I read maybe a paragraph and had to stop. My dad passed from Covid in May 2020, and my family still hasn't had an opportunity to heal because even the most well-meaning in our society continue to tear the wound open again.
> it’s concerning to see Covid stories on screen that depict the illness as just a bad cold. There’s a lot of “bad cold” acting in The Four Seasons Covid episode — stuffy noses and hoarse voices, plus complaints about everything tasting “metallic.” Yet, no one is so ill that they’re struggling to breathe
>
> If you didn’t live through 2020, you could watch the episode and think, “What’s the big deal?” Yes, it’s annoying for everyone to get sick in Thanksgiving but it’s nothing to freak out about. More critically, a “bad cold” doesn’t justify the government restricting people’s activities, banning large public gatherings, shutting down businesses. Covid as a “bad cold” fits a prevailing and highly dangerous right-wing narrative that most mitigation efforts were an entirely neurotic and even malicious overreaction.
The problem is that, while the absolute numbers of deaths and serious infections were terrifyingly high, the *percentages* were low enough that for many people, it *was* "just a bad cold"; not only for themselves, *but for everyone they actually know.*
And that's more real to them than the percentages, and the epidemiology, and the data from over-educated Washington egg-heads who float on a cushy government job and don't have to make payroll and pay the rent for the office.
It's sort of an inverse "War of the Worlds" -- instead of lots of people believing the radio-play was real, lots of people watched the horrors unfolding on their TVs and phones and decided it couldn't possibly be true.
The day the NBA cancelled the rest of their season was the day my company sent us home to work remotely.
My children were 10 and 9. School was difficult for them. I did my best to help. But life was difficult. Every trip to the grocery store for necessities was a possible death sentence.
Because people were dying.
Refrigerated trucks were a thing. Friend worked in an ER. Carried and stacked bodies in them. The bed the body had occupied was immediately filled with a new patient. Equipment was immediately back in use with appropriate sanitation. Friend has PTSD from it.
I watched the numbers. I compared them with city populations. Imagining a city of 250,000 people just vanishing. Then 300,000, then 500,000, then a million and more.
The vaccine was a miracle. Perhaps throwing money at it was the only semi-good thing That Man did. Of course he has spent the remainder of his time undermining it, because he is a devil.
Near the end after the vaccine was rolled out, a very active friend caught it. Never made time to get vaccinated. Planned to get around to it. Healthy guy. Virus ravaged his body. Blood clots. Heart attacks. Strokes. Organs shut down. Left behind a widow.
I caught it later with a vaccine. Not a fun experience. Flu-like symptoms. Even with Paxlovid the fucker held on for two and a half weeks.
I hate the people who minimize this shit. I hate that they attacked medical workers. I hate that they couldn't even be bothered to do the most minor thing to help their community, their country, and their neighbors. I hate that they spit on the social contract.
I remember. And maybe watching someone slowly waste away while there's nothing you could do except ask a silent God for help isn't exactly fit for a comedy series, I hate normalizing the narrative that it wasn't a big deal. A city of people the size of Dallas vanished over the course of a year. Sit with that. If it happened all at once, there would be memorials, speeches, a dedicated day of mourning and remembrance.
Instead, just a bunch of useless assholes making sure the next time it happens maybe it'll be a city's worth of people the size of Los Angeles.
My SIL's SIL was an ICU nurse in NYC at the time. Needless to say, she saw some shit. 💔😢
She and her colleagues were amongst the first to get vaccinated, and of course the local news were there to document the occasion, and a clip made it online. Jenna and one of her fellow nurses collapsed into each others' arms in tears of relief after they got that first dose.
I had a heart attack in December of 2019, just as we were becoming somewhat aware of Covid on the horizon. I was in occupational therapy for a couple of months until March when the clinic abruptly closed. That's about the time I also contracted Covid, and it was likely at the clinic. It was bad. It's still bad. It's like the involuntary act of breathing kinda broke in me and I have to consciously tell myself to inhale. It's like neutral buoyancy, in that my lungs just sit there, neither inhaling nor exhaling until I remember to breathe. And with the attendant brain fog, sometimes I forget to remember...
