Summary
Mask blocs have been a crucial pillar of mutual aid in communities around the globe, as community members undertake the work of public health organizations to keep each other safe. This week, oral histories from mask bloc organizers are interspersed with some context from journalist and author Britta Shoot, who put together a three-part series collaging said oral histories. Also in this episode: the latest COVID-19 numbers, and the National Institute of Health officially seeks input on its RECOVER-Treating Long COVID initiative.
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Still Here is an abridged version of The Sick Times’ newsletter, which publishes weekly.
Mentioned in this episode (in order of appearance):
- The Sick Times: “A good step”: Long COVID advocates and researchers respond to the RECOVER-Treating Long COVID meeting
- The Sick Times: National COVID-19 trends, October 29
- CDC wastewater dashboard
- Biobot wastewater risk reports
- WastewaterSCAN dashboard
- NIH: Submit ideas for therapeutics and biologics via the RECOVER-TLC Intervention Information Request Form
- NIH: Share interest to serve on a RECOVER-TLC working group
- NIH: Submit biomarkers for Long COVID
- NIH: Submit general feedback on RECOVER-TLC
- U.S. free COVID tests: COVID-19 Testing
- The Sick Times: A brief, oral history of mask blocs: Part 1
- The Sick Times: A brief, oral history of mask blocs: Part 2
- The Sick Times: A brief, oral history of mask blocs: Part 3
- The Sick Times: “Perfect storm” of criminalization: Analyzing mask bans
- The Sick Times: Mask bans and proposed bans by state
- COVID Action Map
Additional audio in this episode:
- Rude Mechanical Orchestra: Which Side Are You On? (orig. Florence Reece)
- Pixabay: Thunder and the beginning of rainfall
Your support helps The Sick Times continue to chronicle the ongoing Long COVID crisis.
Transcript
Intro (0:00)
[Instrumental snippet of theme song, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s rendition of “Which Side Are You On?” begins playing.]
James Salanga: This is Still Here, a podcast from The Sick Times.
Miles Griffis: I’m Miles Griffis.
Betsy Ladyzhets: And I’m Betsy Ladyzhets.
[Instrumental ends]
Betsy: We’re the co-founders of The Sick Times.
James: And I’m James Salanga, Still Here’s producer.
Miles: Many public health authorities are ignoring the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Betsy: But here at The Sick Times, we’re not. So we’re bringing you the latest Long COVID news and commentary each week.
Miles: Without pandemic denial, minimizing, or gaslighting.
James: This podcast is an abridged version of our newsletter.
Betsy: And each week, we share the latest on Long COVID and COVID-19 levels in the United States.
James: Then we talk about one or two of the stories that have published on The Sick Times website this week. In this episode, we’ll have guest Britta Shoot, who will share a little bit about the mask bloc oral history project that she’s been working on now that we’ve had the last of the three-part series just published on the site.
And we’ll hear some of those oral histories from mask bloc organizers.
We’ve structured today’s episode similarly to the one from October 11th that honors Tinu Abayomi-Paul.
So basically, we’ll chat COVID-19 forecast first, research second, and save the rest of our episode for the top story.
Miles: In today’s research update, we’ll be talking about Recover TLC, who has now put out a request for information from the Long COVID community, as well as the scientific community, about the recent RECOVER-Treating Long COVID event, which we reported on last month.
James: Great! And now, let’s get to our COVID forecast.
[Sound of thunderclap and light rain]
COVID-19 forecast (1:31)
Betsy: COVID forecast! This week, we continue to be in kind of a moderate lull between surges.
So it’s been a few weeks since the summer surge kind of came down across most of the United States.
And we’re not really seeing an uptick yet, although many experts, public health officials and scientists expect that that will happen as we get into colder weather and into the holiday season. Less because of, I would say, natural behavior of the coronavirus and more because we know as the weather gets colder, people are gathering indoors, people are traveling, and they are these days largely doing so without masks, testing, or any other COVID precautions. So that just leads to an inevitable spike in cases in that kind of time of year.
