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

My encounters with the human race continue. I'm on a train, London to Crewe. Half the people in the carriage aren't wearing masks. I've taken a particular dislike to this fat ugly wanker and his stupid girlfriend who are sitting across the aisle from me, I hate his tattoos and shaved head/beard combo. Why, in the middle of a pandemic, would you go into an enclosed space where you're going to be confined with a lot of strangers for several hours and not wear a mask? And why wouldn't you bring some headphones so the rest of the carriage doesn't have to listen to whatever crap you happen to be watching on your phone?

Real England

That's exactly what it is.

Having said that though, on the bus into town, the only people not wearing masks were two sets of tourists.

Crewe to Glasgow train. Social distancing? You're having a laugh, people are packed in like sardines.

If I don't have COVID by the end of this week it'll be a miracle.

Right now if I go anywhere inside I'm expecting to be told to isolate after :(

And what is it with couples not wearing masks? They're so wrapped in themselves they don't care who they infect?

They've probably "done their own research", which astonishingly turned out to be more accurate than that of highly-trained medical professionals with near-infinite strings of qualifications to their names.

for your on the fence friends who think they're protected because "millions of other people are vaccinated": https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-vaccines-herd-immunity-variants-1.6104364

I imagine there are hundreds of millions of people in the world today who have "done their own research" and as a result are overwhelmingly eager to be vaccinated, but they can't be because their nation has so little access to vaccines that they are restricted to a selected few. Meanwhile, in the US of A...

I am fully vaxxed. Am I mad for flying next month if I wear a cloth mask the whole time (in airport, on plane)?

No

I thought airports and planes are all requiring masks? We were just in airports and planes, and ours both did (and everyone complied).

Thanks, reassuring.

If you're mad, I'm mad, I've already done it several times.

get ready for Freedom Day

https://i.imgur.com/8TItR2P.jpg

now imagine the same graph done per capita...

No need to imagine it: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

Just under the all time record today

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases

it's coming home, it's coming home

it's also coming 2 america

our daycare just announced the first breakthrough case among parents

now imagine the same graph done per capita...

― koogs, Sunday, July 18, 2021 5:20 PM (yesterday)

No need to imagine it: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

― mike t-diva, Sunday, July 18, 2021 8:27 PM (yesterday)

for non-clickers: looks like Botswana is the only one left to beat. let's check back a fortnight from Tuesday!

(UK on 631 per million, Botswana on 653. USA has 95, Canada has 9, Australia has 5. (based on testing and published data obv))

Toppermost of the poppermost.

kinda just assumed everyone in the u.k had just accepted that we'll all get covid multiple times and hopefully it will be mild

The U.K. is running about 1.2m to 1.5m tests a day, I think. I don’t know who else is testing that intensively.

i think this thread is pretty close to the conventional wisdom among epidimiologists at this point

I don't think leaders here have wrapped their heads around the impact of Delta in the US. This is a new era: A) A bad phase of the pandemic for unvaccinated adults and B) The beginning of the endemic reality for vaccinated people. Policy responses require a new paradigm. 1/n

— Will Hoenig (@WilliamBHoenig) July 17, 2021

"NPI" is non-pharmacological interventions, i.e. lockdowns, masks, capacity limits, closed schools, etc.

So basically your choices are to get vaccinated or to get COVID. https://t.co/LbK4sNmeQn

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 15, 2021

The (a) real shame of it all is that so many states are sitting on so many unused shots, but bureaucracy means there's a better chance of them getting tossed than being put to use elsewhere.

I am absolutely expecting to get COVID now, if I don't have it already from the train journey(s) from London to Glasgow. Thank you, Tories.

I don't mind if I get it myself but I don't want to give it to my sister, who I'm staying with from tomorrow.

