asking because I genuinely wanna know:
have any of y’all been incredibly sick between October 2019 and, say, early March 2020? like, unprecedented illness? have you compared your symptoms to COVID-19?
not to self diagnose. to get clarity.

sharing some of these tweets because I think it’s important to discuss how long COVID-19 has been impacting ppl; reports are gonna be inaccurate (for various reasons) for a while. how do we take care of each other assuming many of us have already been sick?

it’s not exactly difficult to figure out whether you’ve had the symptoms; we should also be clear about the symptoms that aren’t as commonly discussed. there have been reports of reinfection, right? we don’t know all the strains either.

IMO, hyperfocusing on the data makes it easy to catastrophize the circumstances. the data makes every person around you someone to *fear*. if they get sick and you don’t, how does that fear guide your thinking? what happens when everyone is reacting to fear?

I’m not at all trying to be alarmist. I detest the fear mongering and misinformation to which we’ve already been subjected. I want folks to know that the data helps somewhat, but that the sample size is extremely limited. remember the doctors who first rang the alarm.

consider the point at which you started counting/ paying closer attention. no one person or institution has the full scope of this. we gotta think beyond what we’re being told if we are gonna have the slightest chance to come out of this mess. we’ve already lost folks.

what happens if we function on the clear fact that we’ve been left mostly to fend for ourselves and our communities, as always?