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

it really does seem like there's a chance that boosted/vaxxed individuals might experience omicron as something milder than the flu which would just be a stupendous outcome. the problem is the sheer number of people all getting it at once, and even a tiny percentage of such a vast number needing care overwhelming health "systems" (lol). Not to mention long covid of course, which is unknown w omicron at this point but you'd hope that a milder disease would result in less of it. All speculation of course but i find a perverse satisfaction in exploring the facets of this shit (much to my wife's chagrin. she never wants to hear about covid again)

xpost not tried them; give us your tasting notes once you've jotted them down

I’ve used Binax Now before, seems to be reliable.

If they taste anything like Ramazzotti, I'm buying stock.

Binax is for sure. I don't know how accurate compared to a pro PCR, but they're easy to use. The one time I had any concerns I used a Binax for immediate results (negative) and then went in for a PCR for more rigorous confirmation (negative). My friend who tested positive did the same thing, immediate at home test in advance of a PCR test, which caught a positive even though the at-home results were negative.

Seems like an understatement to say "it really does seem like there's a chance" -- that's the most likely outcome and we don't have reason yet to believe otherwise.

I'm also at the point where I think placing an neverending burden on the populace and especially on children to avoid "overwhelming health systems" is invalid. How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

Alfred, yes. If you get a negative result, test again in 2 days (because false negative rate is high). If you get a positive, go get a PCR test (because false positive rate is very low but not zero).

How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

This is what you after the pandemic.

Thanks, Jaq!

i would like to be less flippant than man alive about this but i am also struggling to see how meaningful our private decisions are toward public health when the new variant is this transmissible

don’t worry my plans were canceled this weekend and i’m gonna try to take a test before i travel to see my parents (testing is a hot mess in nyc, afaict they scaled it back bc there was little demand after the dawn of the vaccines and now they’re overloaded)

I’ve canceled any social events this week because I travel Wednesday to see my parents and I don’t particularly want to catch/give them omicron, seeing as how it has landed in DC and cases are the highest they’ve been in early a year. I don’t care if it’s “mild” they’re old and I don’t know what will happen. After my Christmas visit I’ll go back to normal social activities.

I'm also at the point where I think placing an neverending burden on the populace and especially on children to avoid "overwhelming health systems" is invalid. How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Friday, December 17, 2021 9:32 AM

why is "overwhelming health systems" in quotes like it's not real? this is like "dress for the job you want, not the one you have" but for hospital capacity. if you don't care anymore you can just say so instead of trying to rationalize it.

I was really looking forward to seeing August Wilson’s How I Learned what I Learned this weekend. I had optimistically bought the tickets a while ago.

harbl those cancer patients whose appointments were delayed by months because of covid were just going to die anyway sheesh. can't believe you hate children this much

man alive: won't somebody think of my the children?

covid: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1007-covid-19-orphaned-children.html

i too have had it up to here with the neverending burden of missing law firm holiday parties

b-b-but jewel was playing!

why is "overwhelming health systems" in quotes like it's not real?

Otm this particular bit was infuriating

After last year I tried to get my fun in this summer, after I got jabbed and testing started to become more available. Christmas is usually when I see friends less and family more, so I'm being more careful again - but obviously for others it's the other way round, or they didn't get a chance to do much when rates were low, or they've had it already and are fed up to the back teeth of being careful.

In the UK our record numbers of cases will take about 10 days at least to appear in any hospitalisation data, so I'm not breathing out just yet.

My other half is hoping to see his sister for the first time since pre-covid this year, likewise me with another family member so I'm gritting my teeth and keeping my head down. And avoiding my once-jabbed-but-then-became-anti-vax(?!) relatives.

Seeing a lot of stuff about 'relying on LFTs' at the moment, to the tune of 'they tell you if you're currently infectious, but this can change within less than a day'. There's a lot of burden on even the best-intentioned and most able people to manage their interactions.

i too have had it up to here with the neverending burden of missing law firm holiday parties

Uh, anecdotally, sounds like at home rapid tests are about to be a huge problem in the short term. Co-workers around me are frantically chasing them down today, almost everyone is completely sold out. One co-worker is driving 3-1/2 hours to Central Illinois tonight to pick some up.

We are incredibly fucked.

Home tests have graduated to the new toilet paper.

Just extra galling that not only do we have to pay $25 a pop for what other countries get for significantly less (or free!) but now we have to fight over them too.

Should maybe split the difference and stock up on kleenex. If you're triple vaxxed but going through tissues like crazy, that's practically a positive covid test.

I mean, what could go wrong with millions of people about to travel all over the country with no access to even simple at home tests? Surely this is all fine.

