Something I’ve noticed: people apologize for getting sick with COVID-19. Or maybe they laugh nervously when they say their daughter brought it home from university, their embarrassment combined with anger and impatience at her carelessness, at least if she doesn’t get very sick, or someone else in the family doesn’t get very sick. When people do—and I’ve known people who have been very, very ill—there’s obviously terrible worry and sadness. But embarrassment still skulks around the sickroom, its shoulders hunched defensively, while impatience and exasperation burn away in the corner.

The virus as a social fail. People aren’t embarrassed by getting the flu or a cold. I suppose one reason we’re embarrassed by COVID is that for a couple of years now, we’ve known the protocols for avoiding it, wearing masks and distancing. The daughter who brought it home must have been stupid, piling into a bar with too many people. Going to a house party without wearing a mask. Really they’re mad at the daughter for being young and heedless. If we’re careful, we don’t get sick, that’s the underlying assumption. 

Yet I wonder if there’s something else going on. Most people who are middle class and above can keep away from contagion. They can often work from home, holding their meetings on zoom and banking their usual paycheques before driving to the supermarket. Maybe they can even work from the cottage, their kids well-equipped with laptops and wi-fi for distance learning, doing their classes and then jumping in the lake. I’m not saying it’s easy to work at home or educate kids during the pandemic, but being able to isolate makes it much less likely you’re going to catch the virus.

On the other hand, if you’re a working-class person, you tend to have to use public transport where too many people go unmasked. You work in a crowded factory, or as a service worker in contact with the miscellaneous public, and statistically speaking, you often live in crowded housing. An article on the Brookings Institute website looks at the figures. Class and COVID, it’s called, how the less affluent face double risks.

I was talking about this with a friend who’s Black, and she pointed out that the figures for racialized people with COVID are even higher. According to an article on the Johns Hopkins Medical Centre website, “In Chicago, where African Americans comprise a third of the city’s population, they account for half of those who have tested positive for the coronavirus, and almost three-quarters of COVID-19 deaths. 

“Likewise, in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, African Americans make up 70% of deaths due to the coronavirus, but just 26% of the county’s population. 

“These examples are not exceptional, and the trend is not limited to African Americans. (Hopkins epidemiologist Dr. Sherita) Golden says, “While much of the focus has been on African Americans disproportionately contracting and dying from COVID-19, other minority populations are also adversely affected, including Latinx/Hispanic and Native American communities.”

The reasons? Dr. Golden points to the fact that Black and brown people disproportionately work in essential fields, live in crowded housing and suffer from chronic health conditions, many of them exacerbated in the U.S. by lack of access to health care. In other words, they’re the working poor. 

So there are many ways in which COVID has become associated with class, and makes people feel embarrassed if they get sick. And by this I mean people from different classes, both middle class and working people, since I’ve heard all sorts of people apologize for their illnesses for a whole series of reasons, second-guessing themselves. Have they been careless? Stupid? Unlucky? Does it showcase the fact they’re working at low-wage jobs? That they’re poor?

I had the virus myself, and when I mention this, I’m always asked how I got it. I don’t remember anyone ever asking me how I got a cold. I’ve heard myself sound defensive when I’ve answered and I’ve told myself to stop that, but I can still remember what I used to say.

“Well, it was right at the start, at the end of February, 2020, before we knew anything about masks. I was playing hockey, and my defensive partner had what she thought was a bad cold. She’d picked it up from her parents, who’d got sick travelling. Anyway, we were sitting together in the dressing room as well as on the bench, and when I my throat got sore five days later, I thought, Well, I guess I picked up X’s cold. I got sick pretty quickly, and when I went to the clinic, the doctor on call said I had the flu. She prescribed a puffer for my breathlessness. Said it was my old asthma coming back. It couldn’t be COVID because there wasn’t enough of it in the city. But I didn’t get better, and when I went back to the clinic a week later, I found that my own doctor was just off two weeks on the COVID ward, and she asked me a series of questions, and said I had a classic case.”

“You’re the only person I know who’s had COVID,’” people said for a long time. Afterward, they would console me. “But we didn’t know back then. You didn’t know.” 