So we’re not quite there yet. Both the wastewater data and hospitalization and testing information that we have continues to show declines and kind of moderate levels across most of the country.
There are some limited indicators that COVID spread could be starting to pick up a bit.
The CDC has a center that does modeling estimates state-by-state based on hospitalization data, and they estimate, basically, what is the current status of COVID spread across the country.
And for their most recent update, which came out last week, they did estimate that COVID cases are likely increasing in seven states and then either stable or declining in the rest of the U.S..
Those seven states are mostly across the Northeast, Midwest, those regions where it’s getting colder more.
Also important to kind of be aware that flu season is starting. So while COVID is still at kind of a declining status, mostly, flu cases are starting to pick up.
So we are kind of getting into that time of year where there are a lot of different viruses is going around, not just the coronavirus.
Miles: Yeah, and you can find out more about the way we develop our COVID trends on our website.
Betsy: One important update that I haven’t seen reported on too much in the news, but is, I think, good for our audience to know, is that the CDC, as of a few days ago, has officially recommended that seniors — so people over 65 — and also people who have compromised immune systems, for those folks, it is recommended to get a second updated COVID vaccine six months after your initial one.
So if you’re somebody who just got an updated COVID vaccine for the 2024-2025 season and you’re immunocompromised or you’re older, you will be eligible for another one in six months to kind of boost up your immune system again.
That’s a bit of good news.
James: And for U.S. folks, you can still get your four free rapid tests per household at covidtests.gov.
We’ve been sharing that every week, but in case that you haven’t gotten around to it, just a reminder that that form is still open.
And next, we’ll hear from Miles about a research update.
Research (4:32)
[Miles’ voice echoes the word “Research” accompanied with a horn sound excerpted from the theme song]
Miles: A quick announcement today about RECOVER-Treating Long COVID.
They’ve published their request for information.
They’re now seeking information on potential therapeutics for Long COVID, as well as interest in being involved in working groups. These include working groups for patients, caregivers, scientists, physicians, and more, as well as they’re looking for feedback on biomarkers to be used for Long COVID clinical trials. And finally, just general feedback on Recover-TLC.
Betsy: So the RECOVER-Treating Long COVID initiative, which is what the NIH is calling its current phase of the RECOVER program, kicked off with the meeting at the end of September, where they had a bunch of researchers and patient advocates and other representatives of the community presenting about different aspects of research and discussing potential clinical trials.
And so as now, like the next kind of phase for that initiative, they put out what is called a request for information, which is basically just like a formal way for a government agency to ask people to give it feedback on something.
It’s a bit different from asking for research proposals.
Formality-wise, it’s kind of in-between the [RECOVER-TLC kickoff] meeting and like a more formal grant proposal opportunity.
Miles: Yeah, it seems like it’s pretty directed towards, like, anyone, basically. So you can submit comments and feedback to RECOVER-TLC ongoing from today through February 1st, 2025 at midnight Eastern Standard Time.
So this gives the community a few months to offer feedback. I know we received so much feedback after publishing on the event from RECOVER-TLC.
If you have other things from that, this is a great place to include that feedback.
James: Yeah, and we’ll also put out another reminder on our podcast as the deadline approaches since it’s, you know, a number of months away.
That’s it for research.
So now, after a quick musical break, we’ll be joined by guest Britta Shoot, who’s a journalist and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. And we’ll be talking about the mask bloc oral histories that she collected and hearing from those same organizers.
[Instrumental segment of theme song plays]
Mask bloc oral histories (6:45)
The Sick Times: A brief, oral history of mask blocs (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)
James: While the government fails to urge preventative care against COVID — namely masking — grassroots autonomous groups have stepped in to provide masks to their communities.
They fit into a long line of mutual aid organizing. And many have coined themselves mask blocs after anarchist black blocs, who are themselves autonomous groups moving in unison to resist oppression.
The Sick Times has published a three-part series that highlights oral histories from mask bloc organizers over the past two months.
