Eureka! COVID Is Here To Stay

You are protecting civil liberties by continuing to be cautious, not harming them.

This is a rewrite of an article originally published May 2020.

Anyone can and will have a eureka moment. I postulate that most every human being on this planet experiences at least one eureka moment in their lifetime. It’s not just a science or math thing. It can happen in the face of every problem, every struggle. It is a feeling of elation, relief, and consolation you get from understanding something that you have struggled to grapple with for a long time. Eureka is an interjection that exists intellectually, intuitively, and introspectively.

Even understanding social responsibility can become an eureka moment, and America needs one right now as it gets back to work. Here is an anecdote.

I grew up in suburban Minneapolis in the 1990s pretty much wanting for nothing. My parents love my brother and myself dearly and our family stays close. There was always a means for us to pull through. We are a privileged white middle-class family. Socioeconomic status is, however, not always a reliable indicator of health, comfort, or happiness. There are so many variables in this world. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.

I was born premature; about eight weeks earlier than predicted. That in itself is not generally a big deal. Modern medicine contributes to much improved survival rates in neonatal care. Although we Americans have a morally dubious health insurance system even after the advancement of the incremental Affordable Care Act of 2010, hospitals are obligated by law to serve first, and hand you the (outrageous) bill afterward.

I was lucky that my mother had good health insurance through working directly for the Federal government. I was going to need that insurance to continue to live.

Originally diagnosed with the more common congenital heart defect known as Tetralogy of Fallot (of Olympic Gold-medalist Shaun White fame), I was re-diagnosed in my adult life with Double Outlet Right Ventricle. The two conditions are similar enough in nature but less routine to manage in the DORV case. I had five open-heart operations by age 8. I received a sixth at age 20. I will need a valve replacement sometime within the next decade, or whenever the current prosthetic begins to wear out. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in the hospital as a kid, and continue to spend lots of time in the clinic as an adult millennial in her thirties.

Thanks to that Federal plan (which to this day is generally much better than any plan you can buy) and my parents’ tender loving care, I had a generous endowment of world-class cardiovascular surgeons, doctors, and physical therapists. I survived a tough thing. That should have been the end of it.

But beginning at age 9, sometime after my fifth cardiac surgery, I underwent a routine pediatric tonsillectomy that gave way to a condition known as PANDAS, or Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections. Basically, strep bacteria attacked my brain, and something snapped. It’s a scary thing for the parents of any child to experience. Their child changes drastically, practically overnight. I was diagnosed with severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder shortly thereafter and began varied early forms of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. To this day, I still see a therapist.

Now, what does this have to do with COVID and masking?

As a result of PANDAS, for most of my life, I was deathly scared of inadvertently hurting other people. Generally this took the form of excessively washing my hands, body, clothes, and other hyper-cleanliness traits we glibly associate with OCD. There didn’t seem to be a logical pattern for this behavior. It mostly manifested as a little incessant voice in my head saying that I needed to do these things or something bad would happen to myself or other people. It was a very abstract but also very destructive quirk. CBT and medication would help, but I reached the apex of my struggle in my late teenage years. Only in my late-20s did I begin to make some level of progress towards management. I’m glad that my OCD condition was under control when COVID hit, because lockdown may have easily led to psychosis and suicide. Indeed, there were news stories circulating of OCD sufferers feeling like the pandemic proved they were right all along, reinforcing their doubts, and creating rarely told personal misery that persists to this day.

It really sucks to be psychoanalyzed. It feels even worse to go through it several times with multiple different therapists and psychiatrists. You feel like a test subject, a lab rat. You feel that you are somehow less than human. You feel that you are not a whole and complete person. You shrug off any suggestion that you could be reduced to some Freudian or Pavlovian bullshit. You are primed to be dismissive as therapist after therapist ricochet unhelpful guidance off of you. Seldomly is a suggestion made that makes you think and more rarely do you come to accept a psychoanalytic diagnosis or theory.

