Alleged 'Sick Hoax' COVID-19 Death Roils Arizona State University
Jacquelyn Gill was angry. First, she heard that an academic she knew online had perished at the hands of the raging coronavirus pandemic. Then things got weird.
“I went from thinking a Twitter friend and colleague died of COVID after being forced by her institution to teach, to doubting she had existed in the first place,” Gill, a University of Maine climate scientist, told The Daily Beast.
Gill was referring to the mysterious Twitter account known as @Sciencing_Bi, which was created in 2016, had a flower for an avatar image, and had about 6,000 followers before it went private over the weekend. The account holder posted from the perspective of an outspoken bisexual anthropologist at Arizona State University who came from a Hopi Native American background. Her tweets, varyingly about racism and sexism and other discrimination that marginalized people in academia confront, became all the more urgent when they began to document the experience of being sick with COVID-19.
“This COVID fucker is relentless. It feels like my skin [is] on fire. I mostly sleep and sweat,” @Sciencing_Bi, wrote, adding, “The dreams are the worst things. Incredibly vivid terrible images and I can’t force myself awake. I was hoping to be in the mild symptom group.”
On Friday, former Vanderbilt University Assistant Professor of Neurology BethAnn McLaughlin tweeted, “Sad to report @Sciencing_Bi died from COVID this evening.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-the-sick-hoax-coronavirus-death-roiling-arizona-state-university
= new reply since forum marked as read
was just a leeetle over the top 