First They Got Long Covid. Then, It Made Them Homeless
Cold weather is brutal for Wendi Taylor. After living with long Covid for two years, she knows that when the temperature drops, the pain and discomfort increases. This is especially true because of the severe arthritis in her hands, which only developed following her initial Covid-19 infection.
Taylor, who lives in Houston and is among the estimated millions of Americans living with long Covid, says that doing dishes during cold weather is probably the hardest part about living in the makeshift cabin she built from tarps and an 8×8 metal pop-up awning frame she found in the garbage.
“I heat water on the stove, but when it’s below freezing, it cools down quickly, and contact with the water causes extreme pain in my hands,” says Taylor. “It feels like being burned and smashed with a sledgehammer at the same time, and takes a long time for the pain to stop. Even just going outside can cause my hands to turn red and swell and have pain like that. It has made me curl up on my bed and cry more than once.”
After riding out last year’s historic ice storm — which left at least 246 Texas residents dead — in a previous camp, when Taylor found out about the major winter storm at the beginning of this month, she went in prepared. She reinforced the tarps that function as the walls of her cabin, and ensured that the poles of its frame were firmly anchored into the ground.
One of Taylor’s biggest concerns this time was having the propane she needed to operate her stove. “Power outages matter little to me, but ‘they’ will buy all the propane if their electric heat goes off,” Taylor, 41, tells Rolling Stone, referring to housed individuals. “This is one of the biggest issues we face: Supplies we depend on daily become unavailable when they’re hoarded for emergencies.”
Masks are community care❤️🔥😷 free masks: maskbloc.org
• Remember: covid is not over, 50% of infections are asymptomatic, minimum 10% of infections end up in long COVID, re-infections wreck us, COVID spreads and moves like cigarette smoke, think of the people around you and you as people who are all day smoking, it becomes more visual to understand how COVID moves.
• There is no way to “train” the immune system because it is not a muscle. there is a common misconception that exposure to harmful germs strengthens the immune system. viral diseases like COVID, flu, measles weaken the immune system, leaving the possibility of lasting damage. The reality is that you don't build your immunity with repeated infections, vaccines strengthen the immune system by teaching it to recognize pathogens without all the risks. Focusing on infection prevention is key.
• Rapid antigen tests give many false negatives.
• Solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the capitalist world.
• Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.
“The cold truth of the matter is that the motive behind COVID minimization is greed and social control. (…) Solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the capitalist world. Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception.” Let Them Eat Plague! http://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/
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