The planet the Democrats live on sounds nice

With a million new COVID cases per day in the US, Democrats celebrate their "victory" over COVID at their massive indoor superspreader event with zero mitigations

On the first night of the DNC, Georgia Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock took to the stage to give a rousing call for disease control and community care:

The pandemic taught us how. A contagious airborne disease means that I have a personal stake in the health of my neighbor. If she’s sick, I may get sick also. Her healthcare is good for my health… we are as close in humanity as a cough!

He made this declaration about contagious airborne disease in a sea of contagious airborne disease. With nearly 1 million new COVID-19 cases in the US each day as of August 16, approximately 1/34 Americans are currently infectious with COVID-19, a quarter of them fully asymptomatic.

The DNC, though it easily might’ve, implemented no COVID safety mitigations; no test requirement, no mask requirement nor even mask distribution, no air quality information, zero of the vaunted “tools” we supposedly now have to “keep us safe” from COVID infections. Long COVID has not been mentioned. While bragging about their unprecedented “accessibility” measures, the DNC ensured that no immunocompromised person would be safe to enter the United Center this week.

Without apparent irony or cognitive dissonance, Warnock seemed to make the case for public health measures controlling the SARS-COV-2 virus while celebrating an administration that oversaw the utter destruction of public health as we once knew it, in a building this is, objectively, full of the SARS-COV-2 virus.

As kids return to school amidst record-breaking August COVID levels, multiple schools have already shut down simply because infection levels were too high for them to continue operating. Meanwhile, the CDC issued guidance encouraging students to stay in class if they have lice or “mild” diarrhea, as the absence crisis “mysteriously” continues to worsen.

The event comes just weeks after a sprawling Nature Medicine review determined the global burden of Long COVID to be about 400 million individuals less than 5 years into the crisis, already costing economies a staggering $1 trillion annually. As quoted in Fortune, lead author Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly observed that:

I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist.

Pretend is certainly an apt word for what has been on display in Chicago this week.

A massive collection of close-packed delegates, electeds, lobbyists, influencers, celebrities and rich people cheered the idea of protecting each other’s health while participating in pandemic denial, refusing to use any mitigations, and purposely spreading COVID.

It was, frankly, bizarre.

The explicitly false nature of Senator Warnock’s statement- along with other Democrats’ varyingly inaccurate statements about beating the pandemic- begs several questions about exactly how far these delusions go.

Does Senator Warnock know we are in a massive COVID surge?

Does Senator Warnock know over a thousand Americans died of COVID-19 last week?

Does Senator Warnock believe that immunocompromised people deserve access to public spaces and representation in a setting like say, the DNC?

Does Senator Warnock know that millions of Americans have already been disabled by COVID-19 infections?

Does Senator Warnock understand that COVID did not literally, actually disappear when Biden took office?

Does anyone in that room?

For some time, it’s been clear that Democrats, like the Republicans before them, are now married to the COVID-is-mild-because-I-got-it-and-survived narrative and that nothing can pry it from their hot little 102-degree hands.

But his particular words struck me because they seemed a leap forward, a new frontier in the competitive field of pandemic denial. He stated not just that COVID is mild and safe for everyone to repeatedly catch forever - something that no public health body has ever claimed, and no scientific study supports - but that Democrats embrace disease control measures and believe in not coughing on one another, in a room full of people actively refusing to utilize disease control measures and instead coughing on one another.

And the crowd, an estimated 3% of it currently COVID+, cheered.

The Democrats perhaps first diverged from reality on COVID during Delta, when emerging evidence indicated that the vaccine-only approach would not work to control the virus. Vaccine protection waned rapidly, the virus proved capable of mutating to evade immunity from both vaccines and infections, and early days of plummeting transmission rebounded with a vengeance.

Instead of acknowledging reality, the party, with assistance from the slobbering media, doubled down on claims that only the unvaccinated would be harmed and killed by continuing mass infection policies. It wasn’t until after Omicron wave one that data emerged showing nearly 40% of those dead in the brutal winter ‘21-’22 reopening wave had been vaccinated. That summer, 60% of the dead were vaccinated. But by that time, the Democratic Party was happy on Earth 2.

No one called them out on their alternate universe fanfic where the virus had been vanquished; people kept dying, the public was sicker than ever, it became clear that Long COVID was a serious disease. But the call of the Disneyfied Pandemic Free Future was too strong. People bought the lies because the truth was just no fun.

