The Arctic Plague Ship That Disabled A Best Selling Author (from ¡Do Not Panic!)

[ahimsa]

The Arctic Plague Ship That Disabled A Best Selling Author

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-arctic-plague-ship-that-disabled

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.

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.”

 

[shak8]

Yikes, this group of artists and the doctor needed to brush up on 21st century infection control measures...I mean how ignorant of the gravity of the virus can y'all be?

A failure of messaging from the governments, a failure of regulations (which people may not like but they are protective).

It takes a lot of work for virologists and infectious disease docs to get the data out there. Huge summer surge; long covid persists, Paxlovid works. Test, test, test. Isolate, masks.

Very sad.

We in the Western US have high wastewater levels currently of covid, RSV, noro virus, and seasonal influenza. I don't venture inside stores without a mask.

I bleach (one part bleach to 9 parts water) because of noro virus, any grocery product I buy and I wash my hands vigorously for a full minute after returning home---the first thing I do.

 

[rvallee]

Yikes, this group of artists and the doctor needed to brush up on 21st century infection control measures...I mean how ignorant of the gravity of the virus can y'all be?

A failure of messaging from the governments, a failure of regulations (which people may not like but they are protective).

It takes a lot of work for virologists and infectious disease docs to get the data out there. Huge summer surge; long covid persists, Paxlovid works. Test, test, test. Isolate, masks.

Very sad.

We in the Western US have high wastewater levels currently of covid, RSV, noro virus, and seasonal influenza. I don't venture inside stores without a mask.

I bleach (one part bleach to 9 parts water) because of noro virus, any grocery product I buy and I wash my hands vigorously for a full minute after returning home---the first thing I do.

Most physicians parrot the wrong ideas. They're trained to comply and those are the orders they get. The average person has no chance of being informed when most of the experts they hear from or ask directly tell them the wrong things.

And even when it comes to true experts, people specialized in this stuff, there's still a significant % who, for some reason, this makes sense to them and they are willing to go out and say it publicly. Again and again.

Hell, the worst of this group of ideologues are about to be in total control of US health policy and budget, and this will spill over to international institutions, although it's not as if they did much good here. The WHO was instrumental in dismissing airborne transmission, and even though they sometimes tell the truth, you have to really pay attention to know it because they say both versions.