Lady Gaga was on stage with Covid. Have we learned nothing from the pandemic? | Arwa Mahdawi

SDo you have to go to work if you are ill with a contagious virus? Lady Gaga has spoken and the answer seems to be: “sure, why not?” During a recent Q&A for an HBO concert special based on her 2022 Chromatica Ball tour, the pop star was asked to reveal something she had never shared before. In response, she said she had played five shows by now sick with Covid. Honestly, it probably would have been wise never to share that little morsel, and it’s a little unsettling to share it casually now. But instead of seeming alarmed by this information, the audience watched the question-and-answer session seemed to cheer and applauded as Lady Gaga grinned.

To be fair, Lady Gaga is not a monster (although she… are fans – they call themselves ‘Little Monsters’): she made it clear that she had thought a bit about the ethics of spit out infectious droplets to a closed space. The singer said she shared her Covid diagnosis with everyone on her team at the time and told them they didn’t have to work if it made them uncomfortable. As for the concertgoers? “The way I saw it is that the fans are putting themselves in danger every day when they come to the show,” she reasoned.

These revelations have generated mixed reactions on social media. Some Gaga fans marveled at her work ethic and physical stamina. (And morals aside, the fact that she was able to perform with Covid is impressive; I could barely wash my face.) Others called the pop star selfish and wildly irresponsible. Someone even claimed in a viral but baseless tweet that their aunt died of Covid after going to a Lady Gaga concert. “We wouldn’t have gone if we knew Gaga had Covid,” the person wrote.

As Lady Gaga noted, there is clearly an automatic risk associated with attending a stadium show full of 50,000 screaming fans. Chances are, some of them will probably be Covid positive. Does the fact that the headliner definitely has Covid add significantly to that risk? I’m obviously not qualified to provide a statistical analysis, but I am qualified to say, “Dude, that was a mess.”

I mean, we all remember that Covid killed at the very least three million people and left millions more with a debilitating long Covid, right? I know many of us have pushed the pandemic out of our minds, but we do understand that Covid has not gone away. And in 2022, when Gaga performed while Covid-positive, the worst days of the pandemic were still a raw memory. Although most people had been vaccinated, many people mourned loved ones who had died from the virus. It feels disrespectful to her not to let her fans make an informed decision about attending her shows. Have we learned nothing from the pandemic?

Unfortunately, the answer to that question appears to be: “No.” There was a brief moment, in 2020, when I was naive enough to think the world could emerge from the pandemic in a better place. Maybe, I thought, we would all reassess what was truly valuable. And for a while, that seemed to be the case when it came to hustle culture. For an extended period of time, there was a lot of talk about how Covid had started a “quiet shutdown” trend and pushed everyone to move away from toxic productivity.

But capitalism is becoming capitalism, and it feels like we’re back to the bad old days of rise-and-grind culture, where your inner worth is measured by your output. You can see it in Kim Kardashian’s viral advice that tells women, “get up and work”. You can see it in the weird platform that LinkedIn has become, where with every post now someone is building their personal brand with a 5,000-word piece of productivity porn. (The intro to a recent, scandalous example: “I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend. Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales.”) And you can see it in the cheers Lady Gaga got when she admitted that she sang while she was ill. It seems we are firmly back in a world where working while sick and knowingly endangering others is not only tolerated, but celebrated.