Prof. Dr. Bob Wachter, Deranged UCSF Dept. of Medicine Chair, explains what he is doing "Covid-wise" & why he masks in elevators but not restaurants in Day 1,371 of his Covid Chronicles

When we last encountered Prof. Dr. Wachter, whose blood estradiol levels must be several hundred times those of the average pre-menopausal female, he was recovering from a mild case of Covid that had escalated into a serious case of Covid after he took a shower, fainted and hit his head on a bin. The update came a mere six months after he’d penned the final instalment of his daily Twitter “Covid Chronicles,” where he informed posterity that he’d decided to resume indoor dining and dispense with masking during small social gatherings. He undertook a considerable risk, one for which his simplehuman trashcan paid the ultimate price.

Thereafter, Prof. Dr. Wachter went largely silent on matters Covidian, driving us to despair that we had lost this singular voice of virological prudence – whether to Long Covid, or brain damage, or testosterone injections, it was hard to know.

I am now happy to say that our fears were premature. Our Chronicler has lifted his heavy pen yet again, one suspects with nostalgia for days past, but surely also with no little trepidation, for the duties of the chronicler are considerable, the expectations of his public immense.

I can feel the ecstasy of future historians from here. No longer must they be deprived of knowing what Prof. Dr. Wachter was doing “Covid-wise” on the 18th day of December in the Year of Our Lord 2023.

Although Prof. Dr. Wachter is no longer a NoVid, he maintains a strategy of extremely complicated vigilance against that enduring scourge upon humanity known as SARS-CoV-2.

It is impossible to convey all the nuances of Prof. Dr. Wachter’s approach in a single blog post, but a brutally simplified outline goes like this: If a lot of people are in the hospital with Covid or there is a lot of Covid in everybody’s shit, Prof. Dr. Wachter will avoid indoor dining, unless he has been vaccinated or infected in the last ten weeks. In that case he will merely mask and feel bad about indoor dining. If it is the winter he will feel a little more bad about indoor dining than he might otherwise, “since Covid-fighting behaviors are also helpful against flu and RSV.” Prof. Dr. Wachter has been on Twitter since 2011, but for some reason I can’t find any pre-pandemic tweets on the necessity of avoiding restaurants during the winter because of influenza and RSV. I’m sure it is a problem with the search algorithm.

Right now, Prof. Dr. Wachter fears that the Covid shit levels and the Covid hospitalisation levels indicate a “moderate uptick in Covid over the past few months,” so he is “back to masking in crowded and poorly ventilated places” like “crowded stores, airplanes or trains; elevators; and theaters.” He will remain unmasked in restaurants and at holiday parties, because the virus is less dangerous there.

Please do not press the good Prof. Dr. Wachter on his logic, or ask him what is the difference between a crowded restaurant and a crowded elevator. Definitely do not ask him why we closed our safe restaurants during the dark days of the pandemic but kept all of our dangerous elevators ascending and descending through every infection peak. And whatever you do, don’t conclude that Prof. Dr. Wachter feels very painfully the idiocy of being the sole masktard in the company of friends and family, and therefore confines his face diapering to environments where he is not expected to interact with anybody. That would be far too uncharitable of you. You do not chair the UCSF Department of Medicine and you will never know the virological truths that our Chronicler knows.

For maximal clarity, Prof. Dr. Wachter provides this additional graphic, with a small photo of himself declaring “I’m here today,” and a blue arrow indicating precisely where he is at.

As you can see, Prof. Dr. Wachter is about a centimetre short of the red zone, where he will have to avoid burgers and soft drinks.

While Prof. Dr. Wachter will continue to jab himself against Covid indefinitely …

… he has decided that youngs may reasonably opt out of the vaccines, despite the fact that youngs also have hopes of “dropping the odds of Long Covid” with a regimen of perpetual vaccination.

Perhaps one day Prof. Dr. Wachter will bother to share with us the secret evidence in his possession showing that the vaccines do anything about Long Covid. Maybe if his public prevails upon him sufficiently, he will make that the subject of a future 25-tweet thread.

Prof. Dr. Wachter will of course continue to employ his three-tiered traffic light virus avoidance system “quite probably for years to come.”

Alas, there is trouble in the Covidian paradise, where Prof. Dr. Wachter’s wisdom has not evoked the universal acclaim it deserves. Many erstwhile fans suspect him, unjustly, of engaging in elaborate rationalisations to justify his penchant for fine dining.

I imagine that the tower of perpetual virus hypervigilance is a very difficult one to descend, particularly after one has gathered a Twitter following by shouting relentlessly from its highest reaches for 1,037 days in a row.