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

my hometown in Australia now has the highest # of cases outside of Melbourne for the state of victoria & it’s scaring the fuck out of me

most of my family are there!
they are being super careful & my parents are quarantining hardcore & have been before this blew up but still, it just so horrible

even in years past when i was at my most homesick it has never felt this awful to be so far from home

had someone come into my shop without a mask because they have, direct quote, "a touch of that OCPD, that breathing thing"

in Glasgow it feels like everything has gone back to normal except 80% of people are wearing masks. People are out in groups, just about everything is open, nobody seems interested in staying a metre away from each other.

“Daniel A. Biederman, executive director of the Bryant Park Business Improvement District, said that for the sake of the neighborhood’s very identity, Midtown executives who fled the city to work remotely should feel a moral purpose to come back as soon as safely possible.

“They’ve almost made the unpatriotic decision for Midtown Manhattan,” he said.“


Unpatriotic!!!!

Alex in NYC and I both used to work in that building. Touch of nostalgia for the grandeur of going to work through that lobby and all the ways to spend my little money in the underground concourse (the flower stand was the most alluring).

sorry VG, may your family continue their hardcore ways

the “identity” of Bryant Park? give me one (1) break

okay starting to get very nervous about September. not only is school starting but my wife is likely to be forced back into the office. my kids are 5 and 3 and cases are rapidly accelerating in my town. if we send the boy to kindergarten then we have to send the girl to day care, and since we're friends with some of the day care teachers we know that they have been all over the place and are going to large gatherings. they already had one outbreak there, nobody got seriously ill luckily. we don't really have anyone who can come to help. everyone works or has kids of their own. neither one of us can really quit right now. there's just no good answer here. I know many of you are in the same situation or worse. If we knew this would only go until November or December I think we could just scrap through it but who fucking knows. schools are about to open and in 10 weeks it'll be too cold here to really hang outside.

:( yeah man, can't blame you for being freaked out by all that. it's hard when you have no idea how long of a ride you're in for and the government is doing next to nothing to help.

my dumbass brother can't come to town and socialize because his work/state would make him quarantine for two weeks after going back - overjoyed, because I was going to have to kill him if he gave my mom the 'rona.

frogbs, that is awful, i am sorry.

if anyone ever asks what is cruel and unnecessary in USA’s handling of this crisis, this story is why i want to fight.

stay well. xp.

I go back in to work on Monday. My job is usually pretty physical but I'm still recovering from a broken leg. Rather than go in to work and sit around on a computer I convinced them to let me sit around on a computer at home. But I can walk unassisted now and I've done everything I can do from here. At one point I felt like Houston was on the verge of closing, but Abbott's not going to let it happen.

Can't imagine what it's going to feel like to be back at work after being gone for almost 6 months.

found myself filled with more anger than i have in ages this morning, not sure why its happening now but its almost enough for me to write off the rest of the workday. hard to be ‘apolitical’ here. distraught at just about everything and that we have to share a nation with, i would argue, the worst people on earth

that feeling doesn't need a specific trigger. hence my meltdown in the outbreak thread the other day.

it's exhausting and there's no end in sight and sometimes your brain hits critical mass with that shit and you can't move forward.

it's awful :(

Fauci hearing about schools reopening is on.
& GOP have already chosen their talking points, maybe did so back in may.

BUt I think that's the same mask Fauci was wearing on the baseball card isn't it?

the story about Kushner pulling back on a testing plan because they thought this would only affect blue states is, even for this administration, insane. every one of these people ought to be charged with attempted murder

oh wait this is the apolitical thread.

call your reps and tell them that

"hi Senator Scott, this is the apolitical thread"

my rep is Glenn Grothman, I'm sure he'll understand

hello senator I'd like to report 300 million attempted murders do you have a pen handy

the kushner article may have pushed me over the edge

Trump finally gets his Iraq

yeah, this really needs to not be a story nobody remembers by Monday. it's gotta be hammered.

Good luck with that, not a week has gone by during this disaster of an administration without something historic and horrible coming to light. And most of those things were forgotten or overshadowed days later. I just read on Wikipedia that Trump was impeached. When did *that* happen!?

be nice if someone in the hearing today read the news during the short recess and then started introducing questions about it when they resume.

obv Fauci can't answer them but....y'know, getting them out in the open.

"what do you think of reports that Jared Kushner scrapped a national plan because he was ok with Democrats dying and blaming their governors?"

"Huge, if true"

"Thank you Dr Fauci"

that story came up a few minutes ago didn't it, not in so many words.
Dem guy brought it up

in the hearing? i haven't been able to watch, but good if he did

It's good that the Kushner thing gets publicized, but surely it was already obvious. Did we forget all those weeks of Trump wheeling and dealing with ventilators and PPE for favored and unfavored states?

There's a world of difference between long suspecting something and having it confirmed by someone on the inside

Just in: Trump says he doesn't know Kushner

I remember the PPE/ventilator wars and that was bad, but this is worse because it's about not providing testing kits and it aligns directly with Trump's "slow down the testing" narrative. PPE and ventilators are reactive needs for dealing with the virus as it spreads while testing kits would've cut down the spread of it significantly as we've seen in other countries.

Warren's already tweeted about it. and if you do a twitter search for "Kushner" and "Hague", well let's just say, you get multiple hits.

Literally necropolitics (table otm).

On all fronts though, this administration refused to follow the in-place protocols and purchased their PPE, ventilators and tests through shady overseas business deals that eventually fell through.

couldn't think what the guy's name was buTti think Jamie Raskin brought up the Kushner thing. Certainly heard him talking about something Kushner was trying to do.

Yep, Mbembe is right. Worth reading his thoughts from spring on our current predicament, too. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/

We decided to go to the beach today, thinking that if we went early on a weekday it should be good. This was our first family adventure out of the house in months. It went well at first but as the morning went on more and more people kept coming. When some frat douche started setting up three feet from us is when we packed up and left. As we were driving out I could see people clustered together with not a mask in sight. Galveston.

I feel so much more at ease when I have to go to a shop since the mask mandate came down. Every state should do it immediately.

3ft is too close, but fwiw there are zero (0) recorded confirmed transmissions of covid at beaches worldwide. which is not to say it hasn't happened, but it being extremely rare is consistent with everything we know about how it works. there have been super-spreader events in public parks on the other hand (in china iirc).

I feel so much more at ease when I have to go to a shop since the mask mandate came down. Every state should do it immediately.

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, July 31, 2020 4:29 PM bookmarkflaglink

otm

Just going to post that "Shiny Happy People" came on autoplay on Youtube and I immediately burst into tears, so that's the kind of day I'm having.

Oh I always cry when I hear that song!! Totally feel u on that. I can’t listen to early 90s REM at all really :(

thats on a playlist i have called "impossible happiness", or it shd be if it isnt

We went to our first pop-up drive-in last night. Great experience! The cars are staggered/spaced, they projected onto a screen mounted on a stack of shipping containers. There were portapotties with a staffer wiping down the handles after each use. Here's one of my happy kids getting her ya-yas out before the movie:

https://imgur.com/a/McUqHyl

https://imgur.com/a/McUqHyl

Goddamit.

https://i.imgur.com/8GtCbz0.jpg

I like that!

posting images on ilx is confounding to me

hahaha, that's a great pic Josh!

Mad Max ish

i like it!