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

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"

my friends were out one day and heard someone behind them telling her husband "did you hear about those people who were forced to wear masks at Disney and then died?", like there were people who believed thousands of people were putting on masks and dying. and yet she said it not as someone with genuine concern but more like "lol, they wore a mask and died, they're stupid, unlike me, the non-mask wearer"

every step of this pandemic has also revealed the widespread innumeracy of the general population

reconsider ever getting into a car again, it's probably more risky

I can guarantee you that there has never been a year where deaths from automobile accidents in the USA reached half a million.

How many other adults are yall eesponsible for exactly

I think a big factor was the "It makes me look like a timid sheep" aspect.

xp ~39,000 deaths per year in the US according to this site, so yeah, not comparable to Covid.

Annualized per century tho

Sure, but what if the century is 2019-2118?

thread's becoming an Adam McKay film

So they moved up the dates in WI, now everyone with a BMI over 25 will be eligible for vaccination starting on Monday.

Wow!

(ok there's a list of medical conditions, but that's the one that makes it 'why not just say everyone')

The small minority of Wisconsinites with a BMI under 25 will be eligible for free cheese curds

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

?? I don't remember these folks but this is true? I've carried a little dispenser for a year, and was using it after touching any public surfaces for the first few months (when surface transmission hadn't been ruled so unlikely, and I was still more apt to touch my mask). I still use public countertop dispensers when they're around, as much as a signal of consideration toward retail staff as anything. but hand sanitiser when you re-enter a domicile is not necessary if you wash your hands properly.

(the last time we had humans visit, when it looked like socialising would be happening in people's homes for 3 months instead of not at all for a year, I put out multiple dispensers and little takeaway ones. this weekend, my vaccinated household is having a vaccinated couple and their new kittens over, arriving by car, and I'll still put out one hand sanitiser out for general use. but soap works!)

I thought soap was more effective than hand sanitizer, which you're mainly supposed to use when soap isn't readily available?

I never use sanitizer at home. That's what soap is for -- to help us through it.

I use sanitizer at the office and in the car.

I mean "you don't NEED sanitizer" is true, but a lot of people were essentially suggesting it was useless because it's antibacterial and COVID-19 is a virus, but in lieu of soap and water, any hand sanitizer at least 60% alcohol can likely help clean your hands of virus.

I personally don't use it much because I prefer soap anyway and there aren't many moments where I don't have it handy or available. but I use it when it's my only option.

i had a few friends telling other friends "don't buy hand sanitizer, it won't work" as opposed to "hand sanitizer shouldn't be your primary, use it only when you don't have soap".

Great New Yorker article from 2013 worth a read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/04/hands-across-america

One reason that hand-washing-compliance rates among doctors and nurses have been scandalously low—in some cases, just twenty per cent of the recommended frequency—is that repeated washing with soap and water can be very hard on hands. A study in the nineteen-nineties showed that, after a group of nurses who washed primarily with soap and water began using Purell, their skin condition improved. Gojo recently conducted a test with nurses who used Purell Advanced a hundred times a day for a month. At the end of that period, their skin was in better condition than it had been at the start, and had high moisture content and less visible irritation. Arbogast said that hand rubs are also more efficient. “With soap and water, you lose time going to the sink, and you lose time drying and walking back from the sink,” he said. “But with a hand rub doctors and nurses can get some and then perform hand hygiene while they’re walking to the next patient.”

Gojo has never marketed Purell as an anti-soap; indeed, the company also sells some of the most widely used soaps in health care, food service, and other industries. But, starting in the nineteen-nineties, a number of studies demonstrated that alcohol hand rubs could be more effective than ordinary washing. In 2002, the C.D.C., after reviewing the accumulating science, rewrote its “Guideline for Hand Hygiene in Health-Care Settings.” The C.D.C.’s report concluded that alcohol-based products were “more effective for standard handwashing or hand antisepsis . . . than soap or antimicrobial soaps,” and that alcohol-based products were better at killing drug-resistant pathogens than even soaps and detergents containing powerful antibacterial agents. Seven years later, the World Health Organization issued similar guidelines, and said that alcohol rubs should now be considered the preferred cleaning agent for all medical workers, including surgeons, whose hands are not visibly soiled.

