New zine that's free for anyone to print and distribute! Read the whole thing at newlevant.com/COVIDzine or in the rest of this post.

UPDATE 4/11/2023:

I swapped out the colloidal silver nasal spray info for xylitol nasal spray info. I originally included colloidal silver spray because of the linked study and recommendation from RTHM, but I don't want to be pointing people toward something with notable health risks. Xylitol spray (Xlear) is also cheaper and more widely available!

This is such a concise and informative resource! PLEASE boost this and keep each other safe! The pandemic is NOT OVER.

it's still jarring to see people not get like, genuinely scared for someones wellbeing when they say they have covid. one of my classmates has covid and i am so worried about them and everyone else is just like get better soon and i get that most people don't get it but GOD.

Its because the lethality level of covid went down over time thanks to vaccines and actual exposure to the virus increasing people's immunity to it. At this point covid has the same effect as a common cold for most people.

the common cold didn't permanently disable 1.9 MILLION people in the uk alone. the common cold doesn't fuck with your immune system. the common cold doesn't cause cognitive decline, changes in brain size and structure, depression and suicidal thinking due to the consequences of infection, tremors, seizures, and memory loss, even in mild infections. the common cold doesn't DAMAGE YOUR ORGANS. the common cold doesn't remain in your body up to a year after infection. the common cold doesn't damage your nervous system. and because of new mutations, infection does not equal immunity.

you should be scared of covid. if covid doesn't kill you it will permanently disable you. it isn't even slightly comparable to the common cold.

and also like... what vaccines?? what measures are we even taking to avoid infection at this point??? nobody masks - not even in HOSPITALS - covid sparked a massive wave of anti-vax ideology that's still going strong today, nobody does air filtering or wears gloves or wipes down surfaces or tries to do stuff outside. i don't even remember the last time i got a covid vax or booster despite the fact that there are STILL new variants emerging.

you think anyone gives a shit about preventing covid anymore? i mean, it's just like the common cold, right?

yea but also. if youre in the usa, if you havent gotten a covid vaccine or booster recently thats almost entirely your own fault. there have been a number of boosters available for little to no money. and if youre not masking thats also a you problem unless masking is outlawed where you are. like i agree covid is terrible and i hate that people think so lightly about it but there are things you could do to protect yourself that you're apparently just not doing.

can i ask, genuinely, which part of this post says that i don't personally mask or use air filtration? i will give you credit that i did say "i can't remember the last time i got a vaccine or booster" but like ... im in the uk. for me that means i don't remember the last time the nhs made it available to me. i do mask, i use hepa filters. respectfully you do not know anything about me

I admittedly had stopped masking as reliably for the past year or so, except when going out with my wife (who is immunocompromised) and medical appointments specifically.

I took my wife to the doctor's for some scheduled blood tests. We both masked. No one else in the office did. We were there for about 20 minutes. She got COVID and then gave it to me. It was a pretty mild case, all told, for both of us, but "mild" is a relative term here.

But I was out of work for a week and a half. I still get winded walking half a block and have noticeably lower lung capacity, and my already-existing chronic cough is worse than it used to be. I am constantly fatigued (even though I can't always sleep), my overall daily pain levels are noticeably higher, and I'm struggling a lot more to think and remember things as I'm still struggling with increased brain fog. And that's just things I know about, I have no idea what may be lingering internally that I can't just notice as easily as the rest.

This is NOT just a fucking cold. It is irresponsible to treat it as such.

My darlings, my loves, my fellow weirdos, I am begging you all to REST after you have covid.

I know it is very hard, and our society asks you to get back up and running at full speed as soon as possible, before you’re even done testing positive even.

But please my friends, please rest.

If you push too hard too fast you might be sicker for longer, you might be doing long lasting damage to yourself.

So please my beautiful nerds, take care of yourselves and REST.

Me being a weirdo hermit who works from home and barely does anything winning for me for the first time ever

New zine that's free for anyone to print and distribute! Read the whole thing at newlevant.com/COVIDzine or in the rest of this post.

UPDATE 4/11/2023:

I swapped out the colloidal silver nasal spray info for xylitol nasal spray info. I originally included colloidal silver spray because of the linked study and recommendation from RTHM, but I don't want to be pointing people toward something with notable health risks. Xylitol spray (Xlear) is also cheaper and more widely available!

giving even a single shit abt covid will actually make u feel fucking crazy sometimes lol

“during the pandemic-” “back when covid was-” it is still here. covid is still here and it still kills people and it still disables people and it does so at an incredibly fast rate because nobody fucking cares anymore and nobody wants to acknowledge it anymore but how can you just ignore it isnt anyone else seeing this . the fucking measles is back bc everyones immune systems are fucked from repeated covid infectons because no one fucking cares anymore. why dont people care.

why is the vast majority of society pretending the pandemic is either completely over or never happened What the fuck is going on !!!!!!!! what the fuck is ggoing on like actually. i feel crazy. How are you going to ignore The fucking plague thats killed and disabled millions. can anyone fucking see this. Oh my god.

went to bed because i was kind of losing it . woke up and im still mad just in a calmer and more actionable way . i think part of what upsets me so much is that it feels like gaslighting. it straight up feels like gaslighting. in the genuine, non-meme sense of the word. the cdc stopped tracking cases and then told us the pandemic was over. doctors don't wear masks and get all offended if you ask them to. grown adults don't cover their coughs. this isn't normal. none of this is normal. society & the cdc will try and tell you it's normal and it's not. and it feels like you're fucking crazy sometimes but you're not. the pandemic is real, it is ongoing, it is killing & disabling millions of people, and you're not crazy for still caring .

