this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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I've heard someone tell me "it's a hoax but I got sick twice" in the same sentence.
I had a shopkeeper tell me it was a hoax and a few members of his family died of it.
Straight up my uncle was in the ICU for over a week and has been basically crippled by long covid. He still denies it's real.
Dude can barely check his own mail 18 months after getting it.
My cousin ranted about COVID and evil masks and Fauci. He then started talking about how he installs 5g antennas for a living and is blown away that people believe conspiracy theories about 5g, and how sometimes his favorite news programs bad mouth 5g, but they're ignorant and should listen to experts. I lost a little hope that day.
That's a long time to wait to check your mail.
The sheer mental gymnastics that would take...
On the other hand, I can imagine that if one has fallen into the conspiracy rabbit hole, not done anything to reduce risk like getting vaccines or masking, or even going out of your way to avoid taking those precautions, then losing some family members to covid might make doing those mental gymnastics much easier. Because if one admitted one was wrong after such a thing happened, that would also mean accepting the idea that one might be partially responsible for the deaths of one's own family members, and that is such an awful truth to accept that I can easily imagine someone desperately clinging to any belief that would make it not so, regardless of how absurd it was. Indeed, the longer one hangs on to it afterwards, the worse one's actions look once you abandon the conspiracy theory, and so the motivation to cling to that belief no matter the evidence just would get stronger.
Like he said it was a hoax and then after a passage of time a few members of his family died, or those were both things said in one conversation?
My boss lost his sense of smell (it's been over a year). He copes by saying he's never been much of a foodie! He tells employees not to take covid tests.
Yeah my mil was avaxx. Then she infected the entire damned family, including two kids under five.
I have a cousin who still insists that her mom died of pneumonia and that it wasn't COVID. Her husband is currently in prison for storming the capitol on January 6th, which tells you all you need to know. It's weird because she's the only one in my extended family who's even remotely into far right craziness.
Shall I assume you don't live in the USA?
They withheld any information about C-19 to US citizens until into 2020. Yet I found myself sick with 'influenza' for Christmas 2019.
That was the closest thing worth calling a 'hoax', the fact that it came out in 2019, but the US public wasn't even made aware of it until later into 2020.
By then people were already sick, and it was spreading out of control. Lockdown was about a joke at that point, they waited too long for lockdown to do a damn thing.
BTW, it didn't affect me any worse than any other case of a strong cold or the flu, though I totally realize it affected others differently.
I definitely heard about it on NPR in Christmas 2019. Not invalidating your experience, but I definitely heard about it on NPR. People were watching it
Can't say I've ever heard of NPR before today, might have been handy to know before I decided to go to the hospital over a large cyst on December 19, 2019, that's probably where I got it.
Anyways, from Wikipedia...
"The World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020, and a pandemic on 11 March 2020."
By then I had already got it and had already recovered. When I finally heard about it on the news, I was like 'well ain't that fucking cute, a day late and a dollar short'
Live in the US. I saw the news covering it in 2019 and showing footage of people passing out in China. China was the one downplaying it to the world back then.