Thread by @helenessex2

🧵on being covid aware & cautious when the world says no to that. I’m in a new minority in the UK as someone who hasn’t (knowingly) had a covid infection. Once I understood how contagious C19 was, I understood risks went beyond just me alone but was more about everyone else

2/ Then I considered it was a new unknown to medics & scientists. By March’20 in the uk it was clear too little too late had been done, unprecedented levels of infection, it was traumatic to learn how many were dying everyday at an increasing rate. Definitely something to avoid.

3/ still I thought, what does it do to the people who survive it? Understandably focus remained on levels of mortality. Then I learnt that epidemiologists were very concerned not only about all the visible impacts but also about virus mutation.

4/ the words “Every time the virus transmits, it has the opportunity to mutate & we can’t predict how or when” stuck with me to this day. that issue seemed to get swept aside in the rush to eat out to help out & oh dear! Dido “we didn’t know the virus would mutate”🤦‍♀️

5/ Then enter the snake oil sellers: 1 infection will bring decades of immunity! Get sick to keep well! Misconstrued Herd immunity was the goal. That seemed to be the only goal that politicians got behind, everything else was a push back against that destination.

6/ anyway you know the rest; more deadly waves, insidious anti vaccine & anti mask campaigns, a deluge of misinfo, more variants, waning immunity, long covid, vaccines that performed well against original strains but less so for preventing infection as the virus evolved

7/now here we are 2 1/2 years later & the chances of me not getting infected if I expect to continue working, shopping, attending appointments, have children at school etc become increasingly slim. There doesn’t seem to be any appreciation of why it makes sense to avoid, post 💉

8/ I find that bizarre given the harm covid has wreaked across the world in so many ways- untold personal tragedy to large scale economic harms. I find it bizarre that the high risk to a significant number of our friends, colleagues, family seems to be air brushed away.

9/. And still I feel those two points that got me from the start are also airbrushed out. this is new and we don’t know what the long term implications could be .. not really until a long time has passed & we can check. It transmits, it mutates; what to? /Fin
#BehindTheMask

#evusheld4theuk #stoptheschoolsbill #CleanAirClassrooms #CovidIsAirborne #LongCovid #LongCovidKids @PIMS_Hub