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

it's also somewhat telling that the biggest social media scolds I know/knew have either got so tired that they eventually started to take greater risk themselves or eventually been exposed as not being as 'responsible' as they pretended to be on social media.

which isn't to say "fuck NPIs forever, let's rawdog this", because I still wear my KN95 everywhere and I frequently rapid test myself and there are certain things I won't do. but at the same token, my mental health declined at an alarming rate this month and even seeing a friend's face had a monumental impact on me which it wouldn't have on Zoom. and my entire household is currently boosted.

enjoy your trip, in orbit!

it's also somewhat telling that the biggest social media scolds I know/knew have either got so tired that they eventually started to take greater risk themselves or eventually been exposed as not being as 'responsible' as they pretended to be on social media.

I just think it's all multidimensional, everybody has things they care about more and things they don't care about much at all, and everybody's out here taking on what they consider acceptable levels of risk for things they care about and skipping things they don't care about, and when we see somebody doing something we personally don't think is worth it, but they do, we naturally see them as a hypocrite ("and they said they were so careful!!!") There is no answer to "what's reckless" that's uniform across people.

In particular, as someone else about to visit older parents, I am obviously with Alfred here that you've done your duty, but for me part of that is that my parents are cool with it! If my parents were like "I want you to hold off visiting us until we know what's up with omicron" I would not think my parents were being unreasonable ninnies denying my kids the pleasure of seeing their grandparents, I would think they were perfectly reasonably setting their own risk levels! People are different from each other.

I think we all just have to judge each other less (within reason -- e.g. somebody who lies about being vaccinated in order to be in a space that's supposed to be for vaccinated people are taking away other people's right to make their own risk decisions.)

yeah within reason for sure. like if someone is exposed to an infected person and doesn't get tested themselves and just resumes hanging with people or warn other people they were around at the time about the exposure, I'm going to have some judgment.

(i had to warn people twice, it wasn't the greatest, but they were appreciative, and fortunately I never got infected either time)

I mean I'm not trying to scold people on this board, I'm more just talking about a process I myself have had to undergo, as a person who has not felt starved of human contact during the pandemic (because I live with my nuclear family, in an neighborhood where it's pretty easy/possible to socialize with people outdoors, because I rarely go to bars anyway, and probably for a hundred temperamental reasons as well) that when people make decisions different from mine it's not because they're shit at calculating probabilities, it's because they are authentically getting something out of it that they have a right to decide they need.

But I mean it's limited, if I'm to be honest. When people are like "yes the basketball team is playing to a full arena but if I have to wear a mask while I'm at the basketball game, I'm not really at the basketball game," I roll my eyes. Maybe that's bad, I dunno. That's where I am at the moment.

JPMORGAN’s 2022 outlook is out:

“Our view is that 2022 will be the year of a full global recovery, an end of the pandemic, and a return to normal economic and market conditions we had prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. .. Our 2022 price target for the S&P 500 is 5050.” [Kolanovic] pic.twitter.com/086vMUzl36

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) December 8, 2021

what a jpmoran

My biggest gripe is really just the level of burden being put on kids who are themselves very low risk. I didn't think it was justified even before they were vaccinated, but now that they can be vaccinated I think we need a clear path to no NPIs in schools (I mean more ventilation, fine, that's great anyway, but no more distanced lunch, masks, changes in the way instruction is done etc.).

"a clear path to NPIs in schools" = require vaccinations for everyone imo oh you just wanted things that could actually happen, you say? hmm

Based on what we've heard about Omicron so far (acknowledging that even that is far from settled), this is where I start thinking that it's maybe not a great idea that (for the most part) our politicians are still basing most decisions on raw case totals.