And today we’re joined by journalist and author, Britta Shoot, who worked on the series, to give some short bits of context to this ongoing work that she’s doing of collecting mask bloc oral histories.
Interspersed, you’ll hear from some of the voices that have been featured in each respective piece.
Welcome, Britta!
Britta Shoot: Hey, James. Thanks for having me. It’s really nice to be here with all of you.
James: Yeah, I’m glad you could join us! First, I wanted to make sure that folks have some context.
So you previously reported out a story about mask blocs for The Sick Times in March of this year.
Tell us a little bit more about how you learned about mask blocs and what prompted you to undertake this oral history project.
Britta: I joined my local mask bloc in San Francisco in middle to late 2023 after meeting other folks in our group at a protest. I’m part of several pandemic response groups, so this work occupies a lot of my energy, my brain, my life.
And reporting on it is just an extension of that.
I’m writing a book about HIV/AIDS activists engaged in protest and disruption starting in around 1984. That was before the formation of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
And part of my research relies on oral histories and interviews with activists, many of whom died pretty early in the AIDS pandemic. And so hearing about some of that work closer to the time that it happened is really different from retrospective interviews many years after the fact.
Our memories change, we forget things, a lot of specifics fall away. Documentation gets lost.
This is one reason that I wanted to talk to my fellow mask bloc organizers now, fairly early in the existence of COVID-19 pandemic-specific mask distribution groups.
Even in the last six months, there has been this real explosion of groups showing up of individuals, saying, “Hey, we’re doing this, I’m a single person. I started this up in my community, you can join me and you can come get some free masks from me.”
A lot of organizers in their oral histories that they shared, they’ve talked about how doing this is very much like a defiant hopeful act against pandemic apathy. They can’t afford to abandon caring for themselves and they don’t want to abandon caring for others. So, I just wanted people to know that was possible.
James: Yeah, absolutely.
And you mentioned that you began getting involved in mask bloc work in the San Francisco Bay Area.
San Francisco is a very particular place to be doing COVID organizing as opposed to maybe some of the other places that have faced mask bans even in California, such as LA.
And so I’m curious, how did you strive to encompass this geographically and demographically diverse range of organizers to ensure that you had a wide swath of different experiences organizing in different areas?
Britta: I’m really glad you asked that because I’ve lived in California for a long time and it’s my home, but I’m not originally from here. I’m originally from the Midwest. And I’m pretty mindful about how different it is to experience this pandemic where I live and where I work versus where a lot of my loved ones live and work.
The first thing is that a lot of people, a lot of mask bloc organizers reached out to me and so I was very happy to respond to them.
And proactively, in addition to that, I reached out to a few dozen mask blocs that I haven’t heard back from, a lot of them across the Midwest and the South.
A lot of mask bloc organizers are disabled, neurodiverse, queer and trans. Many have Long COVID and many blocs are also majority white.
So I was able to prioritize talking with several organizers of color so far.
There are several smaller groups in areas where it’s challenging to mask, you know, as opposed to, like, bigger, more liberal-ish cities.
James: Yeah, absolutely.
And I think this is something that gets touched on in a lot of the oral histories that were collaged together for the first part of the oral history series, which focuses on mask bloc origins and what mask bloc organizing means to respective organizers.
So in order, you’ll hear from Celeste from Charlotte Mask Bloc, Lily from Mask Up Pittsburgh, and an anonymous organizer from Fight COVID NOLA.
[Celeste from Charlotte Mask Bloc: I was actually doing mask distribution on my own, and then one of our other members, our founding member, sent out a message on, oh, I wanna say, COVID Meetups, something like that, just kind of broadly saying like, “There’s a mask bloc.”
And so I just immediately was excited because I was like, cool, I can do this with other people.]
[Lily from Mask Up Pittsburgh: So I’m sure this is something that a lot of disabled people can relate to in the pandemic — I was feeling really, really powerless.
And it kind of occurred to me after seeing some posts online and talking to some other kind of mutual aid folks that like, there actually is something I can do about this on, like, a really local level.
