The Plague Diaries: The agony of choosing life
The mask I wear leaves lines cut into my face after I take it off; 12 hours after stepping outside, getting onto a bus, working an 8-hour shift at a daycare, getting some groceries, going home to the one 3 by 4m bedroom where I know I can safely breathe. I take some pride in these lines; they are physical marks of how I’m tough as shit, that I have faced the risks and care about protecting myself and people around me. I am choosing to live, but in 2024 it looks like choosing abject misery, while choosing preventable death and disability looks like fulfilment and connection. Up until it doesn’t.
Every day I wake up and remember the disease spreading outside my room. Or rather, every night, because lately I can only get maximum 5 hours unbroken sleep in a row. This feels like a post-Covid effect, though it could also be depression. I sit down at daycare and watch these tamariki, who age 3 and up can be taught to wear masks just as we teach them to cough into their elbows, but whose unmasked kaiako won’t even give them clean air or ventilation. I wonder if a generation of disabled children will forgive us.
Every day, hour, minute has become a risk calculation. I worriedly snap at a friend for slightly removing his mask in the supermarket. I worry about whether my mostly-absent flatmate is always masking in shared space, whether I’m safe to go downstairs without a mask. I unmask outside on my work break and then quickly replace it as someone walks by. I check Google every week for news on a mucosal vaccine to stop infection and transmission; some Covid cautious people predict it being ready within a year. Checking this news feels like a prayer. Please, tell me this won’t last forever.
The thought of maintaining this anxiety is why most leftists, like anyone else, slack off on Covid. Outside of living in a war zone and, realistically, climate change, no issue requires you to live your politics as constantly as Covid does. Housing issues or patriarchy or even dysphoria can, in fact, leave you alone for a few hours or days or weeks at a time, but not the air you breathe.
The long-standing ableism of our movements is glaringly apparent as more and more of us go down. Covid is a mass-disabling event, but already-disabled people were first in the line of fire. Some people going to hospital take not only legal documents, but a ‘connection kit’ held to their chest with pictures of and facts about themselves and their loved ones. “Someone’s child, community organizer”, “I am loved”, “I am not ready to die”. These are fat, disabled, old people targeted by triage plans for Covid treatment; those who need to persuade medical professionals to even try to save them. I weep first in relief at reading the name NoBody Is Disposable Coalition, and then in deep shame that I politically abandoned these people for so long.
We can’t keep living like this. Not all of us are quietly waiting to be picked off one by one, but we need to push for public health interventions so that no one has to be this hypervigilant. The science on air filtration has been in for a long time. Air purifiers should have been placed in every building long before now, in the way we have pipes and sewage systems, and kept running as constantly as we run our fridges. Far-UV lights that kill viruses are the same. We have the tools, so why, in 2024, are we not fighting tooth and nail for everyone’s right to breathe safely?
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The simple answer is that fascism offers ease, for a while. Don’t mask, it soothes us, don’t live in fear, scientists and disabled people are exaggerating, you need to live a normal life, we need to be able to come together communally. Even leftists have embraced this, understanding that fascism sells certain forms of comfort and community pride to others but not recognising what it’s selling to us too. Now that I’ve been kicked out of comfort with my new heart problems, I’m astounded by how easily we acquiesced.
Non-maskers often operate off a sunk cost fallacy. Back in 2020, most of us would have felt terribly guilty if we had infected, disabled or killed a loved one. Now, most people feel like taking precautions is pointless because Covid’s everywhere anyway. If we’re non-consensually unmasked in high-risk work environments—hospitality, for example, or entertainment—then immiserating ourselves outside of work doesn’t feel worth the risk prevention. But mostly, I think, Covid being everywhere makes it feel like infection is not really anyone’s fault or responsibility.
We know subconsciously, however, that just because we can’t measure who infected and killed a person doesn’t mean that nobody did it. If it suddenly became clear that your lack of masking had killed three family members—let’s say, one who died during the acute stage, one from Long Covid, and one years later from a heart attack in their 30s—would you go back and put on a mask? Or would you just kill them anyway, because human life under capitalism was detached and isolated even in 2019, and other people are just NPCs?
From one of the most savage meme accounts online.
The upside to this grim reality is that every time you mask—every single fucking time—you are breaking a potential chain of transmission. Even if you’re not masking all the time, this is truly a case where every moment matters, and tangibly counts towards the greater good. If you stopped masking, you can start again at any time. If you came late to it, as I did, you can still stop some future misery. Every time I see a fellow masker in public, I want to high-five them, to fall upon them with thank god, someone else who visibly hasn’t given up.
