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

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.

There was a guy asking for money outside of Walgreens today. He was super jittery, relatively scabby and unmasked. Then I saw him go *inside,* without his mask on, and I thought, ugh, gross. And *then* he was in line in front of me, but ... he was standing on his proper socially distant spot and had put his mask on! Granted, he still wiggled a lot and kept scratching himself, but he was following the rules and in fact when he left, even gave himself a little squirt of hand sanitizer from the counter. So, good for you, scratchy jittery guy. If you can do it, everyone should be able to do it.

so in most of the cities I'm reading about in this thread y'all don't have mandatory mask ordinances?

We do have one, but my walks are all outside so the way our ordinance is written basically implies that if you can stay socially distant while enjoying outdoor activity, you don't need to wear one.

masks mandatory indoors and on public transit in toronto. I spotted a mask and sanitizer vending machine at one of the subway stations - cool idea but I wish many more masks were being distributed free

Mandatory here. And, almost universally, followed.

A couple months ago, I saw a guy in a liquor store who had apparently forgotten his mask, and dealt with it by pulling the collar of his t-shirt up over his nose and he looked so embarrassed and guilty about it that I had a hard time being mad at him.

I like that one of our wine/craft beer spots set up cans/bottles of everything in the window so you can still browse, then call when you see what you want and they roll it out on a cart with a Square reader. Simple, yet really great idea.

What still baffles me: epicenter Miami-Dade County, beholden to a mask ordinance since late March, has seen its cases explode, as you all know (they have slowly leveled off in the last week, though). Why and where? I doubt indoor seating at normal restaurants (i.e. not clubs) contributed much. I know about several secondhand cases of house parties and such, and my friend's mom who died, my friend learned, because she wasn't taking mask wearing seriously. I'm thinking it's, as usual, the poorest and brownest among us: the people who clean hotel rooms, menial custodial work sweeping strip malls, chauffeurs, county drivers and garbage men, etc.

Our mandatory mask order started two days ago, now that our state has the highest positivity rate in the country. Tonight is my 1st bar shift since it went into effect, I'm sure it will be comedy gold.

Mandatory in shops - but certainly not being followed by everyone and especially not by staff (as Tracer pointed out). Also mandatory on public transport, I'm walking everywhere myself but I keep seeing buses go by with plenty of unmasked people on them.

Mandatory in all shops, and very much enforced.

Now, right outside of those shops is a different story.

Mandatory in shops and other public closed spaces (including public transportation obviously) here in Paris. Soon to be mandatory outside as well in places where people congregate (as determined by the city). Compliance is high.

The area outside my home has embraced masks head on. I'm proud.

5 miles east tho.... it's Thunderdome

the vilest Cuban American Trump voter is masked like Tutankhamun.

Mandatory here, plus we have 8pm curfew and only allowed out once a day for exercise and once a day for shopping. Nonessential businesses are now closed.

Feeling taunted by the dickheads building a couple of houses on the corner. (Permitted as long as no more than 5 people on site). Not a mask to be seen, even for activities where you should be wearing a mask for non-Covid purposes (eg. Cutting timber and plasterboard)

Mask compliance is pretty much 100% otherwise.

I've started seeing more people skirt the rule when they know a store isn't going to do anything. A woman walking around the grocery store with her mask around her chin Facetiming someone, etc..

Two acts that should get you sent to a gulag imo

Masks appear to be like seatbelts. You should definitely wear a seatbelt or mask, but they can only do so much if you drive like a maniac or are in a country with fundamentally broken government at all levels, distrust of expertise, limited healthcare, and you refuse to pay people to stay home.

I went out of town for three weeks (to a wild and more lawless area with a minuscule number of cases and a whole lotta right wing assholes) and nobody was wearing masks outside but most were in the few places I went into. A favorite restaurant was doing carry out only and all the people waiting outside were masked but one, a totally archetypical “Karen” was not - until she realized that every single other person was a sheepishly pulled one out of her purse. Peer pressure about this is interesting and felt kind of promising.

Back home now and mask use by people outside has dramatically increased since I left. The university campus where we spend a lot of time biking and Pokémon hunting now requires them inside or out and compliance seemed pretty high, and the downtown development authority is going to require them at all times within their defined area starting Monday.

Everything just continues to get worse and worse and worse and worse. There is never good news or hope. I'm so tired of feeling so overwhelmed by constant anxiety and stress. I hate this.