Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

Best wishes to you, Davey. My partner's family is on Oahu, so next time we go visit (in like 2022?), would be great to meet up, if that's something you'd desire.

Fingers crossed for you davey!

haven’t made a despairing post about masks in England for about 10 seconds so here’s one: we’re fully into harvest time now which is an insanely busy period for us and we have to hire a bunch of temps to help get the work done in time for the deadlines. We’ve spent the last 2 months working on how to do this safely, changing the setup of the labs and extending our opening hours so we have a morning and an evening crew who never come into contact with each other. We also bought a shitload of disposable masks.

At the last minute though they apparently chickened out (maybe taking cues from the govt) and have told the new staff “masks and gloves are available if you want to wear them” but not actually told them to wear one. The upshot is that I’m wearing a mask all day every day (I have an array of snazzy cotton ones) but I am literally the only fucker doing so. It isn’t really my call to make but I might insist people wear them in the room I’m running, I don’t think distance counts for much when you’re in the same lab for 6 hrs with air vents blowing currents all round the room (tbh I’m not sure even masks will prevent spread in these circs but they have to be better than nothing)

I think you should insist on it

hey blue light, yes, let's get a coffee or a beer or something... in a couple years lolol

Best, davey!

my oven stopped working the other day, thursday's the earliest I can get it repaired (zero confidence in doing it myself, especially since it's gas) and while it's obviously better to happen now than in april, it still sucks to be unable to cook during quarantine. technically I can use the burners but if it's a gas problem that seems risky

my oven stopped working in april; still haven't gotten it fixed because i haven't wanted people in my apt

(tbf i'm not much of a cook, particularly in summer)

yeah, not thrilled about having someone I don't know in the apartment, but I figure the amount of human contact involved in ordering takeout or delivery indefinitely would cancel that out

curiously, my gas bill has not gone down

teaching full-time was my dream job a few years ago (mostly because I thought it'd involve me going back into the office, but turns out, they wanted me to stay virtual). trying to do it during this pandemic is a nightmare, and I can't imagine trying to be a school teacher attempting to navigate makeshift ways to do it, with limited support. at least in my job, I've been doing it this way for years - and it's just the students that are having to adapt for the first time.

can't imagine relearning how to do things on the fly, with faculty and everybody yelling at you.

I'm no longer as worried at my job of layoffs for the time being only because at least in my dept, someone just quit, so we're already understaffed as it is and there are endless hire classes coming. Apparently 15-30% of the people we recently trained already quit, so we're well below staff (some of these folks may have been furloughed from other jobs that welcomed them back, so they left ours).

took an extra 401k withdrawal yesterday to prepay the taxes for next year, but gave my folks and my brother $500 each, just to give them as much ammo as possible for whatever's coming. still afraid of seeing frequent posts online of hospitalized friends or friends who are about to lose their homes, but I have to imagine it's inevitable. several people I know have had COVID, and friends or family of friends have died from it already.

to cosmically fix the temperature imbalance caused by my oven breaking down my window AC has now broken down

for this I can't even be like "well, at least it happened now and not in april!"

Sorry, katherine. It's brutal right now.

Our Indian neighbors just got back from a long family trip to Florida. They said they almost felt like the Floridians were trolling them, because they would be on a big empty beach, and yet someone would inevitably insist on strolling by within 6 feet of them. They also said both of their (well, his) parents are Fox News watchers, and in the last few months both got covid, yet each with very mild, negligible symptoms, which he said has only reinforced their belief that covid is nbd. Which ... who knows what the fuck is going on.

Addendum: he told me that his sister was with his parents, too, for a while, but she eventually told them they weren't taking it seriously enough and left with her family. This was a week or so before his parents both contracted covid, no doubt because ... they weren't taking it seriously enough.

I just left the 7/11 I complained about days earlier. there's still a big sign on the door requiring face masks, as tehre has been for a while, and this time, all customers had them on, and the employees too (no "under nose" wearers). my mood was improving, then a couple came in with nothing on. surprisingly, the employees actually yelled at them "guys...facemask!".

and one of the assholes snarkily says "can I just put my shirt over my face, will that be 'ok'?" I was on my way out but I wanted to trip the fucker

(I needed antacids at 11 pm)

17 U of Florida health system anesthesiologists test positive for COVID after going to a party.

Aren't anesthesiologists seen as the dumbasses of the medical world to start with?

my doctor friend was pretty much calling them exactly that on Monday

someone oughta put them out of their misery. anyone got a referral for a good oh fuck

put them to sleep

Surgeons are the purported dumbasses, from what I've heard. The anesthesiologists I've known have been OK.

Anesthesiologist is a great American word.

so I've actually been going to the office*, currently 3 days a week but I may increase it to 5. given my pretty much daily volunteer activities** which take me around the city, often via public transit, this really doesn't pose any additional risk to myself or others AFAICT. the office has a capacity of 110 normally, now reduced to 30, but I've never seen more than maybe 8 people here at any given time, usually hovering around 4, which makes the "population density" lower than it is in the actual house I take up the basement of. most of my co-workers are older suburbanites who have entire houses to play around in so it's no wonder they're almost all opting to WFH in perpetuity. meanwhile I have been monopolizing our massive boardrooms and cranking Spotify while I'm at it, and there's a shower here so I can go for a run on the path outside at "lunch". honestly it's pretty fucking nice, I wish you could all benefit from this insanity.