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My writing feels as repetitive as my thoughts. It becomes hard to tell the difference between crawling out of depression and sinking back into denial. At the back of my mind is a constant dull, pounding ache that alternates between fear, sadness, and rage. Sometimes I look at unmasked people doing regular human activities—good ones, where they connect and rejuvenate themselves—and my heart breaks for the safety that they, we, deserve and don’t have. I want to find ways to reach them, and know there are non-shaming ways to do it. On bad days, I silently seethe as I watch unmasked people get onto the train, while I make a doctor’s appointment to go back on anti-depressants.
Anger at non-maskers is understandable, but largely counter-productive if they’re not in a position of power. From a distance, we don’t know why a person is unmasked; whether their boss forced them to because most customers don’t like masked people, or whether they took individual precautions for years and finally burned out. Non-masking is a behaviour, not a fixed identity, and many non-maskers still worry about the pandemic. If we build a movement, a visible movement with demonstrable gains, many of them will get on board.
This is where Covid cautious communities have arguably been lax. Becoming Covid cautious is very idiosyncratic; some factors include how afraid a person is of getting sick, whether we are/become immunocompromised or have such people in our immediate circles, or some ineffable mental and physical strength to face the facts and mask at length. This makes for a wide variety of political positioning and know-how, some less potent than others.
Covid cautious people proudly adhere to scientific evidence, but we haven’t always followed activist evidence. We keep trying to scare people straight by overloading them with Covid’s horrible facts, and refuse to notice the mountainous evidence that this strategy has utterly failed. Our public health academics state what measures the government needs to implement, but seem like they’re stolidly waiting for policy-makers to listen rather than making them listen. If radical activism ever enters the hallowed (hollow) halls of peer review and institutional acknowledgement, it’s not usually until years or decades after it’s over, so higher-up academics rarely understand it in the moment.
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I design a T-shirt with a virus shape on it saying “As then, so now, silence=death”. I brace for blowback from fellow queers about appropriation, how it’s queerphobic to compare these two viruses. Of the two novel zoonotic-in-origin viruses, with often-mild or asymptomatic acute periods that linger in the body and attack the immune system, Covid is the deadlier. Its acute and chronic phases—along with the sequelae of increased heart attacks, cancers and so on—are rapidly catching up on the total HIV death toll since the 80s. Rather than HIV denial’s targeted eugenics towards queers and/or Africans, institutional Covid denial victimises the entire working class, making global life expectancy drop for the first time since WWII.
Fighting AIDS in the 80s and 90s has been retrofitted as a struggle conducted by the whole queer community. People forget that when AIDS was first starting to kill queer people in the 80s, many queers didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to know, certainly didn’t all rush off to form groups like ACT UP. Blocking the roads and yelling at health authorities to “release those drugs”, as ACT UP did, could be done for people’s right to antivirals, monoclonal antibodies infusions, nasal photodisinfection, and every other Covid treatment under the sun. However, it’s a lot scarier when it’s you doing it, without knowing in advance whether you’ll win. So we’ve all told ourselves that protesting Covid denial is either unnecessary or too risky—not understanding that every real protest is risky, but that it might be preferable to sitting tight and waiting to die.
There is, of course, groundwork to be laid first. Disabled mutual aid has consistently existed long before this pandemic, and never stopped for this one. Building their methodologies out further into abled communities is more effective than a hundred diplomatic conversations with any Minister of Health. The academics fighting Covid could donate some of their salaries to people forming mask blocs, or buy clean air collectives some air purifiers so they can make masked gigs or shows more of a norm. Not all resistance has to be, or should be, confrontational. You can buy a pack of KN95s and hand them out to people you see in surgical masks, explaining the difference in quality of protection.
I feel an obligation to cheer people on, to wax lyrical about solutions and give everyone encouragement, but really I wrote this to excise how trapped and beaten down I feel. I want to escape the city, to walk alone in the moonlight near my uncle’s farm, breathing air that if not always clean is at least safer from viruses. But I’m stuck where I am, and probably couldn’t look myself in the eye if I bailed anyway. I still believe that a mask is a remarkable gift (truly, look at the physics of it), but I need more. I need other people to take their own safety seriously, and then to kick out against the confines of individual risk avoidance. As always, no one is going to save us but ourselves.
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Anne Campbell is a writer and activist.