Vee Copeland, a disabled organizer and former policy analyst details their experience facing the lack of care in movement strategy around surviving the current administration
It has been a treacherous five years since the COVID pandemic began.
According to the World Health Organization, more than seven million people across the globe have died from COVID-19, with 1.2 million deceased in the United States alone. In the early days of COVID, major cities were brimming with the severely ill and deceased — it was impossible to hide the devastation. Morgues once overflowed, hospitals were at capacity, and families began to be broken apart by the loss of family members. COVID response was and continues to be used to aid in war and genocide, deteriorating already fragile healthcare infrastructures. However, after a short time, people began to yearn for a sense of normalcy. There was a deep desire to go back to a time before the devastation. But no matter how much people have tried to forget, five years later the numbers and testimonies of those most impacted tell a story that cannot be ignored.
The disparities in hospitalizations, long-lasting illness, and death caused by COVID-19 are unsurprising. Racially minoritized, trans, and disabled communities are disproportionately impacted physically, mentally, and economically by COVID-19 and the lack of adequate COVID response from the US government. Research has shown that Black people died from COVID at higher rates than white people, with Black children being found to have double the hospitalizations and 2.7 times the deaths of white children. Along with high rates of death and hospitalization, research has also shown that Indigenous communities had the highest rates of children who lost a caregiver to COVID. The story is similar for migrant communities. Sadly the disparities do not stop there. As a consequence of allowing COVID-19 to run rampant through our society, cases of long-term COVID have also increased, largely impacting minoritized communities who report missing more work due to illness and poorer health. According to Long COVID Justice, trans people have also had some of the highest rates of Long COVID. The impacts of COVID-19, and our response to it, are far from over.
I am one of the millions of people who never recovered from a minor COVID-19 infection. It has been 800 days since my feet last touched the ground and over 800 days since I’ve been vertical. It has been over 400 days since I’ve been able to speak more than one sentence out loud. Once a daily runner and public speaker, I now spend my time floating on top of foam mattresses and hospital gurneys. I would say COVID took these things from me, but I believe that it was our shared failures as humans that have taken the most.
Some days I am reminded of how it was in 2020. I can still hear the sound of pots and pans clanging in unison down the streets of Los Angeles where I live. People were in their backyards and on their balconies celebrating the fearless healthcare workers who were fighting to keep everyone safe. One morning in particular I remember waking up and seeing butterflies fluttering between the buildings surrounded by clean air, a sight I never thought I’d see in one of the most congested smog-infested cities in America. Although at the time we collectively felt fear, anxiety, and devastation, we also shared a sense of communal preservation. People were coming together with a shared goal of protecting others and we mirrored this in the streets.
In 2020, most protestors were required to wear masks. We carried around wagons full of PPE and COVID-19 tested before gathering. We were organizing to get people out of cages citing rampant COVID spread and compiling resource lists for the newly unemployed. Communities were creating and revitalizing methods of caring for one another. But slowly our grief, trauma, and otherwise individualistic tendencies began to trickle in. By 2023 the pandemic was glazed over by the Biden administration with a thin shiny translucent film made up of false promises and empty platitudes. Worse, apathy and cognitive dissonance became our communal coping mechanisms, and so the Biden administration ended the public health emergency without the major push-back it so desperately called for.
We the people were sold a narrative that things were better, that the economy would get better, and that our immune systems were working well enough to return to “normal”. We, the people, were sold out to ensure that this narrative prevailed. But we were not just lied to, our compliance and ability to spread this lie was essential to ensuring that it was both believable and executable. This buy-in-bought-out shift of 2022 and 2023 spurred the end of many beneficial and necessary changes that were implemented during the public health emergency. Although not required to stop, many health clinics reverted to in-person services only, revoking telehealth accommodations while also revoking masking and testing requirements. PCR testing centers closed and pharmacies began shrinking their testing capacities. People were required to return to work, or to continue their work in person without being provided adequate protection from the virus, increased sick leave, hazard pay, or disability benefits — all of which would be essential to reducing the spread of the virus. By 2024 the CDC shortened the COVID isolation guidance after already weaning PPE guidance for healthcare workers. Mask ban legislation continued to be introduced across the country. When we could have demanded permanent changes to policy and infrastructure we didn’t.
