Time euphemizes these hypochondriac control freaks as "the covid-cautious."
Covid cautious, fascism friendly.
For all of 2020, Alex, a 28-year-old living in New York, followed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) COVID-19 guidance "religiously."
28? And panicked about covid?
Then, in 2021, something began to shift. That spring, the CDC said it was okay for vaccinated people to ditch their masks in most places. But people were clearly still getting sick--including Alex, who got COVID-19 for the first time in late 2021 and later developed Long COVID symptoms.
Of course he got "long covid." It just always turns out that the hypochondriacs always suffer from the illnesses that doctors suspect aren't quite real.
"There was this reckoning moment where it was like, 'Maybe the CDC is not being totally honest with us about the situation,'" he says. "'Maybe they're trying to present it like we can go back to normal when we can't.'"
You started out strong, then you went off the rails.
[T]o Alex, it feels less like progress than an attempt to "wrap [the pandemic] up in a pretty bow" and pretend everything is fine. Today, he feels there are "very few" experts he can trust--a sentiment that reflects a growing rift between America's scientists and the COVID-cautious community, which includes people who are immunocompromised, coping with Long COVID, or simply trying to avoid the virus.
For much of the pandemic, the scientific establishment and the COVID-cautious public were largely aligned in their desires to contain COVID-19. But as many officials argue for a more moderate approach to living with the virus, COVID-cautious individuals are increasingly the loudest voices calling for continued precautions--and, sometimes, lashing out at the scientists they feel have abandoned the cause.
People who "are still taking COVID precautions seriously have every right to be angry about being abandoned by public-health officials and experts," says Lucky Tran, a science communicator at Columbia University. "The very real pain that many people are experiencing has not been sufficiently acknowledged."
...
Though it may not feel like it, a significant portion of U.S. adults still care about COVID-19. In a KFF survey from late 2023, 26% of respondents said they were "somewhat" or "very" worried about catching the virus, and about half said they planned to take at least one precaution during the winter season, such as wearing a mask or avoiding large gatherings.
Time reports on the case of someone named "Mills." She has muscular dystrophy and reduced lung capacity, and fears that a dose of covid would hospitalize her. She lives in semi-isolation, with only her boyfriend visiting her. Tough stuff. But, she wants the rest of us to live this way. The rest of us who do not have any health conditions making us especially vulnerable to covid....
Mills says she feels abandoned by federal health officials, most recently when they relaxed their COVID-19 isolation guidance in March, even while people like her continue to live in near-total seclusion. "They're supposed to take care of the people," she says. "The fact that they're letting not just disabled people, but people in general, either become disabled or pass away from this virus is very negligent."