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

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!

Great pic.

This morning, my daughter was complaining of a sore throat (pain in swallowing) yesterday and today. She thought it was strep.

So of course we're concerned; she was whisked straightaway to the Minute Clinic. Yep. Strep. I breathe a huge sigh of relief. Bacterial infection, whew. Treatable with antibiotics. Not. A. Virus.

Part of me is like, "how do you get strep when we've been distanced for five months?" Indeed, daughter is the most isolated of any of us. She's 13; she barely leaves her bedroom. She spends the vast majority of her time on TikTok and Discord. She sings showtunes and she reads. I occasionally catch a glimpse of her when she comes to the kitchen for food; sightings of her as rare as an albino deer.

My current (not very scientific) theory is that she may have picked up some germs that I brought in. I do most of the shopping, so it's possible that I inadvertently picked up a germ from the grocery store conveyer belt or whatever, then I touched a surface (like a counter or sink) that she subsequently touched. Nobody else has any symptoms.

So. Every surface in the house has been ruthlessly, professionally disinfected. But we may need to hold off on my son's in-person speech therapy session this week, and be more careful in general.

There was an article about that in the Times a little while back: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/parenting/virus-kids-sick-quarantine-infection.html

Thanks, Lily Dale.

I hasten to note that when I say "be more careful," I mean more careful than we were already being, which was and is pretty damn careful. It's not like we're going to bars or seeing friends or going to parties or concerts. We go for walks, and we obtain food. That's pretty much it.

I *think* strep is not only prevalent in lots of strains but is also both highly contagious and transmissible from those even without symptoms. I know that adults are much less likely to get it, but I assume an adult can get it, be asymptomatic and still pass it on to someone more susceptible. On the plus side, my MD mom always told me that for whatever reason syphilis and strep throat remain two of the few bacterial infections almost instantly treatable by antibiotics. That is, you often start to feel better after the first dose (though obviously need to take the whole course).

strep is a scary one for me bc i had a splenectomy (there's a thing called OPSI where strep kills you in like two days)

I had scarlet fever in 2010 and let me tell you, that was like strep on steroids and also with horrible itchy hives all over my body!

I went to urgent care and they not only gave me a round of antibiotics, they also shot antibiotics into my neck.

Two hours later, I had the first of three defenses of my master's thesis lol. It was insane.

Yeah I have no affection for bacterial infection, but I invite you to imagine my intense relief this morning that we didn't have something viral going on, and not even a suspicion of anything covid-related.

oh big time. There's a reason there's no rolling mostly apolitical thread for strep and scarlet fever

Totally get the feeling of fear and relief Puffin. Went through a similar scare last week with our son. He has non-allergic rhinitis, which has been diagnosed for several years now. It comes and goes seasonally and seems to present with slightly different symptoms with each new wave as he gets older. This time it showed up with a really raspy voice as a new symptom. Naturally our heads jumped to the worst fears, but we were very happy, to say the least, to learn it was just a new manifestation of that and nothing more serious.

Oh YMP, I wasn't trying to diminish yr daughter's illness and/or belittle your sense of relief! I was merely sharing, sorry if it came off as dismissive. I totally get yr sense of relief. I hope yr daughter feels better!!

totally cool, table. I didn't think anything of the sort.

Just to add to fun, my son slept much of the day, seemed a bit off, and then pointed to his throat. So I took him off for a strep test... which turned out negative. So who knows what the heck is going on.

“ The anonymous account, @Sciencing_Bi, was an active participant in the corner of Science Twitter that frequently discusses issues of sexual misconduct in the sciences. It claimed on at least one occasion to have grown up in Alabama, to have “fled the south because of their oppression of queer folk,” and to have attended Catholic school. The account began to pointedly make reference to being Native American and, earlier this year, began to identify as Hopi.”

... and that professor’s name? Luna

Lol

Good day!

went to the grocery store for the first time in almost 5 months (!!!) and it was nice to see pretty much everyone wearing masks, with the exception of the meat guy who took it off mid-order to tell me "these things are driving me crazy"

did see one group of women sans mask at the checkout and one of them was joking "oh be careful, I feel a scratch in my throat..." - fucking morons

my county is still relatively low but our July total is 3x all the other months combined. I probably shouldn't have gone but I find the more this goes on the more I start to get the attitude of "fuck it, it's been 5 months, there's no end in sight, I'm probably gonna get this anyway..." which obviously is not the best attitude to have when most states are still hitting high scores on the daily

in london i’d say it’s about 95% mask compliance in big shops and public transportation. what does my head in is that among EMPLOYEES in the big supermarkets it’s more like 20%. wtf? how can they mandate customers to wear masks but not their own employees??

increasing numbers of shop staff wearing clear plastic face protectors which do v little

went to my pottery studio for the first time since March. Temperature taken, bags dropped off, hands sanitized, signed in for tracing, masks on while indoors. Maybe 12 people there. Subway not too bad either. Baby steps.

It seems so day to day around here. Went for a walk Wednesday evening and, of the maybe 30-40 people I saw, the only person I saw in a mask was a pizza delivery driver running up to a house. Otherwise, not a single mask.

But took a walk last night and didn't see a single person not wearing one. It's weird.