In 2005, the Army, in conjunction with Gojo, conducted a study of the efficacy of Purell outside health care. (The military is a rich source of subjects for such studies, because it consists of large cohorts of closely matched individuals who do what they’re told.) Historically, illness and infection have felled more soldiers than weapons have. The Army had already imposed a stringent hygiene protocol for new recruits, but illness-related absenteeism during boot camp remained high and was costly. Arbogast, who worked on the study, told me that the Army “didn’t want soldiers to get partway through the training and then get knocked out due to illness.” Gojo installed Purell wall dispensers in mess halls and other strategic locations, and designed a bottle that would fit in a uniform pocket, survive a parachute jump, blend in with camouflage, and not stand out when viewed with a night-vision scope. (It looks like a small green hand grenade.) After thirteen weeks, the Army found that two test battalions had experienced forty per cent less respiratory illness than the control group, forty-eight per cent less gastrointestinal illness, and forty-four per cent less lost training time. The military is now a significant Gojo customer. Michael Dolan, who is the company’s vice-president for science and technology, said, “It’s hard to go through boot camp today without being exposed to Purell.”

Of course, it's possible this is all outdated, especially in the context of covid.

I read that article with much interest at the time. I wash and sanitize pretty fastidiously, have since I was teaching in person while undergoing chemo and there was a mumps outbreak at my institution (2019).

I use antibiotics very sparingly because of the whole "creating antibiotic-resistant superbugs" thing, but I don't get judgy about individuals using sanitizers here and there.

I too don't get judgy about individuals doing something completely unrelated to antibiotics because of my opinions about antibiotics.

Sanitizer is effective against covid because the alcohol kills it, not because of any specifically antibacterial properties

Well of course, COVID's a virus

Pssh, there are a lot of people who make a good living going viral. I mean, come on, Tik Tok.

Got my injection yesterday, all good

So one of my closest friends, her brother and sister-in-law, and the sis-in-law's mom tested positive. Mild symptoms: lowgrade fever, slight cough, loss of taste.

Here's the rub: they suspect the sis-in-law's mom brought it -- and she got her second vaccine in late February. So even vaccinated ya gotta be careful.

This is atrociously bad. Maybe don’t take this advice from an economist. https://t.co/QaS9vXwL5v

— Ed MD (@notdred) March 19, 2021

xp Also possible she got the virus during that three-week period where it's not fully effective

Isn't it two weeks?

But you're right.

it's two based on everything i've ever read

Yeah, supposedly two weeks for immunity to kick in, which starting in late February more or less takes us to about ... now. Give or take.

mb, you're all right - 2 weeks

tf with that tweet

"naturally protected", yeeeeeeaaa that's not based in science at all. there have been plenty of kids who have gotten hospitalized for COVID, some have even died. sure, it's unlikely the latter will happen, but over 2 million children have had it, that's not "natural protection".

This was useful perspective:

https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/children-and-covid-19-state-level-data-report/

Imo, I think Oster has been relatively level-headed about this kind of acceptable risk management from the start of this. There may be no clinical basis to "naturally protected," but as she observes, "Being a child aged 5 to 17 is 99.9 percent protective against the risk of death and 98 percent .. against hospitalization." Which is on par with or better than the protections accorded by any vaccine. The question no one knows the answer to yet is why.

What about asymptomatic infection and transmission, though? There's evidence coming in that at least some of the vaccines protect against asymptomatic infections as well as symptomatic ones; do we have similar evidence about kids?

just to be clear 98% “protection” against hospitalisation means 1 in 50 kids will be hospitalised after becoming symptomatic? have i got that right? ya feelin lucky??

isn't the real concern less that kids will die from the Vid and more that "only 12% of the country is fully vaccinated, and they could get other adults sick if you take them on a trip"?

idk that I would like, blanket condemn a trip depending on what precautions were taken and how the travel was done, but.....y'know. I feel like saying "natural protection" suggests a settled science that I don't really think IS actually settled.

to wit: https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/11/30/archdischild-2020-320338

Whether children are also less often infected by SARS-CoV-2 is an ongoing debate. Large epidemiological studies suggest that children comprise only 1 to 2% of all SARS-CoV-2 cases.6–8 However, these numbers heavily depend on testing criteria and, in many reports, testing was done only in individuals who were symptomatic or required hospitalisation, which is less often the case for children. Some studies suggest that children are just as likely as adults to become infected with SARS-CoV-2.9 However, more recent studies report that children are less likely to get infected after contact with a SARS-CoV-2-positive individual.10–14 It has been suggested that children and adolescents have similar viral loads15 16 and may therefore be as likely to transmit SARS-CoV-2 as adults.17 18 In addition, the viral load may be similar in asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals.19–21 However, reassuringly, transmission in schools from children either to other children or to adults has been rare.22–24