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

The problem being, of course, that it's well and good to approach life in a way where you don't judge others, but a pandemic reveals the pitfalls. When you are forced, particularly by something like a job, to be in regular or semi-close contact with others, it becomes hard not to judge when those people are talking about the approaches and decisions that are, by your own individual metric, much less safe. It becomes difficult to not judge others in those times, and I don't think it's worthwhile to feel guilty for doing so.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, April 8, 2021 12:36 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sure, but the corollary to this is that, when under that kind of stress, it becomes all too easy to misdirect your judgment.

Oh absolutely, my point was more just to say that it's both a) easy to understand why people who normally don't judge others might find themselves doing so in a pandemic, and b) reasonable to not beat ourselves up or feel guilty for slips into moral judgment or despair during the largest health crisis of our lifetimes.

it also seems very easy to participate in meta-shaming of others, apparently

I do think one major source of crossed wires is the huge chasm of experience, exposure risk-wise, between urban and suburban or rural areas. when a lot of people talk about hanging outside they mean getting in their car alone and traveling to a relatively secluded park. when a lot of other people talk about hanging outside they mean coming into very close contact with hundreds of people just in the act of transit, then going to a park that is not secluded at all. two very different experiences.

can't read the whole thing but (like a lot of chapo-related detritus) i think menaker is reacting to a very specific type of person you run into mainly on twitter, not just people presenting some over-cautiousness. "I think a certain kind of person has gotten addicted to a new kind of self-righteousness that they’re not going to want to give up so easily" - i don't think there is a statistically significant number of these people, but they exist. there are people who will create moral ideologies out of anything and covid restrictions provide a lot of ammo for that.

i've been more careful than most people and i'm in little rush to get back to "normal" cause i'm a natural shut-in anyway, but i do get annoyed at the "we should have been masking before covid and we should keep masking after covid (because some people in japan did/will)" crowd. if you wanna do it fine, but judging others for loosening their own restrictions strikes me as desperately clinging to a newfound moral angle they aren't ready to give up. i guess i don't buy into "masks are inherently good regardless of ongoing public health crises"

but again these people probably aren't that prevalent, not enough to write a whole thing about as 99% of americans will surely be acting like 2019 in a few months. twitter as a platform just makes everyone talk louder and scoldier than they actually are

xpost Yeah, seriously.

The pandemic has made me extremely jealous of people who have a yard.

yeah I'm aware this is a urban vs suburban vs exurban divide. When I mean "outdoors," I mean "someone's yard."

I appreciated a take recently about improving ventilation and HVAC systems...the point was, PPE is for when you CAN'T control or adjust the environment...but moving air and/or filtration is far and away the most protective thing we can do for shared spaces. I'm very grateful that the slight gamble we took last year, that outdoors was virtually low or no risk, has turned out to be accurate.

on the other hand it is not a great look, especially right now, to talk about how something that, pre-covid, was an asian cultural norm is insane or wrong

Of course you could end up waiting a long time

Australia yesterday cancelled their target of everyone getting a first jab by 2022.

I don't have any clue whether I will still be wearing a mask in a year but the strongest evidence for it actually being a good thing is the fact that the regular flu basically didn't exist last winter. (there's this, but "masks don't work to prevent the flu because people weren't wearing them indoors" is not a particularly convincing counter-argument https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20200508.769108/full)

self-xp (Of course, this has nothing to do with the health service being public/national, and everything to do with the government being hideously corrupt and led by an aggressively incompetent moron. A few hours before announcing the slowing of the vaccine rollout, they hired McKinsey for $1.4 million to give them one month's advice about whether the rollout is going badly.)

the menaker piece seems annoying but i’m mostly annoyed podcast patreon boy has a subscriber only newsletter, gotta pay to witness these good thoughts

I think it's Krueger's newsletter tbf

newsletters suck

I do think one major source of crossed wires is the huge chasm of experience, exposure risk-wise, between urban and suburban or rural areas. when a lot of people talk about hanging outside they mean getting in their car alone and traveling to a relatively secluded park. when a lot of other people talk about hanging outside they mean coming into very close contact with hundreds of people just in the act of transit, then going to a park that is not secluded at all. two very different experiences.

The other thing is that this set of examples involve people who are, in both cases, looking to responsibly distance themselves from the people around them; I don't think either of the profiles in your scenarios describe the people who packed the Rangers' stadium.