Tbh I’m expecting to get covid eventually and I’m vaccinated

How is this a "sort-of" exception? Surely this is a full-stop exception. I diminished by quite a lot the extent I spent in crowded indoor spaces between March 2020 and April 2021, which decreased the likelihood I'd get COVID before I got vaccinated. I don't understand any argument that doesn't count that as "helpful." Most of the world is unvaccinated. Hell yes those countries should try to delay the wave until they can get the shots in the arms.

The sad reality here is that, even if the endemic steady state is okay, there are dark days ahead for the world. The sadder reality is that NPIs aren't very helpful tools, and come at a real cost. The sort-of exception is if you can buy time to higher vaccination with them. 27/n

— Will Hoenig (@WilliamBHoenig) July 17, 2021

XxXpost so is he saying NPIs should be used more judiciously?

Xpost I think he means lockdowns and things like that. And is speaking more collectively.

Lockdowns flatten the curve and prevent hospitals from getting overwhelmed. They don't stop transmission. Made sense to do them en masse pre-vaccine, and to do them when caseloads get into mega-dangerous territory, but there's a real world cost to these actions (psychological, financial, etc).

I think he's saying at this stage they really often just delay the inevitable.

He’s saying that NPIs made sense when they were literally our only option, and vaccines were months away or in the process of being distributed, because the goal was to slow the spread so more people can get vaccinated.

If as now seems likely we’re going to be dealing with years/multiple more waves that spread among everyone (including the vaccinated) until everyone has a sufficient response that they’re like colds, and pretty much every adult who wants to be vaccinated is, the goal of NPIs is both less relevant and an extremely hard sell. Hard sell to vaccinated people because who wants to go into lock down for months/years to avoid an all but inevitable eventual mild case? And hard sell to the unvaccinated deniers for obvious reasons.

vaccinated Texas state senators hiding out in DC just announced they got it btw.

Hard sell to vaccinated people because who wants to go into lock down for months/years to avoid an all but inevitable eventual mild case?

My interpretation too.

Current case rates almost certainly an undercount by a bigger factor than on winter because a other fraction of them are mild or asymptomatic. Like if the counts back then we’re off by 2-3x, they might be off by 10x now.

Unvaccinated, immuno-compromised and underage people still exist iirc.

We’re not staying in lockdown forever and immune compromised people aren’t going away.

I would love to continue NP interventions until kids and everyone else who wants to or can be persuaded can get vaccinated. But the NPIs required to stop everyone delta it in the next 6 months say are politically out of the question. They’d need to be way stricter than anything we had last year.

Everyone getting delta

But the NPIs required to stop delta in the next 6 months

iirc my repeated policy proposal takes effect six months ago

(okay, we're two days short of it. time stretches in the pandemic.)

Yeah I mean we are where we are. “Herd immunity” was a psychopathic policy a year ago. But when the implied case rate in the UK is around 2m/week despite a relatively very high vaccination rate 1) we don’t have moves we can make that would do much more than delay everyone getting it 2) and because most of those cases are mild and/or undetected the moves we could make to delay are politically untenable.

I’ve been coming to terms with “get vaccinated or get covid” for a couple of weeks and was just getting there when this news came out https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccines-kids-under-age-12-expected-mid-winter-fda-official-n127405. Seems inevitable that literally all kids are going to get it in the next few months.

Seems silly to worry about this when almost all adults globally are unvaccinated but, well, I have kids.

In the UK it's currently get vaccinated, get COVID... fingers crossed it doesn't kill you or cause any longterm damage. Technically that's England rather than the UK but a whole load of maskless cunts getting trains from England to Scotland, for instance, will soon make sure it's a truly United Covingdom.

Made sense to do them en masse pre-vaccine

Most of the world IS pre-vaccine!

We're not discussing govt policy in most of the world

The thread caek shared was very US-centric.

Also the author didn't say Never enact NPI, let's all dry hump each other at center court of MSG.

He's pointing out in countries that have vaccinated a lot of their pop, NPI is kicking the can down the road and the effects now may be damaging