfast in our solidarity with those most impacted, and do what we can: get vaccinated if you’re medically able, mask in public, test regularly, and agitate at work, in school committee and town meetings —perhaps even in the streets. Do not accept mass death and debility. I deserve better, and so do you.
At the time of writing this column I don’t think I’d believe I’d be in Japan in about a years time. The amount of “personal risk assessment” that went into this trip was substantial and there were several times I nearly canceled. I wore N95s on the plane, disposing of them after 8 hours of use to make sure they were effective for the entire 14 hour flight, and carried a mini HEPA filter with me. Even now that I’m here, we’re being incredibly cautious—I’ve been here about a week and my girlfriend and I haven’t kissed yet, as we’re waiting for two negative PCR results before we decide we’re in the clear. And we know that despite all these precautions, we might still get sick. We should not have to do this level of risk mitigation to be reunited with the people we love. The burden of responsibility for managing this still very real pandemic should not fall on the vulnerable, and yet here we are. Demand better!
With love and rage,
Your Sick Friend
Casey
[image description: Black and white drawing of a flower person in black opera gloves and go-go boots reclining on a squishy tasseled pillow. The words “ your sick friend” are arranged around their body. The corners are framed with pills, a pill bottle, and flowers with happy and sad faces.]
Original Publication Date: March 17, 2022 in The Montague Reporter
TURNERS FALLS – Hello dear reader! Welcome back to my monthly column, Your Sick Friend. I’m a chronically ill and disabled artist and writer living in Great Falls. I was born with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and have a host of related conditions that severely impact my mobility and quality of life. This column is dedicated to sharing my experiences during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing my perspective as an immunocompromised 30-something.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, I’ve spent the past few months dreading March 1, which is when the Montague mask mandate was set to lift. While many celebrate their freedom to go maskless at Food City, I am more terrified to simply exist in public than I have been since the pandemic began. The new CDC COVID-19 guidelines and risk classifications, released at the end of February, have only added to my anxieties.
Under the new metrics, what the CDC had previously considered “high community spread”—492 cases per 100,000–is now classified as “low.” The CDC’s new “high” is substantially higher: communities will not be classified as having a high rate of transmission until there are 1,136 cases per 100,000. And it’s only at that threshold of spread that the CDC recommends masking indoors!
Essentially, absent any developments in epidemiology or medicine, the government changed their numbers around to make the map of the US, previously awash in red “high risk” states (Massachusetts included), transform overnight into a sea of serene “low risk” turquoise, assuring us that the country can now celebrate a return to normalcy. But this “new normal” is predicated on the US public accepting incredibly high instances of illness, death, and debility not previously part of what anyone considered “normal.”
Previous and new CDC COVID-19 transmission thresholds, based on cases per 100,000 population per week. Credit to Twitter user
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The number of US counties transitioning from each of the previous COVID risk categories to each of the new categories when the CDC’s thresholds changed in late February. Credit to Twitter user
.I’m not sure I can emphasize enough just how scary this is for me as an immunocompromised person. Essentially, the government has decided that the only people responsible for keeping the vulnerable safe are the vulnerable themselves. We are being told, in no uncertain terms, that our lives do not matter. The vulnerable have effectively had our social rights stripped from us.
Because of these new changes and the ripple effect they will have in society, I may never again feel safe going into a grocery store, the post office, or even to the goddamn pharmacy to pick up my immunosuppressive medications – let alone on a trip to see the family I’ve been separated from for over two years, or to see my girlfriend who lives all the way in Kyoto, Japan.
And because of changes in isolation requirements for those with COVID-19, I can’t even trust that my doctors and nurses aren’t being forced back to work while potentially still contagious with a virus that could kill or further disable me!
Immunocompromised people are not cryptids. We’re not rare beings, tucked away from society. We are workers, parents, students, children! Many of us look “healthy” on the outside. Your cashier, doctor, teacher, or waiter could have an invisible immunocompromising illness. A conservative estimate, cited recently by disability scholar Beatrice Adler-Bolton in her substack, The Blind Archive, is that the immunocompromised make up 11% of the US population! And this only counts those of us who have been formally diagnosed.
Diagnosis and treatment are privileges many do not have; because of the dismal lack of healthcare many Americans face, there are likely thousands of people who do not know they themselves are among the vulnerable.
I know I’m not alone in my anger and despair at the way the government continues to bungle its COVID-19 response. As isolated as I often feel, I have to remind myself that there are many other people who feel the same. In fact, a recent poll cited by Ed Yong, science writer for The Atlantic, found that 50% of Americans still support mask mandates!
If you are sad or scared or angry (or all three and more), and want to find media that is still taking the pandemic seriously, I recommend my friends’ health justice podcast, Death Panel – especially their recent episode that breaks down the CDC’s new guidance, “Lying Like a State.” I also recommend Ed Yong’s articles and Twitter feed and the work of epidemiologists Abby Cartus and Justin Feldman. If you are looking for ways to keep yourself, your family, and your friends safe, check out the mask reviews and fit guides Aaron Collins has on YouTube.
And finally, please continue to wear masks and get tested regularly! You can find testing locations by going to www.mass.gov/info-details/find-a-covid-19-test. It’s not clear, especially after the new CDC changes, how long these services will continue. Please take the time to tell the staff at the testing sites how much you appreciate their work and fill out any user surveys they may send you with positive feedback.
It shouldn’t be up to the public alone to manage this public health disaster – that is what governments are purportedly for – but this is where we currently stand. We can’t give up on each other. We have to remain steadfast in our solidarity with those most impacted, and do what we can: get vaccinated if you’re medically able, mask in public, test regularly, and agitate at work, in school committee and town meetings – perhaps even in the streets. Do not accept mass death and debility. I deserve better, and so do you.
With love and rage,
Your Sick Friend
Casey Wait