I guess my main sticking point is: who gives a shit if someone wants to wear a mask for the rest of their life? unless you lip read (which some people have pointed out) it literally does not negatively affect my life in any way, and may well make it better by preventing illness. whereas, on the flip side, someone refusing wearing a mask is not going to benefit my life in any way, and may well make it worse if they're the person who gets me sick.

so, even in the most blunt non-moral "what's in it for me" thinking I think it's pretty clear what the answer is here? unless "what's in it for me" is the chance to shame people while pretending you're above that

on the other hand it is not a great look, especially right now, to talk about how something that, pre-covid, was an asian cultural norm is insane or wrong

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Thursday, April 8, 2021 2:30 PM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i wasn't saying it's insane or wrong, just that it shouldn't be treated as a moral obligation. from what i understand the asian cultures in which it was a norm pre-covid generally didn't treat it as a moral obligation, and they masked for many reasons beyond just preventing communicable disease. i generally don't think americans should use "well that's how they do it in japan" out of context as a rhetorical device, as i've seen people do a number of times over the past year, which is why i mentioned it.

oh yeah i definitely did that a few months ago, whoops

i'm not trying to make anyone feel bad lol

i've become an advanced scold so i'm gonna stop now

I care zero if someone wants to wear a mask for the rest of their life as long as they're not advocating others be required to do so

what if the others in question are really ugly

xp -- that wasn't about you but the takes floating around

Planning a camping trip with friends, one of whom might not be vaxxed by the time we meet up since he's in his mid-30's and has never had a health problem in his life, and doesn't work in a frontline industry.

I'm stupidly excited to spend a few days in the woods with people I love.

Distant xpost, but does that mean Australia's borders will remain more or less closed at least through the end of the year?

Planning a camping trip with friends, one of whom might not be vaxxed by the time we meet up since he's in his mid-30's and has never had a health problem in his life, and doesn't work in a frontline industry.

I'm stupidly excited to spend a few days in the woods with people I love.

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table),

If the rest of you are jabbed, the risk is minimal: your friend infecting y'all and vice versa.

Oh, I know. That's why we're planning it.

Some notable SF vaccination numbers at this point. We're now over 400,000 with at least one shot -- 53% as noted of the eligible population. 1/3 of said population now has completed a shot regimen, while 2/3 of the 65 and over folks in the city have similarly completed theirs. (The 82% of those who have received at least one shot is a number that's barely budged in a while, though, and may indicate what levels of further resistance/unwillingness to get the shot will crop up further down the line.) Meantime, a number of neighborhoods in general have specifically passed over the halfway point for getting at least one shot, including once again both Excelsior and Bayview/Hunter's Point as well as Chinatown, Twin Peaks and elsewhere.

does that mean Australia's borders will remain more or less closed at least through the end of the year?

Morrison held a press conference at 7:30pm to announce that nobody under 50 was getting AZ and they have no idea when the country will have Novamax, and it was stupid to ask the government about it, but the task force would be working overnight, that night.

It's not clear whether this was a task force of doctors, of public servants, of McKinsey consultants being given a free licence to bill overtime, or the $6 million-salaried official National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission set up 54 weeks ago to determine how to guide the governmental recovery from the 'vid, but ask them first imo.

oh wait

Distant xpost, but does that mean Australia's borders will remain more or less closed at least through the end of the year?

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 9 April 2021 6:12 AM (fifteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This was always the case, even before the latest announcement. The feds have cocked up the vaccine procurement and rollout so royally, putting all the eggs in the AZ basket. It’s been a slow motion car crash since the middle of last year, it wasn’t going well before the latest announcement.

Here is Dr Norman Swan to explain why everything is going wrong.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/slow-vaccine-negotiations-health-with-dr-norman-swan/13294894

It also came out yesterday that the government have been hiding the fact that they have imported 717,000 (over 80% of their supply) AZ shots from the UK, due to a) not bothering to secure an export licence from the EU before announcing they would have 4 million jabs done by the end of March, b) worrying that the vaccine hesitancy Ed mentioned yesterday would be aggravated if ppl knew their shots were coming from the variant-riddled terf island, and c) so that gammons in the mummy country wouldn't get mad.

I'm rooting for Dan to use his belt and road hookup to get Victoria Chinese vaccines (and to own the Libs, which is good not bad down here).

