In anticipation of the possibility that I’ll end up having to endure weekly COVID tests, I’ve been exploring the possibilities. I staunchly refuse to let them penetrate my body against my will (with a needle or anything else) but beyond that am still considering options.
To give you the full picture of how stupid this mandate is, I need to explain my usual life.
I live alone. My apartment is a segmented portion of a house, but no part of my space is shared. I have my own entrance, bathroom, kitchen, and everything else. Occasionally, I see one of the landlords outside working in their yard and wave on my way to or from a run or the mailbox, but that’s rare.
I work from home. I have never been, to the best of my knowledge, within two hours of anyone else who works for my company. They had to add my state to the computer system when they hired me so they could properly figure my state taxes.
I have my groceries delivered. Waving to the instacart shopper as they drive away after stacking my groceries on my doorstep is the closest I come to shopping.
I occasionally go to the post office to send a gift to a friend in another state. I live in a very rural part of New England where the tiny post office is open less than thirty hours a week. The one person who works there is behind two sheets of plexiglass, vaxxed, and double masked. I have natural immunity.
Except for my doctor, dentist, and therapist, I have been in close proximity to another human being one time since the pandemic began. Even that was ideal for not catching COVID — a friend and I had lunch outside. Two hugs, one each at the beginning and end of this outing, were the sum total of my non-medical human interaction since we all learned how to spell COVID.
Presently, I see my therapist three times a week. He sees one patient at a time, so I am never around another person in the waiting area. His chair is more than six feet away from the couch, and he never touches me. He and I both have natural immunity—me after having and recovering from COVID, him after having an asymptomatic infection that resulted in sky-high antibodies.
In order to comply with Biden’s authoritarian dictate that I must either have my body nonconsensually penetrated with his preference for my healthcare choice or be tested each week, here is how my life would change:
Each and every week, I would have to do one of two things.
1) Drive to a doctor’s office, which would involve:
— filling my car up more often than its present six times a year, so I’ll be in a gas station line around other customers, and interacting with the clerk.
—interacting with the office staff to check in.
—waiting in an indoor waiting room with patients who may or may not be contagious with various illnesses.
—having a nurse come close enough to weigh, fever-check, and COVID-test me.
—interacting with the office staff again to check out and make my next appointment.
2) Test myself at home, which would involve:
—the same amount of driving, so ditto the gas station bit above.
—waiting in line at UPS around other patrons.
—interacting with the staff to pay to send my test in.
The test from home option is thus far limited — Amazon allows the purchase of only two tests per patron. I am hopeful I will eventually be able to buy more, but for now it seems to be a hard limit, not a “two tests per month” standard or whatever.
Even at the bare minimums of 1 gas station clerk, 0 other people in line, a conservative estimate of perhaps just 2 or 3 other people in the waiting room (in New England, in winter—yeah, right) 1 office staff member at the doctor’s office to check in and check out, and 1 nurse that’s an exposure to at least 5-7 people per doctor’s office test, likely more. For the UPS option, as long as it may last, it creates the minimum of 2 people, the clerk and the manager on duty, and that’s if I happen to arrive when there are no other patrons. (I used that UPS drop-off regularly before the pandemic, and it was always busy.)
Either option involves increasing my exposure to other people massively (one might even say (colloquially), exponentially). From being around 1 person in a typical week to a minimum of 3 for the UPS option (which thus far appears to have a hard limit of two weeks) to the more likely option: a weekly trip to the doctor’s office to be around 5-7 people, minimum, each and every week in a New England winter.
Ask yourself: if you were creating a mandate and your goal was to increase the level of sickness as much as humanly possible, could you do a better job than the Biden administration is doing now? I doubt that I could. I suppose one could mandate that Americans with fevers over 100 have to knock on a minimum number of doors and shake hands with all residents. It would take something like that to out-do them for sheer competence at creating the opposite scenario of that which they claim for a goal.
Short of that, it’d be hard to outdo them for sheer effectiveness at crafting a plan for causing sickness to spread as rapidly and widely as possible.
Friends, we live in clown world. Truly, we are governed by authoritarian fools.