Thank you for this much-needed reality check, Mr. SER. I was enthusiastically grateful for mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing, especially pre-vaccine. For those of us lucky enough to survive the epidemic, I’m sure that these measures are what helped us stay alive.
I lost 2 family friends to COVID in 2020. The first was older, and visibly overweight, which would have given people room to think, “Well, sure. Someone like that is at risk in ways I am not.” The second was a mother to people I went to school with who worked at a grocery store. She went to bed one night feeling a bit sick and never woke up. I remember the local news (in a sparsely populated rural state) describing her death as the first official COVID death on record in the state where there was no “underlying health condition.” Why did that matter so much? Given the state of America’s health and health care, why did that idea (it’s only happening to people who are already sick) somehow have so much valence?
We all carry so much unprocessed trauma from living through that experience, in a society that struggles to accept illness and death generally, that we are all motivated to memory hole what really happened and how dangerous it was and what it really felt like. As ever MAGA is their own brand of crazy, but there are plenty of people across the political spectrum who are not realistic about what COVID really was like. And it doesn’t bode well for next time.
The people in power wish that we all consider health a matter of personal responsibility and nothing else. That's how you make money off of health care, and how you keep tax revenues for weapons. This is why when AIDS started, there was talk of how people who got it through transfusion "didn't deserve" to get sick.
It is a devastating perspective on health that has cost inmumerable people their lives in the U.S.
Agree. It’s a story we tell ourselves in part for psychological self preservation in the face of danger. But it’s also a story that serves entrenched power. Health is not a virtue. Illness is not a vice.
The strain of eugenics that we saw during COVID and the AIDS crisis - and now with MAHA and the current regime - is some fascist nonsense. It also serves the people in power who want to think that illness and death is never coming for them and that the rest of us poor plebes can just suck it. We should have been smart enough to be born with more wealth and privilege, right?
Thank you for this. Like some of the commenters below, I also was (and am still) in NYC during COVID. I was here for 9/11 also, and for me, COVID was worse, because we didn't know when it would end, or how. I remember being in Central Park, seeing the mobile tents, I remember the clanging of pots and pans every night at 7PM (started for such a good and kind reason, but within a few weeks was incredibly upsetting to hear every day). The sirens. God, the sirens. And I lost several people close to me. Cousin, father-in-law, childhood friend, grown-up friends. It sucked.
I myself caught COVID in December 2020 (probably as a result of faithfully wearing the cloth masks we were assured were as effective than the medical-grade ones but in fact were not), but, thanks to everything being new, including the testing, I tested negative four times (long story, but I was in a situation where I was getting tested every 3 days), probably because I had no congestion; just a very high fever (and then fatigue that lingered for weeks after). When I finally did test positive, I was feeling fine again (other than spiking fevers at night for about six weeks after, I remember my GP, who worked herself to the bone in the hospitals during the worst of it, telling me that COVID seemed to mess up the body's ability to self-regulate temperature for awhile afterwards). But the PCR tests couldn't tell the difference between living and dead virus, so even though I was two weeks past the initial illness, off to isolation I went. In retrospect though, I was so grateful to have spent the days I was feverish thinking, "Well, whatever it is, it's not COVID; it's just some other virus."
That said, I remember, after I was out of isolation, walking in a grocery store (still masked, of course), and just feeling this intense relief, that I had gotten through it (back when we thought it was a a one-and-done situation. I've had it again since then, much milder fever, but ALL the cold symptoms). But I'll never forget the fear. I hate that this is being memory-holed. Not that I want it to turn into a yearly public grief-fest, like we've done with 9/11, but this was not nothing. It was awful.
I haven't watched the show, but I haven't thought about it much, one way or another. Thank you for this, now I know to make sure to avoid it. And thanks for the space to vomit up some of my own feelings about that awful couple of years.
THOUGH- the Gritty memes in November of 2020, after the election, ruled. :)
The world changed in so many horrible ways; I lost friends to it (in multiple ways). Most of all, we had the biggest test to see if we in the USA could come together and care about others, getting through this. And we failed, MISERABLY.
Now we are defenseless for the next pandemic, because some people wanted to focus on sadopopulism rather than practicality.
Namely, there were people who grew to resent the sacrifices and inconvenience they were asked to make, to protect the Black and brown people tracked into the jobs that served them.