I'm not sure if it is a plus or a minus that an October election is definitely not on the cards.

i was told the wait between shots one and two would feel interminable but i had no idea, what a slog!

got my second jab this afternoon, kinda getting my ass kicked by the side effects again, tho so far it’s less terrible than the first one

just lying in bed feeling achey and watching bad horror movies as god intended

<3 hang in there

Hey, if there are any other Cook County-ites who've waited for eligibility to open on the 12th, there's apparently going to be > 100,000 new appointments at mass vax sites for next week going live at noon today ( https://vaccine.cookcountyil.gov/ ).

Jab one scheduled for Monday morning, just a quick walk from my home. I'm trying to get my body to believe that it's actually happening and maybe unclench just a little for a change. It would help if Walgreens would send me the confirmation email they said they sent me but all pertinent info is printed so just try and deny me. Just try!

fwiw my walgreens confirmation email was sent like 8 hours i scheduled the appointment

Okay, that's good to know.

most of the side effects of the second shot have been survived, but today i have a massive headache that feels like a hole in my head :D

CA opens up to 16+ next week. I have decided to wait until then for pfizer or moderna rather than get J&J, which is already very widely available here without an appointment. thought it might be useful to explain why.

i am personally very unlikely to get seriously ill from covid. with *any* vaccine that probability goes to essentially zero. that's not what i'm worried about. if that's what you're worried about, you should get the first vaccine you're offered.

what i am worried about is the people in my life who cannot get vaccinated and are not working from home in their PJs like me all day (my kids, their friends, their families, couple of old codgers i know, etc.) so it's more important to me that the vaccine i get reduces the risk of me passing covid on to someone else than it reduces the risk of me getting it in the first place.

the only vaccines with any high quality evidence that they do that are pfizer and moderna, which is based on this trial, which did weekly surveys for even asymptomatic infections https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/29/real-world-study-by-cdc-shows-pfizer-and-moderna-vaccines-were-90-effective/.

i'll only have to wait a few days to get pfizer/moderna. if i had to wait a month i'd probably get J&J. if you already got J&J you did not make a mistake, and you will likely have equivalent protection when the boosters become available later this year. public health officials are not lying or commiting malpractice when they encourage *populations* to get any shot asap (including J&J). all vaccines are good.

I think I didn't get the confirmation email from Walgreens until the day after I scheduled mine, but I checked my online account about a thousand times while I waited, just to make sure.

with *any* vaccine that probability goes to essentially zero.

I think that's true, but isn't the J&J significantly less effective full-stop against Covid and particularly its newer variants? That is, all three vaccines approved in the US will likely keep you from going to the hospital and/or dying, but two of them are close to 100% effective at totally protecting you and one is closer to 65%-75% effective. Do I understand that right? Which means recipients of the J&J could still potentially be a more likely future vector after vaccination than those that got Pfizer or Moderna, right?

J&J is 85% effective against *severe* covid, which is almost the same as pfizer/moderna. and very close to 100% for my purposes.

J&J seems to be less effective against moderate cases, and we assume but don't know (because it wasn't tracked in the trial) that it's less effective still against mild and asymptompatic cases.

Which means recipients of the J&J could still potentially be a more likely future vector after vaccination than those that got Pfizer or Moderna, right?

caek did address this bit three sentences later tbf

i asked a covid immunologist friend with kids to bless my plan and he said he'd do the same thing (but i think he's already vaxxed via the novavax trial). he also told me:

J&J would likely be comparable to pfizer/moderna if they gave two doses, but they only trialed one dose to finish the trial quicker/save lives which, fair enough.

J&J are now trialing a booster with variants in mind, rather than a simple second dose.

J&J recipients will also probably benefit from the moderna booster trial (happening now, going well, US EUA expected in the fall).

and this was his POO, which seems worth posting in full:

Top tier: mRNA (and novavax which is similar in efficacy for B.1.1.7 but more variable antibody levels and somewhat less robust to variants)
---
Second tier: maybe 2 dose adenovirus vaccines? AZ is sloppy and Sputnik is opaque, so hard to recommend either.
---
Third tier: 1 dose JnJ. Way more transparent than sputnik, better safety than AZ, and remarkably good 1 dose efficacy against B.1.351
---
Fourth tier: all the inactivated and Ad5 vaccines that barely work.

immunoligists/vaccine people are really angry with AZ btw.

pfizer just officially applied to the FDA to allow use in 12-15 year olds. apparently this will be quick (i.e. days not weeks?).

Good news in terms of speed - I believe they can just amend the EUA and that should happen quickly https://t.co/ei60JDWB1U

— Ed MD (@notdred) April 9, 2021

Pretty handy. That would immediately expand the eligible population in the best of ways.