*for anyone who doesn't know I'm in Toronto; our last briefing said we'd had 58 new patients over the previous 48 hours which is imo pretty good for a city of ~3 million

**I've said this before and I'll say it again, if there is ANY capacity you can volunteer in throughout this, even if it doesn't involve leaving the house (eg phone line support, cooking, etc), I really can't recommend it highly enough. even if you think you don't have the energy or bandwidth or whatever, I find it becomes an energy source all its own.

I'm going in two days a week - as of last week. Only 5 hours a day too.

our relatively small county has gotten 100 new cases over the weekend. our total is only around 550 so that is a pretty big chunk. regardless, the school district decided yesterday to do that dumb hybrid plan, 2 days on, 3 days virtual. they said they'll leave the windows open. LOL, this is Wisconsin. good luck with that. my wife is most likely going to have to return to work in September. I have no idea what we're gonna do.

can COVID spread thru cheese?

Only Swiss, iirc.

Call me an alarmist if you like, but if you think the Cov' has been spreading like wildfire up to now, just you wait until school is back in session. Boy oh boy oh boy.

lol josh

Gouda, on the other hand…

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/vitamin-k-found-in-certain-cheeses-may-help-protect-against-covid-19-researchers-say-1.4983748

there's never been a better time to be a short canadian cheese eater

Vitamin K2 is also found in various hard and soft cheeses, including Gouda, Jarlsberg, and Munster.

Hmmm…

Slipknot, Gwar and The Residents chime in
https://www.spin.com/2020/07/the-masked-bands-survival-guide-to-your-new-masked-life/

GWAR have re-released Slumdogs of the Universe and the date it's coming out got delayed due to COVID. their email on the matter was actually quite funny.

“It’s hard to convince the government you’re an essential worker when what you do is stand onstage and play music and shoot a bunch of blood everywhere and strangle people to death,” Blöthar says. “As much as I appreciate the vacation time, I would love to be able to throttle some humans. But no, they can’t even agree on things long enough to get their shit together and wear masks, so they don’t kill each other.”

“For one thing, people won’t really know what you look like, and that’s a great advantage, especially when you’re trying to commit armed robbery at your local convenience store,” Blöthar says. “The other thing, especially if you’re really ugly, which most humans are … at least you get to walk around and not be as ugly as you usually are. There’s a big plus to that. Another big plus is other people don’t have to look at your ugly mug. And their days are not ruined.”

GWAR’s frontman had but one bit of advice for those adapting to masking: “Just wear a mask. Just do it. Stop kicking and screaming about it. For GWAR, looking at all this stuff happen, it’s just reconfirmation that people need to wear masks so we can get out there and give you the well-deserved ass-kicking you all are in line for.”

The main thing is to find a mask that fits,” Taylor says. “I know a lot of people complain about it, like, hurting their ears and shit, but that’s because your mask is too small. Or your head’s too big. Whichever is the case, I’m not too sure."

DRINK BLEACH!!! Retweet so your so called friends know too! Another great PSA from JiZMak Da Gusha. #GWAR #DrinkBleach #Covid19 @JiZMakOfficial pic.twitter.com/Ijg9FEEr03

— GWAR (@gwar) April 29, 2020

Me, I'mma wait till we hear from this guy

http://www.themoviejerk.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Frank.jpg

6 days into the government making it mandatory to wear a face covering in shops and I've made my first trip to my local mini Tesco. Face coverings more necessary in smaller shops than larger you would think? Think again! Half the customers and none of the staff wearing face coverings. Not that much difference from a month ago.

I went to everyone's favorite, the Post Office, a couple of days ago, and one of the two workers behind the counter was not wearing a mask. She wasn't helping me, and I did not have the heart to scold her. The person she *was* helping was not wearing a mask, either. They were both the only ones in the post office that I saw sans mask.

I'm here in one of the worst hit areas of the US where masks are mandatory and just had a run-in with a militant anti-masker at the store here. It can be so unnerving.

I just never would have imagined that masks would become this much of a political firestorm. Obviously, yes, there would be dissenters and fringe idiots, but never to the centerstage like this. It's soul crushing, really. To know that just that simple fucking step, while not being able to solve this crisis, would have put us all in a much better position right now.

It really is the fight scene from "They Live," except on a huge scale.

this country was deeply broken before Trump came along but he's very much ushered in the era of "trust no one smarter than you"

We don't even have that excuse here, seems to be more people can't be arsed wearing them.

see also death cult

the only explanation for anything in the USA is that 40% or so of the population worships death

Just sitting here hoping that Trump starts riding hard for some Covid 'cure' that's legitimately toxic and that his flock will unquestioningly start guzzling down like a bottle of sarsaparilly.