In the three years since Delta, we’ve been on an unending roller coaster of massive waves followed by short-lived lulls, lulls during which 1/200 Americans are still testing COVID+. No sooner had we made it through JN.1 than KP.2 was surging; no sooner is KP.2 subsiding than KP.3.1.1 is right behind. New variants are emerging before the current wave is spent, with endless mass infection giving SARS-COV-2 the ultimate playground to experiment with genetic mutations and maximize its immune evasiveness.

Vaccines are updated but fail to keep up with the virus; the current booster is for XBB, the variant that was predominant in the winter of 2022-2023. The JN.1/KP.2 boosters still await FDA approval as the KP.3 surge crests.

Meanwhile, the Democrats’ Earth 2 fantasy persists. It goes a little something like this: In January 2021, the COVID-19 vaccines debuted. We all got the shots, a year later COVID also became mild somehow, everything went back to normal, and everyone lived happily ever after. There’s no Long COVID, there are no record student absences, there are no record disability numbers, hospitals aren’t overwhelmed, people aren’t sick all the time, disabled people aren’t unsafe in all public spaces, there are no worker shortages, there is no scads of scientific evidence showing long-term damage to all major organ systems following even mild infections.

None of that exists!

The Earth 2 story has even begun retroactively assigning Biden era deaths and outcomes to the Trump administration. Multiple times in recent months, both the Biden and Harris campaigns have referred to “a million people” dying under Trump. 400,000 Americans had died of COVID when Trump left office. The Biden administration even held a memorial event for those first 400,000 dead, the night before it took power and ceased to care about COVID deaths.

1.2 million Americans are dead of COVID today.

But those 800,000 dead bodies conflict with the Earth 2 story. How could hundreds of thousands of people died after COVID became mild and everything went back to normal? Maybe that somehow also happened under Trump! It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to feel true, and it sure feels like Joe Biden wouldn’t kill 800,000 people with negligence and scientific misinformation.

Just like it feels like we learned how to protect each other from airborne contagious diseases when Senator Reverand Warnock says it in a booming, inspiring, church-ready voice that invites us to relish our social justice credentials and love for our neighbors.

And doesn’t it feel like the DNC, an indoor event with hundreds of COVID+ attendees not wearing masks, is the most inclusive and accessible convention ever?

These delusions are so powerful, have been so propped up by the media, are so appealing to the public who wishes them real, that they have become indistinguishable from reality. Now, we all have to live on Earth 2, where the COVID infections never end but the pandemic is over.

“COVID no longer controls our lives,” declared outgoing President Joe Biden, who recently announced he would not seek re-election via twitter during his third COVID reinfection. It’s a favorite line of his, one that probably came to his comms people by process of elimination when they realized they couldn’t say:

“COVID is no longer a leading cause of death”

“COVID is no longer killing people”

“COVID is no longer disabling people”

“We no longer have to fear getting sick every time we leave home”

“Schools aren’t closing”

“Workplaces aren’t understaffed”

“Millions of people aren’t currently infected”

No, they settled on the most vague, subjective criteria for COVID victory, namely, “we don’t think about it anymore.” Sometimes they brag that people “aren’t wearing masks anymore.” And it’s certainly true. At the DNC, it’s quite clear, people are surely not thinking about COVID, nor wearing masks. Like Republicans in 2020, they aren’t letting some stupid old virus control their lives. Masks? More like face diapers! If a few disabled people can’t be exposed, those people should really stay home!

The Democratic National Convention is taking place on what sounds like a very nice planet. One where the oligarchs are working to solve climate change, which can be fixed with carbon credits and fracking. One where there’s no genocide in Palestine, and there aren’t any protestors outside either. Fascism is going to be defeated at the ballot box in November, and we’re all going to move forward together. COVID-19 was a virus that existed in 2020-2021 (RIP) and killed a million people under President Donald Trump (RIP), not because public services have been hollowed out over the course of decades of neoliberalism, but because one man is a rude Cheeto. We all went through something scary back then, during the pandemic. But now we know how to take care of our neighbors.

Now we know, if they get sick, I may get sick too.

Now we know, we’re as close in humanity as a cough.

But none of us are sick anymore, and none of us are coughing. Not on the planet where the Democrats live.