A View from the Left on Covid-19

As people on the left, we typically think that we go way beyond what is expected to take care of each other and our communities. We offer our sofas for pals to sleep on, lend out all of our most formative theory books, our shelves are pantries open to all we touch with our love. We share our lives in letters to people in prison and voice notes to comrades. We don’t want there to be any one who is outside the circle of care.

We know about how to show up for others, how solidarity is not one deed but many; having a difficult conversation, listening deeply to metabolise each other’s pains, sharing our art forms or material support. 

For all of our cherished causes and comrades, we show up, it is pretty much what defines us. 

 Yet, when it comes to one of the most pressing causes of our time, which crosses our paths like storm water on a warming planet, again and again, much of the left is silent. 

With each passing month, we lose more of our comrades, others become chronically ill, and capitalism remakes the terrain of living to be harder and harsher.

I am talking about covid, which is a totally dire subject. The mention of covid tends to make people seize up or switch off, so much so that there is a genre of videos on tiktok and instagram that start with overly long and mysterious introductions, only to introduce covid as the topic of the video and begging the listener/watcher not to switch off and scroll on. 

So I am hoping that you can stay with me for what I hope isn’t too preachy an intervention about why we should re-examine the wounds of the past, the lost ground and opportunities, and view covid as an opportunity to connect, to get pretty mad, and to organise around. 

Covid and capitalism’s death drive

Sars-cov-2/covid-19 is a virus which enters each body like a roll of a die, it has the possibility of being mild, or potential to lead to permanent disability or even death. 

As such, the syndrome it causes, ‘COVID’ is neither a seasonal cold or flu, but the acute infection stage of a rapidly mutating virus that evades long term immunity. It can cause lasting damage to the respiratory, cardiovascular, immune and neurological systems, often even after a ‘mild’ initial infection. 

Since April of 2022, almost all of the protections against covid-19 for workers, patients and communities have been scaled back. The Health and Safety Executive does not require Covid-risk to be discussed in risk assessments, or for suspected outbreaks to be reported for most types of workplaces. The UK Health Security Agency, has also bragged about exceeding targets at reducing the costs of pandemic-era protections.

The ability to access free Lateral-Flow tests for easy home testing or PCR tests with a suspected infection at a community level has been massively reduced. Gone also are mask mandates or even recommendations to wear masks on airplanes, public transport, gigs, sports stadiums, schools and even hospital settings. Vaccinations in the UK are hard to come by unless you are over 75 years old, or have conditions like lymphoma, HIV or are on immunosuppressive medication, or can afford to pay over £50 per shot. 

Vibes over lives 

Covid is no longer viewed as a threat, and the current phase of guidance is geared towards ‘living with’ Covid as a ‘respiratory infection’. Any evidence of the significant impact of covid on children, elderly people, disabled people, people of colour is buried in plain sight, we struggle to hear each other in the white noise. 

With a lack of testing, for a condition known to be a leading cause of deaths of children in the United States, public officials are more concerned about the impact of covid on ‘school absenteeism’, than young people’s health. Chris Witty, the Chief Medical Officer for Public Health England, even co-signed a letter recently endorsing sending children to school with ‘mild respiratory illness’. This was reinforced by Brigit Philipson, the new Labour Health Secretary, saying that reasons to keep a child off of school ‘do not include a runny nose’ in the Times last week. 

In a context lateral flow tests being priced at £10 for 5 packs, and very few being available through the NHS, this is a nod from the highest profile Public Health civil servant in the UK to spread covid, even when you know you that you/or your child may be infectious.

Every part of the state now prioritises vibes over lives., Referencing the 1960’s autonomous marxist group, the situationist international, you could say that this is very much the spectacle made manifest. The appearance of health, in the signifier of attendance, replacing real lived health, what it means to feel healthy or to be in good health. So we continue to be exposed to potentially very serious respiratory viruses and denied even time to rest and recover.

Up until May 2023, there had been over 33,000 deaths (2) where covid was mentioned on the death certificate in Scotland. The US government’s Centre for Disease Control estimates that 1 in 5 adults have a health condition related to a previous Covid infection.  