I did not experience that and yet I can manage to remember the devastation.
Media rarely dwells on the poor and the infirm, I guess ratings wouldn't be high enough if it was a camera on an elderly person isolated in their nursing home, delivering a monologue on the crushing feeling of being alone.
Our medical workers, our grocery workers, agricultural workers, everyone who had to work to sustain society should remain front and center in any re-telling of the pandemic.
Glad that I no longer subscribe to Netflix, no need to give them my money and time, if they are going to treat Covid like a bad cold, even for the unvaxxed. No one in my family got Covid until after they had gotten the vax for it, so it was like a bad cold for them. People I know who got it without being vaxxed had lengthy hospital stays, and only one survived.
American entertainment media is letting us down, just as American news media is letting us down.
covid is a cardiovascular infection that manifests with cold like symptoms. to portray it as "just a cold" is a grave disservice to those who died, those who worked in service and medical fields, and to undercut how seriously it affects people in the long term. i was raised by my grandparents. my grandmother died in a nursing home from covid in 2020. it was a bad death too (some deaths are easy, some are not, this was prolonged and painful and was on christmas). one of my good friends got covid and was in the ICU for over a week. he still struggles with his health from it today. people have absolutely memory holed it and its angering af to me. Thanks for this review. I will avoid the show.
Thank you for writing about this, it seems the time before the vaccine is being memory holed.
I was in NYC then, I got covid before the vaccines and it nearly killed me. It was like trying to breathe through a straw. I was so sick I made a video for my family and wrote instructions for what I wanted for my kitties, I was in bed and made the decision I would die there and not in a hospital corridor. The sirens never stopped.
For a year after I had heart issues, my pulse would suddenly shoot up for no reason, I did fully recover eventually.
So seeing the attack on Fauci is enraging and brings back bad memories.
It also is frightening that there could be a next pandemic with the current idiots in charge.
I read maybe a paragraph and had to stop. My dad passed from Covid in May 2020, and my family still hasn't had an opportunity to heal because even the most well-meaning in our society continue to tear the wound open again.
> it’s concerning to see Covid stories on screen that depict the illness as just a bad cold. There’s a lot of “bad cold” acting in The Four Seasons Covid episode — stuffy noses and hoarse voices, plus complaints about everything tasting “metallic.” Yet, no one is so ill that they’re struggling to breathe
>
> If you didn’t live through 2020, you could watch the episode and think, “What’s the big deal?” Yes, it’s annoying for everyone to get sick in Thanksgiving but it’s nothing to freak out about. More critically, a “bad cold” doesn’t justify the government restricting people’s activities, banning large public gatherings, shutting down businesses. Covid as a “bad cold” fits a prevailing and highly dangerous right-wing narrative that most mitigation efforts were an entirely neurotic and even malicious overreaction.
The problem is that, while the absolute numbers of deaths and serious infections were terrifyingly high, the *percentages* were low enough that for many people, it *was* "just a bad cold"; not only for themselves, *but for everyone they actually know.*
And that's more real to them than the percentages, and the epidemiology, and the data from over-educated Washington egg-heads who float on a cushy government job and don't have to make payroll and pay the rent for the office.
It's sort of an inverse "War of the Worlds" -- instead of lots of people believing the radio-play was real, lots of people watched the horrors unfolding on their TVs and phones and decided it couldn't possibly be true.
The day the NBA cancelled the rest of their season was the day my company sent us home to work remotely.
My children were 10 and 9. School was difficult for them. I did my best to help. But life was difficult. Every trip to the grocery store for necessities was a possible death sentence.
Because people were dying.
Refrigerated trucks were a thing. Friend worked in an ER. Carried and stacked bodies in them. The bed the body had occupied was immediately filled with a new patient. Equipment was immediately back in use with appropriate sanitation. Friend has PTSD from it.
I watched the numbers. I compared them with city populations. Imagining a city of 250,000 people just vanishing. Then 300,000, then 500,000, then a million and more.
The vaccine was a miracle. Perhaps throwing money at it was the only semi-good thing That Man did. Of course he has spent the remainder of his time undermining it, because he is a devil.
