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

not going to wait until this time next year to live my life

best of luck

maybe vaccines will be given away through game shows, and you land on a space and you either get a shot of COVID vaccine or drain cleaner depending on which space you land on

xp just stay away from me, seriously

kinda pissed to learn i've been a total sucker, avoiding grocery stores, avoiding shit.. just fuck everything, man.

fuck off

"live your life", congratulations

does killfile remove the poster's name and also all the posts responding to them? also, fuck everything!

"kinda pissed to learn i've been a total sucker, avoiding grocery stores, avoiding shit"

I've been doing that too! I was just responding to Aimless's post about things being better next year. I don't want to wait that long

I don't want to wait that long

you won't have to wait that long, unless I'm mistaken and you live in a country that is near the back of the line for vaccines.

fwiw I had a really good talk with my friend that I bumped this about, the one who didn't want me walking into her house, and it turns out that her precautions predate COVID and are based on her auto-immune issues (which are super weird tbh, and rough). so now we understand each other and I will continue to bring her dinner every Friday.

UK govt just announced that under-50s will have to wait until May. it was going to be April. problems with supply apparently.

We spend a couple of hours outside every day walking/playing with the dog but we don’t go indoors anywhere at all. That’s just been the approach we’ve taken the whole time. Testimony about person x going to the grocery store a few times a week and never getting covid is not very persuasive to me; yeah, it’s not a huge risk if you and others are masked and distanced but it’s not a vanishingly small risk either and with my chronic autoimmune shit I choose not to take it (and I pay others to do so for me, which is kind of weird yes).
The conflation of “doesn’t go shopping” with “does not leave one’s home” is annoying to me and feels pejorative.

shopping is fine, I think. to me eating at restaurants/bars are far less excusable
i DO want to shame others for holiday get-togethers though, but ya know... it wouldn't be nice.

if outdoor seating at restaurants/bars is available and tables are properly separated 6 feet or more, masks required, I don't see the harm tbh.

indoor is the concern because places with shitty a/c units could wind up carrying aerosolized disease throughout the restaurant and of course your mask is down when you eat/drink

likewise if nobody eats there and it's not a chain that could weather the storm, given how the Trump admin allowed these businesses to completely falter last year, they'll close, so....it's a tough sitch

holiday get-togethers a much bigger problem as a) throwing a bunch of people into crowded airports and train stations, b) they arrive to visit friends/family they haven't seen in a while and probably nobody wears masks, they hug, kiss, are all in each others' space, and c) one family member is sick and now they're all sick.

i don't really believe in shame-reaction as a default because I don't presume to know what protocols were followed (did everybody get COVID tested, did they distance/mask, how many people were there), but people taking selfies of 20-25 some odd maskless people mushed up against each other can fuck off obv.

As someone who has traveled a lot (by car, staying outdoors, after testing & isolating, blah blah) for family reasons over the last year, I'm uncomfortable weighing in too much on this. Probably everyone thinks whatever they're doing is "safe." My boyfriend is deffo less careful than I am and he feels fine about it, and it gives me agita.

I don't post about it on soc meeds much though, bc people are inevitably going to have feelings about it. Lots of people haven't hugged their elderly parents in a year. They're not wrong to choose that. My parents were already somewhat compromised by their own choices, so I make my standards more cautious than theirs and at least I'm not adding any new factors into their situation. (They're vaccinated now and my mom literally asked someone to take his mask off yesterday so she could hear him better--jesus christ these people.)

agree, with social media I've tended to not post what I'm up to or doing if I'm out and about, for the reasons implied.

i've been less on social media in general as it's turned into "I'm Doing COVID right, and you're not!"-book - definitely better for the mental health.

(frankly, though, I'm not really about tags anymore - even prior to COVID, if I want to tell the world where I am, I'll do it. don't do it for me unless you ask).

A thoughtful read

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/what-will-pandemic-nostalgia-feel-like/618304/

i've been less on social media in general as it's turned into "I'm Doing COVID right, and you're not!"-book - definitely better for the mental health.

― "Salvation Army FUCK!" (Neanderthal), Thursday, March 18, 2021 8:04 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i think i hit a certain point where i just didn't want my mind occupied by "oh my god fuck this person for [x]" thoughts and i am now on instagram as little as possible

the problem is that there IS a right and wrong way to have handled this and some of us are wrong and some of us are right and all of us THINK we're right but none of us can know until several years in the future at which point checking back in on this thread is going to be very yikes for most of us. but it is important that future yikes people understand that we didn't know! we couldn't know! smart people didn't know! dumb people didn't know! we were left to make it up as we went along and were constantly terrified! there was a complete idiot driving the car! we didn't know whether to buckle up or kick open the door and tuck and roll. most of us lost a year. be kind to us future people.