My own eureka came when I was seeing a student therapist while studying at the University of Minnesota some time around 2012. Had I kept track, she would perhaps have been the twentieth-or-so therapist I had ever had the (dis)pleasure of meeting. It would have been easy to be dismissive of her insights or opinions. After all, she was just a student, herself. But she had real intuition. What she said on just our second session together was extraordinary.

She asked me, calmly, “what if most of your fears of contamination stem from being surrounded by doctors and nurses in protective garb [PPE] throughout your childhood?”

It was conjecture I had heard before. I nodded in response.

“Yes, protecting themselves from me.”

“No,” she answered. “Protecting you from them.”

The proverbial light switch flipped. Eureka. I had been studying semiotics at university. But I never thought to apply this sort of dialectical analysis to myself.

I am a fan of the satirical Law of Jante (Janteslagen). It was developed as a way of explaining the social conformity and self-depreciating attitude stereotypical among Scandinavians. Like all satire, it is pure fiction, but plays with a hint of truth. Its ten laws contain witty social axioms such as:

“You’re not to think you are anything special.”

“You’re not to think you are more important than we are.”

“You’re not to think anyone cares about you.”

In brief, why should I care about you, if you don’t care about me? What if everyone else acted like an egotistical jerk? What if our society was even more of a free-for-all than it already is? Why should your liberties count for more than mine?

Maybe we should care about each other a bit more.

Masks are a two-way protective measure. They are not for your benefit alone. They are for the safety of everyone. In a surgical setting, doctors and nurses don ridiculous-looking apparel and wash their hands for as long as 5–10 minutes, not unlike a stereotypical OCD sufferer like myself. This isn’t so much to protect themselves from something the patient may have contracted, but to keep themselves from transmitting their own microbiomes to the patient, particularly where open wounds are involved.

Masks are important when there is an outbreak of disease with a high transmission rate. We were lucky that the initial strains of COVID-19 had a lower R0, or reproduction factor. The original strains of coronavirus had an R0 of 1.5–3.5, meaning that for every person infected, it spread to between 1.5 and 3.5 other people. (Okay, 1 to 5, because you shouldn’t cut people in half.) Right now, with all its mutations, it has a median R0 of 5.7. This seems to indicate it’s probably prudent to continue masking, at least in interior public spaces.

Demands to “take off that mask and return to the office” are missing the point. Such insistence is puts convenience above responsibility. It infringes on the most basic civil liberty: the pursuit of life and health. Those of us that still wear masks aren’t being ridiculous. We do it for ourselves, and for others. We continue masking to lower the volume of disease we all may be exposed to, and we do it to protect the immunocompromised.

All the things we learned to do during the course of the pandemic are not risk aversion. They’re risk mitigation. We seem to have forgotten we still exist in an active pandemic that has killed well over 6,100,000 around the world, approaching 1,000,000 in the United States alone. To continue to practice good hygiene is a social responsibility on par with getting vaccinated.

I had to chew on that gift of insight from the student therapist for a while. I still wash up more often than the average person. But my hands are no longer chapped and bleeding from a hundred washes per day. A couple of good washes are all I need. The overall end result of my eureka was a significant reduction in life-long OCD symptoms. I never got to properly thank the student therapist who thoughtfully and compassionately gifted me with her analysis.

While not giving up being cautious, I stopped blaming myself for doing my best. But importantly: I did not stop trying my best.

I got my vaccines and boosters. I wear a mask when I’ll be inside close to other people. It is not a political statement. It is a statement of reality. The Law of Jante mitigates the tragedy of the commons with humility. Being mindful of others is good enough. It is not conformity; it is duty.

By wearing a mask in public, getting your shots, and following social distancing guidelines, you do not succumb to government tyranny. In pissing off your boss, you show social responsibility. You communicate that you are mindful of the health and safety of others. You potentially save lives. You show humility, love, and decency.

We could use more decency these days. That’s the eureka moment we need.