ahimsa
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
The Arctic Plague Ship That Disabled A Best Selling Author
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-arctic-plague-ship-that-disabled
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-arctic-plague-ship-that-disabled
¡Do Not Panic! said:Covid then was running rampant, a fact almost certainly unknown to many of the creatives when they stepped off the plane in Svalbard and onto the ship in Longyearbyen. With many of them having flown from the US, one of them (and most likely more than one), brought covid onto the ship.
The lack of any covid protocols and the absence of any pre-trip testing made this outcome a statistical inevitability.
“I feel immense anger and frustration with the Arctic Circle organisers,” says Isabel Kaplan, who I spoke to for this article. “It would been so easy for them to impose a negative test requirement to board.”
Of all the places that you could lock covid out of, a singular group of people on a ship sailing in the middle of the Arctic Ocean is surely one of the easiest. Almost comically easy. The flipside of that is that if you do get an outbreak in such a confined environment, it will spread hungrily.
Which is what happened.
By the end of the trip, Isabel says the ship doctor estimated more than half of the roughly one hundred passengers had contracted covid.
¡Do Not Panic! said:Isabel says she later found out that a trip participant tested positive for covid the day before the trip and was told by the organisers she was still welcome to come on the trip. This person made the decision not to come, but it underscores the dismissive and shamefully ignorant attitude towards covid displayed by the organisers and the ship doctor. (I twice contacted The Arctic Circle organisers but they failed to respond).
And now Isabel, who is 34 years old, has long covid. The disease has a vast array of presentations, and Isabel has the more serious version, her symptoms akin to those suffering from ME.
“I've been essentially house-bound for three months, bed-bound during my crashes,” she says. “For the past two months, I haven't even been able to walk my dog. I have POTS, fatigue, post-exertional malaise, and MCAS. The PEM is the worst. On my rare 'good' days, I can write, and that's when I feel most like myself. But when I'm in a crash or recovering from a crash, it feels like I'm running on low battery mode, and I don't have enough battery to fully power my brain. I know there are lots of people who can't watch TV or read or have terrible brain fog, and I feel very grateful that I can still do these things, though my ability to focus on what I'm reading and find pleasure in it is diminished. It's disorienting and upsetting to no longer be able to consistently engage in activities that are so central to my sense of self.”