Reflections in the middle of a recuperation.
There are a few things that have struck me as I sat around waiting to expire or revive. Some of them reflect what an anticommunal society we’ve become, some are just reflections that ACAC, All CopsErrCapitalists Are Counts. (Extra “o” in there, oops…)
I’ve had spontaneous pneumothorax (collapsed lung) and COPD so I’m at risk. My wife has several lifelong disorders that place her in the situation of being very at risk. For a start, she can’t tolerate the vaccines, for a second, antivirals could have been problematic for her and indeed there was only one that could be prescribed for her out of the range now available.
So now to that ACAC.
The price of K’s antivirals is listed at $2,100. Do you get that? After not managing COVID at all well, governments also didn’t manage to put the brakes on ACAC pharmaceuticals companies to rein the cost in to being affordable. So in places like here, our Pharmaceuticals Benefits Scheme (PBS) subsidises it so it costs $49 to patients. $2,151 of the cost is paid for out of public funds. Because the governments of the world never had the balls between them to stand up and say to the Big Pharma that since this was a global pandemic they’d send the military in to ensure compliance with a price cap if necessary, now many people without a PBS will never be able to afford thoise meds. You say it would be Fascism to move against corporations like that, I say it’s Fascism when pharmaceuticals companies can secretly run the world for their profit and use our governments to cloak their thievery.
My antiviral is even worse priced. But I digress. Sort of. Because this is all horribly relevant.
When I was a child, it was accepted that after a serious illness there is a period of convalescence. Well, every illness was followed by convalescence, sometimes a day, and in some cases, months-long recovery times. We don’t see many people having the luxury of a convalescence period these days, and there’s a reason for this, and improved medicine isn’t the whole story.
Look At Us
The workplace was once a social lifeline, and an extended family. If you were unwell and needed a convalescence, you knew you could take it. My last experience with workplace attitude to my needing a day off to be biopsied for possible cancer was that I was made to feel like I was cheating the company out of a whole day of my time.
Also, the COVID lockdowns focused another thing for us – our social horizons are broadened by our new power of communication via the Internet and social networking, but our in-person social horizons have shrunk to the point where being locked down was a severe blow to the little localised community we had.
We (K and I) don’t go out much anyway. We have two or three friends we keep contact with but don’t live in each others’ pockets, we might shop once a week or once a fortnight, and our ‘nights out’ consist of grabbing a pizza or burger and sitting in the park or in the car by the beach. Or taking it home and eating at the garden table outside. We’ve done this for the best part of a decade so we’re used to each other’s company. And we’ve had similar long periods apart due to one of us having to go to hospital and the other having to keep managing the house and pets.
But this time we’re both quite ill, with a disease that’s been spread by social ignorance and irresponsibility, we’re both acutely aware of why COVID wasn’t eliminated two years ago already (a big “thank you” but spelled with an F word to all of you who carried on like your throats had been cut back when a single three month global lockdown would have seen us home Scot-free and who are now refusing to even wear masks out in public BTW) and I think that grinds both our gears.
Last thing – in my idle clicking, this suggestion came up in my Youtube browsing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgGLFozNM2o . Talk about relevant.
Wear masks. Wear masks. WEAR MASKS!