Our movement spaces en masse were not spared from this longing to “move forward”. Protests have more widely become unmasked spreader events. Folks have been convening meetings and gatherings without proper public health precautions. The exclusion of those who are ill, immune-compromised, or caring for others who are, continues to increase. Whereas some people quarantined for a year, others have been in their corners of the world for five years straight. Scholars whose careers are centered on liberation-for-all and medical professionals and researchers who make money from working on infectious diseases like COVID have decided to overlook the virus. Few classrooms, seminars, and conferences provide and require adequate air filtration, masking, and testing. The masses have tried to escape the grief around the devastation of COVID, albeit valid grief that is consequential to widespread government abandonment, by choosing to forget. If we ever wondered what we’d do when our backs were against the wall, our collective response to COVID has given us a glimpse.
It’s important to acknowledge that for many, there was and is an expectation for the past and present administrations to protect their country from COVID and other threats to public health. Our government has allowed for mass death to continue. Additionally, it’s important to acknowledge the importance of community and our power to do what is necessary to protect each other. As a long hauler, I am lamenting over the heartbreak I have felt from friends, family, lovers, and comrades who so quickly decided COVID precautions were where they drew the line. We have let each other down by so easily opting to forget.
In a sense, COVID has served as a black light or even a microscope of sorts, surfacing that which we try to bury deep underneath our policies, institutions, and relationships. The fight to remember isn’t easy because when we remember, we also have to reckon with our shared failures. It’s much easier to hide underneath falsities and revisionist histories. It is much easier mentally to cope with a lie than it is to dig deep into the raw truth of our circumstances and the role we all play. We know this because we have witnessed this tactic of forgetting over and over, and we are experiencing it again with the book bans and “anti-woke” policies.
The act of forgetting has always been a tool of oppression. We cannot adequately resist that which has been revised, erased, or forgotten by our community members. But few will acknowledge that this is happening with COVID. Just as one may utter that “slavery was back then, get over it”, when we use verbiage like “post-pandemic” we are rendering oppression as a static past event rather than an ever-evolving present that shapes our shared future. This tactic has always been useful to those who wish to profit off of our suffering and the cycle will continue to repeat if we do not acknowledge and act on the truth of our current reality. If we do not reckon with our failures to each other around COVID and do the work to remedy it, are we better than those who try to ban our people’s histories’ from the schools? We aid in the crusade to forget every day when we do not consider the pandemic as both current and deadly.
It is difficult to admit that we cannot and should not have accepted going back to things as usual and that we each have had a critical part to play in the state of health of the collective. If we don’t mask up or take proper public health mitigations to reduce spread when we share space with others on transportation or at book talks, conferences, grocery stores, protests, appointments, classes, and family gatherings we are excluding and potentially harming others. We have made excuses and exceptions as to when and for whom we should take COVID seriously, and it has contributed to the perpetuation of harm. We cannot keep distancing ourselves from our failures or the reality of what it takes to survive systemic institutional abandonment if we hope to do better for each other.
Part of our struggle forward is ensuring that we are demanding proper mitigations for ourselves and our communities. Supporting local grassroots organizations that keep us safe, helping mask blocs, or starting our own spaces that ensure the protection of each other’s health and wellbeing remain vital parts of the fight towards true justice. COVID has shown us that our movement spaces intersect. For example, clean air organizers continue to ensure that we are advocating for clean air and better air filtration, health, and disability justice organizers continue to advocate for free COVID testing and masking requirements, and labor organizers continue to fight for better labor protections. At this five-year point, we have to remember how much our movements overlap and how strong we are together. We cannot do it alone. This means that we need to also show up for each other in the streets, protecting each other from illnesses like COVID and the flu when we’re out organizing in physical spaces and our day-to-day lives. We can begin to remedy our failures by expecting more from each other and remembering what this fight requires. If we are to make sustainable progress truly we have to refuse the lies of those who benefit from our misery.
COVID puts a spotlight on our movement vulnerabilities. It was and is a devastating virus with catastrophic consequences. COVID continues to spread and we have zero FDA-approved treatments and a crumbling federal public health infrastructure. The situation we’ve been placed in is detestable. Forgetting has not saved us then, is not saving us now, and will not save us in the future. We must remember each other and acknowledge our failures if we hope to ensure our collective survival. Remembering what COVID is and the damage it causes is crucial for anyone organizing around or working towards disability justice, racial justice, LGBTQ+ justice, migrant justice, and liberation. As we fight for our rights and the rights of others across the world, we have to acknowledge how we may be contributing to debilitation. Fighting for abolition is deeply relational and we fail each other by not seeing each other and ourselves as worthy of protecting in all aspects. So as a seasoned long-hauler and now permanently bed-bound organizer, I dare you to remember what and who we are fighting for in year five of COVID.
