The Plague Diaries: My own private lockdown
You know, living with AIDS in this country is like living in the twilight zone. Living with AIDS is like living through a war which is happening only for those people who happen to be in the trenches…And it's worse than a war, because during a war people are united in a shared experience. This war has not united us, it's divided us. It's separated those of us with AIDS and those of us who fight for people with AIDS from the rest of the population.
~Vito Russo, 1988
Four months into my new Covid-based heart problems, I went for a walk and had one drink of alcohol, and the next day was unable to stand up without my heart rate going up to 110 BPM, at one point exceeding 140. This phenomenon is called postural tachycardial syndrome, or POTS, and is pretty common for Long Covid sufferers. I’m writing this from a reclining position, and am not sure when I’ll get up again.
On the cusp of my new, possibly bed-bound life, I feel like I did when we were all preparing for the lockdowns in 2020. A sense of weird anticipation, a thought of how to spend this enforced downtime productively, all the films I should watch and writing projects I should complete, who might be persuaded to video call me, new hobbies to take up. Working out how to do activism when we can’t go and see anyone in real life. Except it’s not we, it’s me; society at large is uninterested in my predicament. To be fair, I think most people sympathise on some level; it’s just that they have other things to be getting on with.
I was part of this gently-indifferent cohort myself. Throughout 2021-2023, I still wore a surgical mask on buses and in shops, at work and occasionally in other crowded areas, but not constantly. And, as we all say, I needed to live my life, and wasn’t aware of how to do it without sacrificing too many things I cared about at the time. I occasionally felt bad about Long Covid and its victims, or for the immunocompromised people who have stayed indoors for 4 years now. I remember my nerves about government protections being dropped, my desire for something better. But I had other activist interests, other life crises to attend to. It faded into the background.
Now Covid is back with a vengeance, taking centre stage in my life. Since I’m back in personal lockdown, with extra immobility, I’ve been reappraising the New Zealand government’s response in 2020—and boy, were there some glaring flaws in it. I was aware of many around the time; shutting Māori out of key decision-making and planning, the extra powers given to police, the two-tier benefit system, the wage subsidy that turned out to be a huge upwards transfer of wealth. But by far the worst flaw, in hindsight, was the governmental refusal to admit to Covid being airborne, or to make any long-term preparations for how to deal with that.
If you think back to 2020 in Aotearoa, this image probably triggers some kind of Pavlovian response. Most of the country, it seemed, tuned in to the Jacinda and Ashley show, and often developed fervent parasocial relationships with them both (remember this shit?) which made it harder to critique their strategy. Scientists have known since around March 2020 that Covid is airborne; New Zealand journalist Gordon Campbell was making the argument for airborne transmission and hence masking by April 2020. Yet Bloomfield insisted on waiting for word from the CDC (an interesting choice to emulate the US health system, especially under Trump) and the WHO—and then ignored what they said. The disinformation from Ardern and Bloomfield has stuck in the public’s minds ever since; when asked about Covid precautions, most people usually still mention hand sanitiser and social distancing.
The government’s reliance on lockdowns is strange in retrospect. The first ones undoubtedly saved thousands of lives, but they weren’t sustainable forever. So where were the alternatives—did the Labour government and its Ministry of Health think Covid was just going to die out? If every country had done effective lockdowns, perhaps, but this was clearly a non-starter. Since we knew Covid was airborne, shouldn’t we have made plans to mitigate airborne transmission in the long term? During our long stretch without Covid, the government could have installed air purifiers in every home, workplace, school, hospital, vehicle, every indoor space possible. How many lives could we have saved? How many people like me would still be walking around?
Instead, the government pivoted towards more individualistic precautions—getting a vaccine and wearing a mask. I think it’s safe to say, in 2024, that vaccine and mask mandates were a punitive approach to Covid safety. Just because the worst people in the world used this to justify an attempted coup doesn’t negate it. Put it this way—if they weren’t punitive, people probably wouldn’t have now pivoted so far in the other direction. These days, we’re all afraid to ask each other to mask even while someone is coughing everywhere, and our event planning skirts around actual safety by tentatively saying “we encourage you to wear a mask if you feel the need to”. No one wants to be seen as forcing masks on people, even though masks are like a lifebelt in a storm at sea, partly because of that legacy.
Pro-vaxxers accepted a punitive approach at the time because we were all shit-scared of Omicron and didn’t know what else to do, especially when time was apparently of the essence. And again, anti-lockdown ringleaders were despicable people, so none of us wanted to accidentally sympathise with rich anti-vaxxers losing access to their yoga studios. As an ardent Convoy 2022 hater, I know that small business owners were the battering ram of pro-Covid fascism, and loathe how their demands are now common practice. However, if the government had installed air purifiers and normalised ventilation, we might have been able to sidestep punishment and maintain a pretty high level of disease protection. The anti-vaxx goons would piss and moan about any good public health decision, but at least their breath would infect fewer people. In hindsight, the mandates now seem like the government’s way of covering its arse.
It's time for our communities to make plans for the public health emergency we have, not the one we wish we had. For event organisers to stop setting their watch by Ministry of Health propaganda, to stop making vague pleas to “stay home if you’re sick” and have the courage to say “masks required and provided”. We’re used to thinking of Covid disinformation as a sprawling Telegram rant about ivermectin, not NACT-led inquiries headed up by the epidemiologist who told everyone to relax in 2022. But, wildly, real Covid information in 2024 is most easily accessed through Facebook and Reddit groups full of anxious nerds; Long Covid sufferers sharing what remedies have helped them, and Covid cautious people teaching everyone about air purifiers and how to mask. These people are not infallible, but they’re at least committed to trying to follow expert advice. And while I lie in bed and contemplate my place in the universe, they’re the only people I know who are down in the trenches with me.
Anne Campbell is a writer and activist.