The stealth American press campaign to promote the New Miracle Vaccine 3.0, which will totally solve everything this time, continues apace. Not content to farm the project of terrorising the masses out to Wellesley undergrads interning for their online magazine, The Washington Post itself chimed in yesterday about the very grave and worrying testing situation:

The Biden administration stopped mailing test kits to households in June. The ones Americans stockpiled over the last year and a half are expiring. Major insurers no longer pay for over-the-counter tests once the requirement to do so ended with the emergency declaration.

As a result, those who still factor covid into their daily lives are weighing whether it’s worth roughly $12 to test for every sniffle and scratchy throat and every visit to grandma. The costs quickly add up for larger families and for people who’ve contracted covid intent on protecting others by following federal guidelines to test repeatedly to end isolation and masking.

The piece features various testimonials from virus losers bummed that the government and payers of insurance premiums are no longer funding their obsessive desire to screen themselves for one of various head colds currently in circulation.

Meet Mark Camenzind, who has totally lost his mind, and whose virus compulsions somehow warrant coverage in America’s second most prominent newspaper:

Some people, regardless of their personal risk level, want to know if symptoms indistinguishable from a cold or allergies are actually covid-related so they can avoid infecting the vulnerable.

In mid-July, Mark Camenzind tested positive using his last over-the-counter test in his stockpile after hanging out with a friend who contracted the virus. He had a vacation to the Pacific Northwest looming but wanted to test negative twice, 48 hours apart, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, before going maskless.

Happily Camenzind consulted his fellow online virus freaks and they helped him locate a precious free test, lurking unnoticed like Alberich’s Ring in the cabinets of a local apothecary:

After posting on a local Reddit forum, Camenzind found a pharmacy that conducted free tests on-site. He tested negative and bought his second test at Walmart.

“I think it’s important for the community to protect each other’s health. I’m pretty spooked by long covid, and I wouldn’t want to wish that on anyone,” said Camenzind, 25. Still, “I don’t want to end up at the point I want tests and it’s costing me hundreds of dollars.”

Camenzind believes Long Covid is super dangerous, and he believes constant testing will save him from Long Covid, but he also believes that paying for this life-saving testing is, well, a bit much to ask.

Later we hear from Susan Grammerstorf, “a 65-year-old nurse in Virginia Beach” who “started taking Paxlovid after she tested positive for covid in July.”

Determining her status after she came down with a dry cough and nausea upon returning from a cruise was not easy, she said.

She tested negative on at-home kits she got free from the government but did not trust the results because the kits had expired. She could no longer get free tests from Walgreens through her Medicare plan. Although she works remotely, she drove 45 minutes to the medical school where she is employed for a free test – and found out she was infected.

The experience left her frustrated and worried about the months ahead.

“All of those people who are walking around with covid are not testing. They are giving it to other people. Nobody is really paying attention,” Grammerstorf said. “It’s important to offer them free so people do the responsible thing.”

Libby Young, a 33-year-old nonprofit manager in New York, said she tests less frequently than she used to because she has to pay out-of-pocket. Money is tight because of medical expenses to treat long covid symptoms that leave her fatigued after exertion.

When she and her partner fell sick in July, they rationed tests they bought on Amazon. Her Google searches for free testing in her Hudson Valley community produced nothing.

“Having any additional health expenses, plus medication I take, it’s a huge burden,” Young said. “It’s cost-prohibitive and you often don’t test positive until day 3, 4 or 5.”

With people like this woman, is there anything left to say about the integrity of Long Covid as a diagnosis?

Kristin Riddick, a mom of three young children in Richmond, canceled a vacation in June after she and a son tested positive before their trip. The family decided not to test even when others became sick because of the costs and challenges of swabbing young children, but waited more than 10 days to return to work and day care.

“We have to be a little bit choosier about when we decide to test,” said Riddick, 32. “It’s just so hard to know when to pull them out and when not to, but we also don’t want to traumatize our kids by sticking things up their nose whenever.”

Note that these poor children have spent probably half of their lives, if not more, in this woman’s crazy compulsive Covid world. There is every chance they will grow up to be happy well-adjusted adults.

If you want to know what hell is like, have a look at the comment section. The top-rated contribution is an insane person having a conniption that nobody cares about Covid anymore:

Traveling this summer, it’s clear that most people no longer care if they get COVID or any other disease spread through the air. Everywhere we have gone, people are maskless. We still mask and are often the only ones doing so. We mask on planes, indoors where there are more than a very few people (3-4 in a wide open ventilated space) and/or poor ventilation. We don’t eat inside 95% of the time traveling. We see many people in crowded areas obviously sick, flushed, sweating, coughing openly. People don’t care if it’s COVID or flu or a cold. Because we are up to date in vaccinations, and mask nearly all the time and do not attend anything crowded indoors, we have not had COVID. … One mistake we have made is not masking in elevators at hotels.

Yes, this lunatic would like a cookie for allegedly avoiding infection via a hygiene regimen that is vastly worse than the illness any common respiratory virus could ever cause.

In an incident on a plane, a youngish man collapsed in the aisle. A doctor was called for. A young doctor attended, fully masked, in an N95 respirator. We saw him and his wife on the return trip as well. Both were masked. He identified himself as a physician from a major metro hospital.

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Lurking in his replies is a woman doing her level best to frustrate the social development of her young children by keeping them perpetually muzzled:

I have 2 kids under 10. They attended school this last year, masked. My preschooler who had to de-mask for lunch & naps, got sick every 3-6 weeks or so, fortunately not COVID. My older child got sick twice all year because she only de-mask[e]d for lunch. Masks work – colds, COVID, flu, etc. They went to school, Scouts, saw a show at the Kennedy Center, went to birthday parties. We lived life but wore masks inside in large groups of people. We function just fine.

Every time this woman’s kids get sick she has to trace it back to some masking lapse, which sounds like a completely normal and non-abusive approach to the sniffles of childhood.

It just goes on and on like this, the personal virus dramas of silly propagandised people, one after the other:

After I came home from a work trip in London at the end of June, I was unusually exhausted and feeling winded. Because I have a high-risk husband, I thought I should test. The test I had at home showed negative, but was expired. Not trusting that, I went looking for tests at Walgreens and CVS. I had to go to three places to find one, and they were sold in boxes of 2 for $24. Once I confirmed I was positive (and then, too late for Paxlovid, slammed by symptoms) I tested myself again every few days, buying new tests for the next 10 days (including one expired one from CVS that I was too sick to return).

Overall I spent over $100 just monitoring my status so I knew when I could stop isolating. Six weeks later I’m still dealing with fatigue and dizzy spells. This was my first ever positive encounter – I’m now hearing from others that they’re getting it for the 1st time too. It ain’t over.

As I’ve said many times, the pandemic response broke a lot of people. In twenty years they will still be masking, testing, and sheltering in place every time some distant relative gets a cold. They belong in asylums, and the people who did this to them belong in prison.