Because my comics have gone around the internet, many people have asked if I’ve “gotten better yet”. The answer is a firm NO because that’s not how post-viral illness triggered by an infection that causes organ and brain damage works. Please consider your behavior and who you are leaving behind.

Check out the People’s CDC here where they provide weekly updates on the COVID situation in the U.S.

ID in alt text and below!

Keep reading

Covid Update, USA, late December 2023: Buckle up, folks.

Takeaway from his (very informative) thread:

This is a period where we need to act with more care. Not a time to panic, but a time to be more cautious.

so there's this weird chilling effect as the majority of Americans give up on masking / other COVID prevention, where the remainder of people who are still actually trying to prevent COVID becomes a smaller group that contains the people who are most intense about it, with the result that the people who are still posting & issuing guidance are also likely to be recommending more intense measures than the majority of people were ever willing to use. this becomes a vicious cycle where fewer people are willing to be that intense; the group still working on prevention shrinks further, increasing the proportion insisting on intense measures, making even fewer people willing to follow them, etc etc.

i'm saying this because if you read this post and you were like "well i can't do all that" or "i don't know what that means," i am here to tell you this:

Doing one thing to prevent COVID is better than doing zero things.

If you can mask indoors, do it. If you can avoid large gatherings, do it. If you can't do either of those things, maybe you can test frequently. Maybe you can run an air purifier at your holiday gathering. I am one of the people who's been fairly intense about prevention this whole time, and let me tell you, reducing harm in any way you can is a good thing. Don't let the perfect, which is a highly variable and moving target, be the enemy of the good. Do what you can with what you have where you are.

Stay safe, y'all.

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.

But something else happened.

Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.

“So it’s really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine,” says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.

Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine Photo credit: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

VACCINATE. YOUR. DAMN. KIDS. 

Everyone please re-blog this. It’s very important.

@takashi0 You re-blogging things tends to get them spread far and wide. Please help us out on this one.

Fun and exciting news! COVID does the same thing, although in a different way. Had COVID a while ago and keep getting sick with everything else? This is why.

COVID weakens the immune system for several months. This is why we’re seeing outbreaks of weird fungal infections in adults, more TB worldwide, mycoplasmic pneumonia outbreaks filling hospitals, plus more children getting severely ill from RSV and strep.

Wear. A. Mask. If you haven’t had COVID, keep it that way. If you have, you are immune-compromised and you really want to avoid catching COVID again, or getting anything else.

Since I’ve had COVID (multiple times, despite my best efforts), I’ve been getting colds rougly 2–3x more than before, some really nasty ones that knocked me down like a flu, and all my colds have taken twice as long as before. And I used to have a really good immune system before, rarely ever got sick.

And since I’ve been keeping up with the vax and wearing a mask everywhere and testing regularly, I’m reasonably certain those were really just colds that fucked over my COVID-weakened immune system, not additional COVID re-infections.

In 2022, I had my 11th surgery, which was less dangerous and less extensive than most of the others. It was healing quite well a couple weeks later, then I got COVID.

Then I got a wound infection. Never had a surgical infection before in my life, and it shouldn’t have happened that late in the healing process, but it did.

Now, these are anecdotes, but the data is there, basically every other kind of infection has grown more common and more serious since COVID started to spread out of control.

I think the greatest political victory of anti-maskers here in Canada was shifting the focus of covid precautions from public responsibility to personal risk.

It's no longer about "My mask protects you; your mask protects me," or about keeping your neighbours or loved ones safe. Now it's only about "I'll wear it if it's crowded, otherwise I'm not that worried," and how much of a risk it is *to you*.

You see a lot of people who previously called anti-maskers idiots and would heap blame upon them, but now those same people all stopped wearing masks or taking precautions because "Vaccines are so effective now!" or "There's hardly any [reported] cases!" or "I'm tired of being scared," or "Well it's not going anywhere, and I'm tired of putting my life on pause." And it just becomes very clear that it wasn't ever actually about protecting those around you, (or if it was that it isn't now), but instead it was that everyone was just waiting until they could "start living again" or get back to "normal", and those people were angry because they thought someone was preventing them from living.

I thini that's the real root of it, is simply that most people never knew how to be alive in times of stress, that no matter how shit things get, you're alive and your life is right here and now.

But it's really hard to not read it as betrayal, as a childish selfishness, when someone doesn't wear a mask or do the bare minimum; because well, it's just very clear that it's not about the other people they're hurting, or pushing to the side, they can go back to stores and dance class and bars!!! There's even less people in wheelchairs clogging up the halls, or less people to serve their drinks or staff their business. It's all back to *normal!*

I've been in an abusive or tumultuous home basically all my life. If I decided that my life "started" when I wasn't stressed, I would discount my entire existence, it all just would have been "on pause". I still wear a mask. Everyone else is "back to normal".

It's just very clear that their idea of "normal" doesn't include you, or the people we lost, or the people now being pushed aside.

"Those at-risk will protect themselves," because the disabled and the old and children historically never need help, right? Get a grip. But don't worry, I know you don't feel too afraid to wear that mask that protects me and them, so I'm sure it's fine.

“I think that's the real root of it, is simply that most people never knew how to be alive in times of stress, that no matter how shit things get, you're alive and your life is right here and now.”