Near the end after the vaccine was rolled out, a very active friend caught it. Never made time to get vaccinated. Planned to get around to it. Healthy guy. Virus ravaged his body. Blood clots. Heart attacks. Strokes. Organs shut down. Left behind a widow.
I caught it later with a vaccine. Not a fun experience. Flu-like symptoms. Even with Paxlovid the fucker held on for two and a half weeks.
I hate the people who minimize this shit. I hate that they attacked medical workers. I hate that they couldn't even be bothered to do the most minor thing to help their community, their country, and their neighbors. I hate that they spit on the social contract.
I remember. And maybe watching someone slowly waste away while there's nothing you could do except ask a silent God for help isn't exactly fit for a comedy series, I hate normalizing the narrative that it wasn't a big deal. A city of people the size of Dallas vanished over the course of a year. Sit with that. If it happened all at once, there would be memorials, speeches, a dedicated day of mourning and remembrance.
Instead, just a bunch of useless assholes making sure the next time it happens maybe it'll be a city's worth of people the size of Los Angeles.
My SIL's SIL was an ICU nurse in NYC at the time. Needless to say, she saw some shit. 💔😢
She and her colleagues were amongst the first to get vaccinated, and of course the local news were there to document the occasion, and a clip made it online. Jenna and one of her fellow nurses collapsed into each others' arms in tears of relief after they got that first dose.
I had a heart attack in December of 2019, just as we were becoming somewhat aware of Covid on the horizon. I was in occupational therapy for a couple of months until March when the clinic abruptly closed. That's about the time I also contracted Covid, and it was likely at the clinic. It was bad. It's still bad. It's like the involuntary act of breathing kinda broke in me and I have to consciously tell myself to inhale. It's like neutral buoyancy, in that my lungs just sit there, neither inhaling nor exhaling until I remember to breathe. And with the attendant brain fog, sometimes I forget to remember...
Thank you for this much-needed reality check, Mr. SER. I was enthusiastically grateful for mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing, especially pre-vaccine. For those of us lucky enough to survive the epidemic, I’m sure that these measures are what helped us stay alive.
The metallic taste came from taking Paxlovid, which I believe may not have been available until after 2020.
Interesting. I recall it when I had covid but I’ve never taken Paxlovid
I lost 2 family friends to COVID in 2020. The first was older, and visibly overweight, which would have given people room to think, “Well, sure. Someone like that is at risk in ways I am not.” The second was a mother to people I went to school with who worked at a grocery store. She went to bed one night feeling a bit sick and never woke up. I remember the local news (in a sparsely populated rural state) describing her death as the first official COVID death on record in the state where there was no “underlying health condition.” Why did that matter so much? Given the state of America’s health and health care, why did that idea (it’s only happening to people who are already sick) somehow have so much valence?
We all carry so much unprocessed trauma from living through that experience, in a society that struggles to accept illness and death generally, that we are all motivated to memory hole what really happened and how dangerous it was and what it really felt like. As ever MAGA is their own brand of crazy, but there are plenty of people across the political spectrum who are not realistic about what COVID really was like. And it doesn’t bode well for next time.
I’m sorry for your losses.
The people in power wish that we all consider health a matter of personal responsibility and nothing else. That's how you make money off of health care, and how you keep tax revenues for weapons. This is why when AIDS started, there was talk of how people who got it through transfusion "didn't deserve" to get sick.
It is a devastating perspective on health that has cost inmumerable people their lives in the U.S.
Agree. It’s a story we tell ourselves in part for psychological self preservation in the face of danger. But it’s also a story that serves entrenched power. Health is not a virtue. Illness is not a vice.
The strain of eugenics that we saw during COVID and the AIDS crisis - and now with MAHA and the current regime - is some fascist nonsense. It also serves the people in power who want to think that illness and death is never coming for them and that the rest of us poor plebes can just suck it. We should have been smart enough to be born with more wealth and privilege, right?
This, all of it.
Thank you for this. Like some of the commenters below, I also was (and am still) in NYC during COVID. I was here for 9/11 also, and for me, COVID was worse, because we didn't know when it would end, or how. I remember being in Central Park, seeing the mobile tents, I remember the clanging of pots and pans every night at 7PM (started for such a good and kind reason, but within a few weeks was incredibly upsetting to hear every day). The sirens. God, the sirens. And I lost several people close to me. Cousin, father-in-law, childhood friend, grown-up friends. It sucked.