The result of these changes, while the virus continues to circulate at high levels and to mutate regularly, is that disabled and chronically ill people feel abandoned by every institution that they need to rely on for care.

 Worse still, they feel alienated from friends, family and communities, who are not co-regulating risk. Most people have been convinced that the virus will not impact them severely, or at all, and any blip in their healthy life will be taken care of by the state and their community. 

Those who continue to adopt individual and collective care strategies are seen as living relics, haunted by their own disproportionate fear of disablement, and therefore abandonment by the state, or death.

As disability justice activist Mia Mingus puts it ‘You are not entitled to our deaths. You are not entitled to the deaths of our loved ones in the name of capital, privilege and “normal.” You are not entitled to our silence about our pain and suffering and the wet tar grief that envelops us.’

In the reassertion of the ‘new normal’, of seasonal travel, indoor gatherings and maskless socialising, chronically ill and immunocompromised people are relegated to the fringes of social life, even more so than many were before and during the first wave of the Covid pandemic. 

Also, absent from social life are newly disabled people; health workers who contracted a life-changing pathogen while offering care and comfort to severely ill people in the earlier waves of the Covid. As are young people who caught covid in the classroom or lecture theater and can’t see their way back to their chosen life path through brain fog and a maelstrom of lingering health issues. 

None of this is okay, or in any way compatible with leftist praxis or prefiguration, ‘the new world in the shell of the old’. A not small proportion of the population is losing work, time and much of their quality of life to post-infection conditions like long covid. Even more seriously, we are losing friends and comrades to preventable, premature deaths to covid.  

This is a tragedy enough in itself, but unfortunately the situation is even more perilous when the response by the states of the world to this harm is to bury, deprioritize, defund and dismiss.

It is a collaboration between the state and capital, the next step beyond the systemic cruelty which has brought us hits such as Disability Benefit reassessments, manufactured outrage about ‘sick note Britain’ and the state’s suspicion of disabled people’s symptoms and right to exist. 

Now more of our comrades are becoming disabled every day, at all stages of life, from a virus which is being encouraged to spread, while official life pretending is so passé, so 2020. 

What are the implications for this, if we go along with the UK Health Security Agency, Centre for Disease Control and World Health Organisations’ ‘new normal’ consensus? It seems like a massive exercise of organised abandonment,  the term coined by abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore for a ‘strategy of depriving people and places of investment in order to hasten their exploitation’. The major states of the world have decided that disabled, older and immunocompromised people don’t matter, or at least not as much the quarterly profits of the airline industry and chain restaurants owned by private equity firms. 

These boundaries of who and what counts are frighteningly narrow, and have eugenic implications. How are we to fight for protections for Climate Refugees, an end to the international arms trade or reappropriating the grand thefts orchestrated by the wealthy from here? 

As Joseph Healy from the Anti-Capitalist Resistance says, ‘Essentially, during the pandemic, Neoliberalism has taken a step closer to Fascism by viewing the death and disablement of those who do not contribute to economic production as a price worth paying.’ 

What is to be done? Class discussions in the school at the end of the world 

All of this is extremely overwhelming and hard to bear. The social Darwinists in government and in corporate boardrooms would rather you felt sad, despairing and gave up. They want you to believe that people are greedy, selfish and individualistic and any action you take would be hopelessly minute in its impact. Neither premise is true, we are just facing an amount of misinformation which could make a supplement-dealing alt-right podcast host blush.  

Yet, even with a several year long deluge of officially sanctioned misinformation on covid, a recent Yougov survey revealed a majority of adults in the UK would feel uncomfortable being indoors with someone that they knew had covid.

There is so much you can do in every space we move through, in little acts of care and mutual aid. 