I don't see a scenario where I look back and regret doing volunteer work, going for a walk/jog, or buying essentials, aka the only things I've left the house for in a year

The RIGHT way to do this would be an aggressive top down approach at the federal level that shut everything down completely until the virus was at an extremely low level, followed by comprehensive contact tracing and more localized shut downs when needed. What we got instead was wishy washy language and a vague notion of individual choice leaving each of us responsible to try to sort out what the right/wrong things to do are when it is far too complex a question for any one person to completely grasp. So each of us has our own flawed personal approach and can be angry that everyone else isn't reading our minds and copying our behaviors.

xp you may regret not doing more! the future is a harsh territory

I personally would like the vaccine, please. Ideally delivered door-to-door from a truck playing Turkey in the Straw RZA's new ice cream truck song

forks 100% otm

my only other comment is that anyone otherwise healthy who is severely limiting their activities due to perceived risk might wanna reconsider ever getting into a car again, it's probably more risky. but yeah, we don't know.

Forks otm.

I am realizing, though, that I have a lot of residual anger from the very early days - February and March - when it felt like I was constantly trying desperately to tell people that this was A Thing and was getting nowhere. I'd say, "Hey, this virus is absolutely tearing through all these other countries and they're having to lock down; it's going to happen to us too, we should start preparing now." And I'd get, "I think we'll be fine." "Locking down seems exaggerated." "You shouldn't let fear stop you from living your life." And my favorite and by far the most frequent: "Oh, I don't think it'll do that here." And when I asked why they thought a virus would act differently in the US from the way it acted anywhere else, I'd get answers like, "Well, maybe people in those countries don't wash their hands as much as we do here." Really racist American exceptionalism bullshit. That was hard enough to deal with, but then the virus hit Seattle, and I was trying to tell my friends in other parts of the US that this was here, it was happening, it was probably in their town already, and it was like they couldn't hear me.

I guess I felt at the time like I was going to eventually get some acknowledgment from the people I'd spent so long trying to persuade, a "Hey, sorry about that, looks like you were right." And for the most part I didn't, and I won't, and that's frustrating to think about. And I know that's just the way people are, that most of the people I know are doing their best and have been for most of the pandemic, and that I need to be kind. For the most part I just don't think much about those early months. But the anger and the frustration is definitely still there somewhere.

The thing about all this I find wildest is what people accepted without a fight, and what people continue to push away. Hand sanitizer? Sure. Masks? Nah. Work from home? If you say no. Vaccines? Eh, you go first.

Right way or not, there was no way a total shutdown was ever going to work in the U.S. (and even then, essential workers, etc)

forks and Moodles both otm

I am realizing, though, that I have a lot of residual anger from the very early days - February and March - when it felt like I was constantly trying desperately to tell people that this was A Thing and was getting nowhere. I'd say, "Hey, this virus is absolutely tearing through all these other countries and they're having to lock down; it's going to happen to us too, we should start preparing now." And I'd get, "I think we'll be fine." "Locking down seems exaggerated." "You shouldn't let fear stop you from living your life." And my favorite and by far the most frequent: "Oh, I don't think it'll do that here."

oh yeah, I expended so much energy begging people to take it seriously. most all of my friends took it very serious from the jump, but one of my best friends started spouting Elon Musk theories one day and I said THE GUY HAS A BACHELOR'S IN SCIENCE DEGREE, HE'S NOT AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST, and he backed off and now doesn't believe him anymore.

xxposts remember the anti-hand sanitizer "you don't need that shit, just use soap" folks?

or "it's a virus, it won't work!"

I'm more surprised about the resistance to masks than to vaccines. It's stupidly easy to wear a mask if you have to go out and it has no obvious downside. If you truly have a health condition that makes it impossible (highly unlikely) then you shouldn't be out in the first place. The groundwork for vaccine resistance was already there with the anti-vaxxers.

I suppose a big part of it is that the messaging around masks was badly botched early on

yeah but like even then, the complaints defied logic.

"there's no proof it works" - ok, in the early stages, before studies were actually commissioned to measure the impact of masks on COVID transmission, at least I can understand this line of thought, but why does it hurt to try it?

"It's harmful and will kill you with CO2 poisoning" - yeah, just like the billions of doctors, surgeons, and nurses who have kicked it due to wearing surgical masks.

"You're more likely to get sick" - yeah, if you lick or eat your mask, sure. besides, where's the evidence, what happened to "there's no proof?"

"It's uncomfortable" - so are boxer briefs and fedoras.

no, you're right, there was never any logic behind it, and there's even less now when it's clearly acknowledged to be one of the best safety measure you can take around other people

I mean i hate wearing masks but like....really, that's the inconvenience that's going to be point of no return for people?

"we deserve the right to spread the disease to whomever we want!"

"You're more likely to get sick" - yeah, if you lick or eat your mask, sure.

you would think this is ludicrous but remember: people are dumm

i like my mask with syrup and butter

I use masks instead of oranges in my Negronis.

People are also stubbornly contrarian, especially Americans. If they wanted them to wear masks they should have told them they weren't allowed to wear masks.

if Ted Nugent wore a mask, you would have seen 100+ million MAGAs with NUGE masks.

I always assumed that *was* a mask.

I suppose a big part of it is that the messaging around masks was badly botched early on

A lot of that was down to WHO iirc? I mean, the same think happened in the UK.

Or else doubts over the efficacy of wearing masks was used in the UK to cover up the fact government had done next to no pandemic planning - would be more accurate maybe.

"I reused my kn95 as a coffee filter b/c 'green' and then I got Covid so masks don't work"