You know, I can’t change laws and I can’t like, you know, I have no interest in running for office or anything like that. But I can, like, directly help the people who are my neighbors.]
[Anonymous organizer from Fight COVID NOLA: We have a big tradition of mutual aid organizing in response to hurricanes here in New Orleans.
And it was all like DIY supply chains for, like — throughout South Louisiana [after Hurricane Katrina]. And, you know, to get people goods, there was a bunch of people in their cars, like driving across the state, driving in from out of town.
And I, I did some distribution there.
And that kind of thing inspires me about, how, like, when we are abandoned by institutions, when like, the normal ways society is organized, when that falls apart, we can fill that void, we can step up and meet our needs.
And sometimes what we create is better than what the institutions had to offer us.]
Miles: The second part of the Mask Block series focuses on resource distribution and allocation.
Britta, are there any common threads of advice or information that you’ve learned from talking to these different mask bloc organizers that could be helpful to folks, maybe starting a new one or looking to get involved with this mutual aid work?
Britta: Being in a mask bloc is not about just having masks or just getting masks. It’s about all this other stuff, it’s about connecting with other blocs. It’s about the logistics of your own bloc. So it’s about whether, you know, the logistics being delivery or if you mail masks, it’s about keeping personal information confidential from folks who request supplies.
And some blocs have a couple of different [mask] styles … that they can offer, and that really supports people who just cannot afford to keep trying to pay for this [mask try-ons] on their own.
A lot of the organizers I’ve talked to described how long they contemplated doing this before they actually did it, which is really interesting.
Overwhelmingly, people understand that this is a serious commitment that they’re making to people in their community, and they want to be reliable to people who offer supplies to.
Most organizers find that once they establish themselves, other people come and find them. There’s a really interesting range across groups in terms of whether a group has formal processes or [whether] a group is very decentralized and members work autonomously.
And a lot of organizers talk about the differences, sort of how they’ve structured their group. It has a lot to do with size.
Miles: Now you’ll hear slivers of experiences from the following organizers in order.
Lily from Mask Up Pittsburgh, an anonymous organizer with Bluff City Mask Bloc, Alex from Boston COVID Action, and Socks from Mask Bloc OKC.
[Lily from Mask Up Pittsburgh: It is so much just scrounging random stuff that clinics don’t want for some reason, but that are fine. It’s really random what people are getting rid of.
I wonder how many of these people who you [public health authorities] would be giving them to, that we’re just giving them to. You have the infrastructure, we don’t.
We’re just like four people in a trench coat.]
[Anonymous organizer from Bluff City Mask Bloc: I started compiling mask deals that people were sharing in other spaces into Twitter threads. I usually put at the top, “Hey, if none of these deals make getting masks accessible for you. Let me know, I can connect you to your nearest mask bloc.”
I’m not doing anything special. I am on the email lists of these retailers and I see their emails to me saying, like, “Oh, 40% off with this code.” And I check the code.
Some of the other ones that are more specific, like Fisher-Scientific randomly has certain masks are like on sale for really steep [discounts] — $22 for a case of 550 masks or something like that. — like, those ones, I understand people not seeing. But like, [I’m] trying to teach people how to do this on their own.]
[Alex from Boston COVID Action: We’ve delivered 14,185 rapid tests, of which the vast, vast, vast majority are from the [Boston] Public Health Commission. And that’s since January of this year.
It’s just like a large-scale version of what was happening on Northeastern’s campus, where they quite literally, this is at Northeastern, had a warehouse full of free tests that they were just sitting on. They had the funds or whatever to purchase them en masse, but they had none of the political will to say the word COVID anymore.]
[Socks from Mask Bloc OKC: We’re doing three masks per person for right now. Just because when you have a low stock, you want to help as much people as possible, and also, I guess, just leave room for people to ask later on.]
Betsy: The last part of the series looks at how mask blocs are organizing around mask bans and the criminalization of masks.
The Sick Times has also published an analysis of mask bans across the U.S. That was a piece by journalist Justine Barron that I highly recommend folks check out as well.
