I’ve found myself muted for three years now, unable to say as much as I used to. It’s partly because of my health and partly because of the great silence around the secret pandemic: I feel like I’m living in a different reality to most people. The visible sign of this is the n95 mask I wear when I’m indoors in public – my protection and my stigma.

The acute effects of covid have been reduced by vaccines, so covid is no longer killing so many people quickly – although there were still 5000 known covid deaths in Australia in 2024. But the far bigger concern than the acute phase is the long-term effect. Covid impairs immunity, damages the heart, raises the risk of strokes and can cause cognitive decline. With every covid infection, there is also at least a 5% risk of long covid, ongoing symptoms which last longer than three months, including triggering serious conditions like ME/CFS and POTS. It’s been two years now since my last bout of covid and I am not better. These effects were observed early in the pandemic and have been clearly established by research but our governments are doing little to inform people about the ongoing risks. It’s out of the news and out of the minds of most, reduced to just another winter virus to watch out for. People don’t understand that covid is airborne. Workplaces have done nothing to improve air quality to reduce virus transmission. Many people are sicker than they used to be, catching more viruses because their immune systems have been weakened by covid.

What happened? The full story might emerge one day, but there was a concerted effort to return the world to ‘normal’ and ‘normal’ meant denying reality, not talking about covid any longer and certainly not taking any precautions. The Great Barrington Declaration sounds like a conspiracy theory. Free-market libertarians wrote a manifesto for covid denial and governments eventually embraced it. It is justified by pseudoscience (‘herd immunity’, ‘immunity debt’) and blaming everything which has gone wrong on lockdowns.

There was a widespread manipulation of public opinion via swarms of fake accounts on social media. It happened with climate change, Brexit, Trump and then covid. In early 2022, I went on a Facebook page for covid information in WA and asked if anyone knew of a barber who was wearing a mask or taking other covid precautions so I could get my son’s hair cut. This was meant to be a page for people wanting to avoid catching covid, but the comments were a torrent of mockery, ridiculing the idea of taking any precautions. The moderators removed the worst ones, but also removed my comment that claimed something sinister was going on. Why was a covid-safe page being swarmed by covid denialists? I haven’t gone back on Facebook much since that day. At the same time as my Facebook experience, any comments by politicians on social media were being met with a similar pile-on on by covid deniers and minimisers. A false impression was created of widespread public opposition to any precautions. On the spectrum between lockdowns and let-it-rip there are intermediate, moderate measures that could be used.

I have been thinking about writing this post for a couple of years, deluding myself that if I could write eloquently enough, marshal enough evidence, I could make a difference, contribute to a turning of the tide. I have let go of that idea, but I need to say something, to break the silence. So thanks for reading!