public spaces
The public space is for everyone, which is exactly why not everyone can be there at all times.
Since the pandemic, I see an increased behavior of refusing to stay home when sick. Everyone has a fear of missing out, a fear of staying at home for possibly nothing. They already had to stay home a couple times in 2020 and 2021 and that’s enough, now they’re entitled to treat themselves forever to make up for that. Regulatory bodies have taught them you only have to stay home if the Covid test is positive. And how many do still test, even? Not many. “It’s probably not Covid” is now the joker card to attend anything anyway, even if the other people don’t wanna catch anything non-Covid either.
People don’t seem to get that they’re robbing people of things with that. If you hide it and attend events anyway without telling anyone you feel sick, you’re deceptive and not even giving them a chance to remove themselves or mask up or not even waste their time showing up. If you infect them, you’re not only potentially ruining their vacation plans, work schedule, making their uni assignments schedules stressful or making them miss out on an exam, you’re also risking them developing long term damage from that. POTS, ME/CFS, Long Covid, heart damage, brain damage, developing autoimmune illnesses, and more.
Even if they’re just a silent carrier feeling healthy as usual, they’re gonna carry it to other people, especially vulnerable groups and can’t even warn them about it. They’ll carry that to their grandparents, to their friend with rheumatoid arthritis, their coworker with ulcerative colitis, their mum who had an organ transplant, their dad with heart damage.
These are also the same people that can attend that event! Or like me, the café. I was mostly bed ridden since March and I feel better now since my medicine seems to be working. It’s an immunosuppressive medication, so I have to be careful and think thrice about entering rooms in public, especially now when cold season is ramping up. I deny myself a lot of cool stuff already because the risks are too high, I wear a mask, I choose to sit outside when possible, keep space, take the table in the corner or near a window etc.; like this, the risk isn’t zero, but at least I did what I could. After all these months, I’m just sick and tired of my home, and want to feel normal and do what everyone else is doing (within limits).
Covid discourse has kind of introduced this idea that immunocompromised people should just lock themselves away while everyone else can go out because “why would we care about such a low percentage of people”. But the thing is, it’s not really that low, and even if it was, a low % of the entire world population is still a fuck ton of people. These people are your coworkers, your neighbors, family members, friends, (future) partners, potential future children, the owner of your favorite restaurant, your favorite artist, the person online that wrote a piece that’s meaningful to you. Don’t they deserve kindness and protection?
~ 10% of the world’s population has an autoimmune illness such as inflammatory bowel diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, type 1 diabetes, hashimoto’s, celiac disease, myasthenia gravis, vasculitis and more. Chances are, you know of at least one person in real life who has one of these, especially if you live in a Western country, and more online. The numbers seem to rise and it’s not clear why, but theories are it’s about stress, pollution, food additives and similar things, and you know that won’t go away; chances are, these things will keep increasing. It might even hit you.
But they’re not the only ones. What about HIV positive people? There are roughly 40 million of them worldwide, and additional ones that might not even know or share that. What about organ transplant receivers? They have to take immunosuppressants too to lessen the chance of the body rejecting the organ. I cannot find reliable numbers on living organ receivers worldwide (I found 1.5 million but no other sources said that), but every 8 minutes someone gets added to the organ donation waiting list - which shows the desperate need for it and that these are also already sick people, often on dialysis, who don’t need your shit.
In general, older people are more vulnerable due to weaker immune systems and pre-existing age related conditions, and the demographic has shifted heavily towards that because we get older and older. In 2022, there were 771 million people aged 65+ years worldwide, almost 10% of the world's population.
Does that seem so small and far away now? I don’t think so.
But still, yesterday I secluded myself at the café at the most far away corner separated by walls, in a little nook. The outside spots were sadly closed off that day. After a while, a mother came in with her child and basically sat right next to me. I was focused on reading uni material and had my AirPods in, but after a while I noticed how absolutely sick that child was. Genuinely, should be in bed with medication type of sick. The poor child, seriously. She was coughing her lungs out over there like a champion and it sounded nasty, full of slime and painful. And she’s here, because her mum just couldn’t wait a week or two to go to the café. Her mum is the main character, we are all just NPCs in her world. The other customers and the staff don’t matter. That they might close next week because all staff caught it and no one is able to run the shop is also not her problem, she got what she wanted after all.
I left as quickly as I could. And honestly, I almost confronted her about it, because this isn’t just about us around her, it’s about child welfare. But I didn’t do it, because what would I change? She knows her child is sick and she doesn’t care and god knows mothers think they don’t have to listen to childfree women about anything, so whatever. I briefly considered telling staff, but they seated her and served her. They know, they just don’t care either or care more about not offending anyone. In my opinion, someone sick should be kicked out, but okay.
The point is: for everyone to be able to enjoy public spaces, you have to stay home sometimes. Tough luck. I am typing this in the bathtub, feeling a cold coming on, and I have to think about if I skip my medication tomorrow or not - lifesaving medication that just started to work - to give my body a better chance to fight it. And we had planned a trip to visit my fiancées family over the weekend and next week as I took time off from work, and now I wonder if we have to cancel it. All because of a selfish individual. So just stay home, man. Just a few days.
Published 24 Oct, 2024, edited 7Â months, 2Â weeks ago