Justine also put together a list of mask bans that is a good resource if you want to learn more about local laws in your area.
Britta, since the piece we published this past week is the third [and last] of the series on the Sick Times, what are the next steps for you with this project and what are you looking forward to as you continue working on this?
Britta: I mean, I obviously have to start by saying that The Sick Times made it possible to conduct these initial interviews, which has been about two dozen so far.
I’m continuing to conduct interviews with organizers and I’m looking into some further research support to make it sustainable for me to continue to do this long-term.
I also hope the series helps highlight how tiny, itty-bitty mutual aid groups are doing extremely heavy lifting in regions of the U.S. where mask bans are being proposed and enacted.
Public space is already so restricted for those of us wanting to avoid COVID and other airborne diseases.
Government and public health officials have said that people can choose how to protect themselves, and it’s incoherent and violent to first individualize pandemic protections and then not allow individuals to use the few protections that we can personally access and control.
You know, we can’t force bus drivers to leave the windows open for ventilation, and we can’t convince librarians to turn on air purifiers, and most of the time we can’t even compel health care workers to protect us by masking, but we can all wear respirator masks like N95s.
Mask blocs will just continue to exist to support folks who want and need to mask to protect themselves and others.
Betsy: Yeah, I should mention also as another resource that folks can use, the COVID Action Map is a public resource that maps out a lot of the mask blocs as well as other COVID-related organizing groups. I believe it’s global, like across the U.S. and also some that are global.
Britta, if people want to get in touch with you to share their experience with mask bloc organizing or with any questions about this project, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Britta: They can go to maskblockhistory.org, and they can email me from there. I would love to talk to as many organizers as want to talk to me.
Betsy: We’ll close this out with snippets of oral histories from, in order, Celeste from Charlotte Mask Bloc [and] an anonymous organizer from Fight COVID NOLA.
[Celeste from Charlotte Mask Bloc: A lot of other people and other groups looked to us to be the spokespeople of anti-mask laws.
So us and Triangle Mask Block are the two mask blocs that are kind of public, have gone public in North Carolina.
And so between us, we both — Triangle Mask Bloc covered Instagram [awareness], we covered Twitter.
The one thing that makes me feel is that I’m very upset at people who are ostensibly allies and how they refuse to do even the most minimal performative allyship.
So just, like, I have no faith in other leftists at all. They’re just like, I find them to be weak and pathetic for not being willing to do such a small thing.]
[Anonymous organizer from Fight COVID NOLA: Another person I delivered masks [to], like, asked for a hug and was just like, “I don’t have anyone. No one cares anymore.”
I’m getting emotional now.
A big part of the work, too, is showing people that they’re not alone and that other people care and that we’re all being fucking gaslit by the government and it’s like, what you see is real.
I really appreciate everyone who takes masks from us. It’s not like us bestowing something upon y’all.
This work has had a big impact in my life just on my ability to navigate my community safely. I’m really grateful for it.]
Britta: Thank you for understanding the importance of what mask blocs are doing.
James: Yeah, thank you so much for your work.
Outro (21:19)
James: And on that note, that is all we have for you this week. You can stay up to date with The Sick Times’ newsletter and coverage at thesicktimes.org, where you can also find the links to all the stories and the studies that we have mentioned in the podcast.
[Instrumental theme song excerpt plays underneath the rest of the podcast]
Miles: We’ll continue reporting the information you need to better practice care.
Betsy: Solidarity with everyone still here.
James: This podcast and The Sick Times are supported by you. You can help us keep this work going by donating on our website.
Still Here is a production of The Sick Times, a nonprofit newsroom chronicling the ongoing Long COVID crisis.
Our theme song for this episode is the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s rendition of Which Side Are You On?, originally by Florence Reece. You also heard a snippet of cellist Joshua Roman’s song “Immunity.” I’m James Salanga and I produced this episode. Our engagement editor is Heather Hogan. Sophie Dimitriou designed the cover art for our podcast, and Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets are your co-hosts and The Sick Times’ co-founders.
Thanks for listening.
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