Hypothesizing that Omicron is less severe and significantly reduces the odds of death and hospitalization, but is more transmissible and is slightly more likely to escape vaccines and boosters. On the one hand, great, less people dying is wonderful news! On the other hand, this comes with a (as long as I'm hypothesizing) ten-fold increase in cases. So the decision makers look at the rather terrifying case numbers and start back in with the restrictions - indoor dining shuts down, schools go remote, etc. We maybe "slow the spread" again, but we are back to kids struggling with being isolated from their peers, more people losing their jobs, small business bearing the brunt again if they even managed to survive the first time - all the cons that come with shutdowns and restrictions. Is that a net win for a variant that is less deadly?

tl;dr - I don't really trust our politicians to make smart decisions on this Omicron news and things feel rather bleak again

Obviously that whole hypothetical assumes Omicron does end up replacing Delta as the prime variant here, which clearly is not where we are now.

So the decision makers look at the rather terrifying case numbers and start back in with the restrictions - indoor dining shuts down, schools go remote, etc.

There's no chance this happens in the U.S. Again, we're still dealing with Delta and these things didn't happen.

You aren’t wrong! But watching schools shut down extracurricular activities and hearing about a few companies that have kicked back to fully remote just today has me wondering….

"a clear path to NPIs in schools" = require vaccinations for everyone imo oh you just wanted things that could actually happen, you say? hmm

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 9 December 2021 00:12 (three hours ago) link

I wouldn't object to this, but I've felt for a while it was an unnecessary hurdle given that unvaccinated kids have about the same risk as vaccinated adults, possibly less, and we remove plenty of NPIs for vaccinated adults.

the same risk of transmission?

Lower risk of transmission

right. a higher risk of transmission than vaccinated kids though, presumably.

at a certain point you have to decide if you want to go round and round with closures and quarantines forever or just require vaccination for in-person imo

and then you can dispense with the fiction that NPI achieves anything in schools which is questionable at best imo

Questionable that it’s fiction?

questionable that they achieve anything in schools

the power of kids to ignore rules and be disgusting is a force far more powerful than paper masks and guidelines about 'bubbling'

I mean, anecdotal evidence for sure but my son is the same age as my nephew. My son's school has done, to my eyes, an admirable job trying to get 10 year olds to stay masked and relatively distant. Even with two kids in the class testing positive earlier this year, there was no transmission in the class and only the 3 other kids in their "pods" needed to quarantine. My nephew's class, in a much more conservative leaning district and much to my sister's chagrin, has done a terrible job of enforcing much of anything and his class has just been sent remote for three weeks for the THIRD time since August due to what is being categorized as an "outbreak" by the county's health department.

yeah, masks totally reduce transmission and anyone who doesn't think so is fooling themselves

esp if they're KN95s or N95s, but surgical also have benefits, just not as good

Someone in my department died of Covid two days ago. She was 39 & had two kids. I guess we didn't work together a whole lot but we still talked every week or so (back when we were in the office) so it's all kind of surreal. A buddy of mine was in a group chat with her and apparently she stopped responding about 3 weeks ago. I have never heard her say anything political but her husband always struck me as a major chud. I looked her up on Twitter and one of the first people she's following is Marjorie Taylor Green. Its just all so senseless.

here's my anxiety post - Eric Topol is right about many things, wrong about more than I like, but man was he correct about boosters. the debate remained philosophical even after data emerged showing their benefits, and even as we knew curbing the spread of COVID was just as important as preventing severe disease. but a lot of his own peers shot him down and unfortunately a lot of people (me included) listened to him. and a lot of people are probably going to be hesistant to get them now. and....they're not even available for young folk now. so we're going to be behind on getting the youth boosted (though I know they're still doing experiments to see whether they need it as much as adults).

early data showing boosters most def needed for Omicron, even if you didn't think so before for Delta.

Vaccine equity IS important, but I don't think we should let people in the US just spread the disease at will, either (which we've basically been doing since May 2020). it's a hard problem to solve, esp considering how badly the COVAX problem has failed in bringing vaccine equity to the globe.

xpost it always amazes me how people ekep saying "I don't need a vaccine, I got an immune system" while simultaneously seeing stories like these of young people dying from the disease :(

oh and well this just happened

https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/09/fda-expands-authorization-for-pfizers-covid-19-booster-to-cover-16-and-17-year-olds/

thats terrible frogbs.

the health dept in my county has been trying & failing to get the bigger school districts to stop doing "five minute mask breaks" every hour for students during the school day. the schools' main argument is that it improves student morale. weirdly, the schools seem to be having constant major outbreaks.