There are also tons of worthwhile targets of campaigning to change policies and spaces in which we live, work, study and organise;]

-Push back on attempts to ban masking in public. While Scottish guidance currently advises that wearing a mask is one way someone can protect themself from getting sick, it is not hard to imagine a roll back of this non-committal tolerance. Mask bans have already become a political campaign of right wing and centrist lawmakers in the United States.  The law in North Carolina has already criminalised masking, in a confusing bill with the caveat that someone can wear a medical mask if they are using it to prevent the spread of infectious disease, but that they must remove their mask at the request of law enforcement or the owner of a property! However, liberal cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, are all flirting with anti-masking policies, in a crackdown against student demonstrators, the Palestinian liberation movement and just the free association of disabled people. Prominent disability justice oracle Alice Wong has referred to this as a new iteration of the ugly laws (laws that used to criminalise people with disabilities).

There is huge potential in alliances between struggles for Palestinian liberation, LGBT rights and disability justice in fighting against this wave of repression. We can fight for a world where you can wear a keffiyeh and a respirator. 

Disabled & high risk people are feeling betrayed & outage by proposed mask bans that are effectively the new Ugly laws in this fascist dystopian eugenic society

No one has our backs except us. Both parties do not deserve our votes

I feel very alone w/ so much rage

— Alice Wong 王美華 (@SFdirewolf) June 25, 2024

-Refuse to ‘live with covid’, and purchase and wear N95, KN95 or FFP1 respirators (those highly effective at preventing the spread of viruses) at demonstrations, at the meeting, any shop, when in transit and in all healthcare environments. If you can’t afford high quality respirators, get in touch with Mask blocs (such as Glasgow and Edinburgh Mask Blocs), who pool funds to widen access to respirators. Respirators of this quality are far superior to cloth or blue surgical masks in avoiding airborne virus transmission, they filter out 95%+ of viral particles if worn snug around the nose and mouth. 

-Engage in mutual aid to support self-isolating and immunocompromised people, and check in on anyone who is sick 

-Advocate for air quality monitoring and ventilation anywhere you are, which can be done mechanically through the use of HEPA filters which remove viruses from the air or through ensuring adequate fresh air. The best of all worlds is a cross breeze, through open windows at two opposite sides of a room as well as air filters fitted with HEPA filtration. We particularly need air quality monitoring and ventilation in health care, schools, colleges, universities and care homes- anywhere people congregate for long periods of time. A recent study in Finnish day care centres observed a 30% reduction in respiratory illness from the use of HEPA air filtration devices. 

-Have conversations about Covid and respiratory-infection risks with friends, lovers, house-mates, families, comrades, unions and when organising any events 

-Purchase and distribute hand gel, but also nasal sprays containing carrageenan, and medical grade mouthwashes. Both have been evidenced to reduce the viral load of replicating viruses in the upper-respiratory system 

-As black arts movement writer Tony Kade Bambara says ‘Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.’, be careful of minimising the pandemic through words. Language is sticky so try to avoid using popular phrases like ‘post-covid’ or ‘during the pandemic’, which deny our ongoing reality of mass infection and the need to struggle. The proliferation of these terms mostly by the mainstream media and politicians has made us actors in their sociological production of the end of the pandemic, a term coined by disability justice activist researchers Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant for when institutions and media commentators began to construct a new common sense around covid being over or no longer a threat.

-Recognise that the state has abandoned us, and be fired up by the injustice of this. Don’t let the state and its representatives away with it. Telling us that vaccines aren’t needed unless you are extremely medically vulnerable (as if it is easy to tell that you are), is misinformation. This is an anti-vaccine position. 

-Fight the government, both in the UK and the more progressive presenting devolved governments, as the NHS refuses to bring back mask mandates in healthcare settings even against the advice of the World Health Organisation, Royal College of Nursing and British Medical Council. All of these bodies recently recommended that the NHS bring back masking in healthcare due to a new variant of concern over winter. 

-Work on protecting each other, and viewing Covid protection measures as acts of self and community care, and love, even as we resent the hell out of our governments!

-Find inspiration in projects like the Clean Air Club in Chicago, fighting to provide the equipment and support to artists and musicians to organise safer gigs and shows

-As you get more involved in Covid research and activism, anti-vac bot farms and dismissive comments from well intentioned people will abound, go easy on yourself. Also seek out communities with other people trying to uphold public health, pushing against a boulder of propaganda and apathy

– Follow campaign groups like Covid Action Now UK and Covid Action Scotland, they have blogs, meetings and their public events are super informative!