I myself caught COVID in December 2020 (probably as a result of faithfully wearing the cloth masks we were assured were as effective than the medical-grade ones but in fact were not), but, thanks to everything being new, including the testing, I tested negative four times (long story, but I was in a situation where I was getting tested every 3 days), probably because I had no congestion; just a very high fever (and then fatigue that lingered for weeks after). When I finally did test positive, I was feeling fine again (other than spiking fevers at night for about six weeks after, I remember my GP, who worked herself to the bone in the hospitals during the worst of it, telling me that COVID seemed to mess up the body's ability to self-regulate temperature for awhile afterwards). But the PCR tests couldn't tell the difference between living and dead virus, so even though I was two weeks past the initial illness, off to isolation I went. In retrospect though, I was so grateful to have spent the days I was feverish thinking, "Well, whatever it is, it's not COVID; it's just some other virus."
That said, I remember, after I was out of isolation, walking in a grocery store (still masked, of course), and just feeling this intense relief, that I had gotten through it (back when we thought it was a a one-and-done situation. I've had it again since then, much milder fever, but ALL the cold symptoms). But I'll never forget the fear. I hate that this is being memory-holed. Not that I want it to turn into a yearly public grief-fest, like we've done with 9/11, but this was not nothing. It was awful.
I haven't watched the show, but I haven't thought about it much, one way or another. Thank you for this, now I know to make sure to avoid it. And thanks for the space to vomit up some of my own feelings about that awful couple of years.
THOUGH- the Gritty memes in November of 2020, after the election, ruled. :)
The world changed in so many horrible ways; I lost friends to it (in multiple ways). Most of all, we had the biggest test to see if we in the USA could come together and care about others, getting through this. And we failed, MISERABLY.
Now we are defenseless for the next pandemic, because some people wanted to focus on sadopopulism rather than practicality.
Namely, there were people who grew to resent the sacrifices and inconvenience they were asked to make, to protect the Black and brown people tracked into the jobs that served them.
I’m so sorry for your losses.
Trucks. Full. Of. Bodies.
I did not experience that and yet I can manage to remember the devastation.
Media rarely dwells on the poor and the infirm, I guess ratings wouldn't be high enough if it was a camera on an elderly person isolated in their nursing home, delivering a monologue on the crushing feeling of being alone.
Our medical workers, our grocery workers, agricultural workers, everyone who had to work to sustain society should remain front and center in any re-telling of the pandemic.
Thanks for this piece.
Glad that I no longer subscribe to Netflix, no need to give them my money and time, if they are going to treat Covid like a bad cold, even for the unvaxxed. No one in my family got Covid until after they had gotten the vax for it, so it was like a bad cold for them. People I know who got it without being vaxxed had lengthy hospital stays, and only one survived.
American entertainment media is letting us down, just as American news media is letting us down.
covid is a cardiovascular infection that manifests with cold like symptoms. to portray it as "just a cold" is a grave disservice to those who died, those who worked in service and medical fields, and to undercut how seriously it affects people in the long term. i was raised by my grandparents. my grandmother died in a nursing home from covid in 2020. it was a bad death too (some deaths are easy, some are not, this was prolonged and painful and was on christmas). one of my good friends got covid and was in the ICU for over a week. he still struggles with his health from it today. people have absolutely memory holed it and its angering af to me. Thanks for this review. I will avoid the show.
Thank you for writing about this, it seems the time before the vaccine is being memory holed.
I was in NYC then, I got covid before the vaccines and it nearly killed me. It was like trying to breathe through a straw. I was so sick I made a video for my family and wrote instructions for what I wanted for my kitties, I was in bed and made the decision I would die there and not in a hospital corridor. The sirens never stopped.
For a year after I had heart issues, my pulse would suddenly shoot up for no reason, I did fully recover eventually.
So seeing the attack on Fauci is enraging and brings back bad memories.
It also is frightening that there could be a next pandemic with the current idiots in charge.
What a terrible experience. Thank you for sharing.