this is possibly based on the old (outdated and very incorrect) guidance that "close contact" with someone requires 15 minutes of exposure. and should be eliminated.

xpost it always amazes me how people ekep saying "I don't need a vaccine, I got an immune system" while simultaneously seeing stories like these of young people dying from the disease :(

― hopefully this review helped someone (Neanderthal), Thursday, December 9, 2021 11:03 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I mean I get saying dumb shit like that in the early days but we're at nearly 800,000 dead now in the US. everyone knows someone who either died from this or got horribly ill and have not recovered. even "mild" cases may be no walk in the park. what kind of mindset is leading all these people to think it won't happen to them? is this just the natural outgrowth of conservative programming convincing people that nothing bad actually happens outside of whatever's pushed by "the liberal agenda"? like even when Omicron was discovered I noticed a lot of people treating it not like a variant of the disease but rather something the media just made up because they're trying to distract you from whatever. it's so fucking dumb. sorry I know this is the non-political thread but how do you divorce the two?

I feel so bad for the kids. I met them several times at various company events. I think they are 9 and 7 now. I can't stop thinking about my own kids and how devastated they'd be if something happened to one of us. and it was all preventable!! fuck!!

Sorry about your coworker 🙁

masks totally reduce transmission and anyone who doesn't think so is fooling themselves

no argument from me. but the foolers of selves category imo includes anyone who thinks kids mask or social distance properly. there is a vaccine. make them take it if they want in-person teaching.

I mean some kids do mask and social distance properly! Kind of like adults, some are really diligent and good about it and others not so much.

also wanna mention there's something very surreal about people you know just suddenly dying without warning. and their last social media post will be something like "hey can anyone identify this bird". like even at work, we've got Teams meetings she was supposed to be in this week, what do you do? do you just like acknowledge it and move on?

make them take it if they want in-person teaching.

considering the vaccine mandate is stuck in the courts in the US. . .this ain't happening any time soon, we can't even ban non vaxxers from airplanes. . . and *plenty* of kids mask properly & social distance

plus even if we did mandate it there would be so many parents who wouldn't let their kids get it even if the kids wanted to get it

suppose a well fitted mask reduces the likelihood of catching covid during a given 15 minute indoor interaction a covid+ person from 10% to 1%. i think those numbers are in the ball park. masks massively reduce transmission for a given single interaction. but it doesn't follow that they're reducing transmission by that much in a situation like schools.

kids in schools are 1) not wearing well fitted masks 2) having lots of these interactions every week in places like the UK where the case rate is ~50 per 100,000 and has been for nearly 6 months. in those circumstances, it approaches a certainty that they're going to get it eventually, even though masks reduce transmission!

same goes for anyone working indoors with literally hundreds of people for months on end, even if you wear a n95 mask.

make them take it if they want in-person teaching.

considering the vaccine mandate is stuck in the courts in the US. . .this ain't happening any time soon

fwiw it's happening in most of california for 12+ starting in january, and for all 5+ starting in september.

it's like: if you're going to park on the hard shoulder at night then yes you should put on your hazard lights (wear a mask). if you do that, you are much safer. but if you're going to park there for hours (go to school with a mostly unvaccinated population for months) eventually a truck is going to hit you. it would be better not to park on the hard shoulder (vaccinate everyone!)

cool. . . it's not going to happen everywhere though, which sucks. covid has really brought out the glaring problems with the US and one of them is allowing states to be little labs of democracy

i mean i'd love a national mandate for vaccines for everyone but i don't think it's possible.

mandates are incredibly popular with an overwhelming but largely silent numerical majority. this is a vote winner all over the world.

a political focus on masks is a distraction that allows timid e.g. US democrats to avoid doing incredibly popular things because they don't want the ball.

mandate vaccinations! take it to the supreme court if necessary! lose if necessary!

i admire your enthusiasm--and you're totally right! supreme court. lose if necessary. thanks for your optimism

this is praxis https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/world/europe/austria-covid-vaccine-mandate-lockdown.html