Now, with the anti-vaxx not-quite-truckers occupying central Ottawa, uniformly white and mainly working class, the stereotype is doubled down. It’s also doubly—trebly—unfair, since 90 per cent of truckers in Canada are responsible vaccinated people holding society together by doing their jobs. In fact, the Canadian Trucking Alliance denounced the so-called Freedom Convoy even before it arrived in Ottawa. As the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs has pointed out, the convoy is led by non-truckers, alt-right provocateurs and fascists trying to spread their message and raise funding for their noxious causes. Convoy leader and non-trucker Tamara Lich of the far-right Maverick Party—a one-time Yellow Jacket leader—is probably getting through to pockets of disaffected people, even though it’s obvious from social media that the majority of Canadians are disgusted by their behaviour. Most of us have no sympathy for a group waving swastika and Confederate flags, urinating on war memorials, defacing a statue of Terry Fox and throwing feces at passersby. 

Yet the unconscious association of working class/virus-prone people grows stronger, and COVID becomes even more a class-ridden disease. Despite the transmissibility of Omicron, people still apologize for getting sick, at least if they even mention it. I know people who’ve tried to hide illness in their family, and are shame-faced when news comes out. They remain embarrassed and angry, and if they’ve found a focus for their anger in the anti-vaxxers, that only doubles down on class divisions, which are growing so disastrously stark. 

I recently re-read a classic novella set during the last pandemic, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, by Katherine Anne Porter, and it gave me even more to think about. I learned when reading the novella in university that it was a heavily autobiographical work of fiction. Like her protagonist Miranda, Porter almost died of the flu in 1918, spending months in a Denver hospital. Re-reading the book got me interested in Porter, one of those writers well known in her time who has slowly disappeared from public consciousness. I decided to order her biography, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life. Written by the writer and former academic, Joan Givner, it has an updated introduction that stopped me in my tracks.

Givner writes that while autobiographical, the near-death experience Porter relates in Pale Horse, Pale Rider is more likely tied to the serious case of tuberculosis she suffered as a young woman than it is to her later case of the flu. As Givner tells it, Porter spent several years in a sanitorium during the First World War battling the disease.

 “The atmosphere inside the sanitorium resembled a charnel house, with the patients as conscious of death as if bones were stacked in the corners. The beds they occupied had already served as death-beds for former patients; sudden hemorrhages and swift removals heralded permanent disappearances of people who had been laughing moments before. It was life on the edge of an abyss and even those who survived might be treated as lepers when they returned to the world. The stigma of consumption was heightened by the fear that it was hereditary as well as highly contagious…”

And, Givner adds, “…new evidence convinces me that Porter substituted the more socially acceptable ‘flu’ for the devastating experience of the earlier years (with tuberculosis).”

So it happened then, too—a disease being considered socially unacceptable. “The stigma of consumption.” But how odd that the reaction to the pandemic was the opposite of what we’re seeing today. Maybe society in 1918 was less apt to look down on people with the flu since the virus was so immensely transmissible that it easily crossed class lines. And when you think about it, tuberculosis is still looked down on, certainly in Canada, since it tends to strike people living on the street. It’s a disease of homelessness. Illness as a metaphor of class. 

One time I stumbled on an anti-vaxxer march on the Danforth in Toronto. Coming out of the supermarket, my arms lengthening from the weight of my bags, I found the street closed for a smallish march of a couple of hundred people. With a few exceptions, they were white: an agglomeration of upper-middle-class-looking yoga mothers pushing strollers, youngish prankster types who seemed to be having a great time, unclassifiable silent older men and women and the occasional loud ragged religious type yelling about Jesus. I was struck by the smugness on everyone’s faces. They knew vaccines were wrong. I reached a guy straddling his bicycle at the intersection who was yelling at them, screaming, berating them, letting it all out. Pausing for breath, he told me he was a doctor just off shift in Emergency. “They’re making it worse, the fucking idiots.”

When I yelled too, one of the religious types came up to me and said in a cloying voice, “Jesus will protect you.”

“I had COVID,” I told him. “I guess Jesus doesn’t like me very much.”

The doctor laughed. The protester gave me a very nervous look and hurried away, as if I was catching. The non-Jesus-liked part of me, I mean. The devil inside me.

We’re pretty divided, aren’t we? The virus will eventually recede, but I don’t like thinking about the social divisions that it has doubled down, and what will happen next.