https://yalereview.org/article/spiritualism-covid-flu-puglionesi
"What has happened to the more than one million people killed by the
coronavirus in the United States since March of 2020? Their names are buried,
in the sanitary custom of our country, inside a chart or a county coroner’s
report. The first year of the pandemic saw public efforts to name and honor the
individuals lost, but this generosity quickly ran out. Mourning has been
relegated to the ephemeral no-place of social media, compressed into
emoji-plated memorials that flit past in an instant. Now the absent presence of
the dead is a problem only for their closest intimates. Democrats, Republicans,
and a chorus of “apolitical” public health experts exhort us to get on with
business, as though nothing bad is happening. In January of this year, the
Centers for Disease Control director, Rochelle Walensky, cheered the public
with the “really encouraging news” that most vaccinated people who died from
COVID had four or more “comorbidities” and were thus “unwell to begin with.”
Through canny arrangements of data, the dead are summoned to absolve the
living—there’s no need to change course, or even to feel sorry. Disclosures of
personal grief are met with demands for personal health information. Strangers
on the internet need to know: were there preexisting conditions? “Is it God’s
way of thinning the herd?” asked a reality TV star, invoking the Malthusian
intuition that sacrificing the “weak” is necessary and good.
The refusal of collective mourning reveals whose deaths and what kinds of death
we consider worthy of honor. Men who perish on the battlefields of a great war
must be mourned by the nation, but the sick, whose suffering has no grand
purpose, are a reminder that we can’t always control our bodies—knowledge best
pushed into the shadows. None of this is new. In 2020, when Americans groped
backward to the 1918 influenza pandemic in search of historical solace, they
found little more than a cloud of amnesia: a marble bench in Barre, Vermont, is
among the few scattered monuments to flu victims. Journalists mining medical
history pried open the closed box of the 1918 flu and found certain resonances:
the closure of schools and churches, a desperate shortage of doctors and
nurses, a push for fresh air and ventilation. In contrast to COVID-19, at first
depicted as a disease of the elderly and then recognized as disproportionately
afflicting heavily exposed racial minorities and the poor, influenza hit
hardest among healthy young people, the group most “valued” by society. Like
today, the public looked frantically to medical science for answers, but local
efforts to prevent gatherings, close schools, and require masking often cracked
under political pressure. Medical experts vacillated, and businesses demanded
relief. People were left alone to protect themselves, and to mourn, as their
resources allowed."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: September 22, 2022
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-72322225
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