How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

Health care systems consist mainly of trained and licensed health care professionals, not beds or ventilators. You can't surge them. No one is going to go through med school plus residency or nursing school and stay licensed if there are no jobs for them in the field unless there's a pandemic or other health crisis. You can't conjure trained people out of thin air or 'crash course' them into swift competence.

interested (not really!) in what the "let's just do it and be legends" poster thinks will happen to US health infrastructure if we spend a couple of weeks with 1m cases a day in a population which is 17% boosted.

re: rapid tests ihealth and binax are good. ihealth is cheaper for now. binax is the oldest. it's not clear they're as reliable for omicron as previous strains, but they're much better than nothing (and nothing will likely be the alternative as PCR testing capacity is exceeded over the next week or two).

reminder that very roughly rapid tests give you a yes/no answer to the question "am i infectious to other people".

Checking out how the rapid antigen test landscape has changed over the past year (not much), really like this figure from "Comparative analyses of all FDA EUA-approved rapid antigen tests and RT-PCR for COVID-19 quarantine and surveillance-based isolation"https://t.co/WbEmxV0kiR pic.twitter.com/UYmYhMNQEP

— alex rubinsteyn (@iskander) December 6, 2021

assuming you're a young healthy person not at risk of complications that's probably the question you want an answer to.

PCR tests tell you "do i have covid?", which is important to know if your symptoms are severe, but not the same thing.

I want an easy test that tells me if I recently *had* covid.

guy in radio this morning was an ex-doctor (83yo) who volunteered to do covid jabs and had reached 3000 during the two waves. so there is some elasticity there in terms of helthcare supply.

I'm also at the point where I think placing an neverending burden on the populace and especially on children to avoid "overwhelming health systems" is invalid. How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Friday, December 17, 2021 6:32 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

fuck you, you selfish asshole.

sincerely,

every single healthcare worker w/ a brain in the entire country, and also the table is the table

This is what you after the pandemic.

otm and also the answer to all these right-wingers I see suddenly extolling the virtues of exercise and fretting about how unhealthy our overall population is — yes, those are real problems and we should invest more in public health measures to counter them, but in the meantime we have states like mine with a 35 percent adult obesity rate and 35 percent would be a lot of people to write off. Someone who's 100 pounds overweight should maybe do a lot of things, but the first one is get fucking vaccinated.

Sorry for the digression, that one just really irritates me.

Id say, now im no expert, that covid restrictions will likely continue until the pandemic thats killed millions upon millions has finished, now im no expert

In light of that, man alive jr can just manage with whatever simply intolerable conditions are being imposed for the moment

Im no expert now

I think it's perfectly fair to say that even people of robust good will and respectable amounts of empathy can get tired of hearing "just a little while longer."

Like, everyone has heard "for a little while longer" so many times in the last two years

This, I think, is the issue. Most civilians (me especially included) went into this pandemic without a lot of knowledge about how a pandemic this severe would work, and although many of us knew about the Flu of 1918, we figured "we've advanced beyond that now", so I don't think most people anticipated 2+ years of their lives being uprooted. I actually thought it would be over by fall of 2020, naive as I was.

I'm not sure much could be done about that -scientists were purposefully avoiding predictions about when it would end because they themselves didn't know, and telling people that it may last years up front might lead to reticence to lock down or adopt NPIs versus keeping it open-ended and hoping for the best. It's probably a good thing they didn't, either - most guidance early on seemed to think fomite and droplet transmission was the most common, whereas now we know it's airborne (which, btw, wasn't even true of smallpox - it occasionally transmitted that way, but mostly transmitted via fomite/droplet).

It's exhausting. and some people in industries that require face to face interaction have had their entire livelihoods ruined. Musicians in bands who made a lot of their bread touring have had to take huge financial hits by cancelling multiple tours, and earlier in the pandemic, album releases were delayed too. no album, no merch, no tour = some bands had to retire from music and get day jobs, which during a pandemic which was not the easiest thing to do in 2020. or now, without putting yourself at risk (unless you get a remote job).

Likewise, what doesn't help is the constant framing of what we "can't" do during the pandemic. There are safe outdoor activities that can be done. But instead of focusing on that, the constant barrage is "STAY HOME". well - when you're the fattest you've ever been in your life, and now facing a myriad of new health issues you've never had before (HI!) that's a very sobering, depressing message. that doesn't mean 'don't do it', but....it explains why people snap and get fatigued and let up their guard.

Likewise, we went from being told in the US that we could take off our masks and that vaccinated people weren't really transmitting much disease to that truth fundamentally changing when Delta showed up. At the time, I defended the CDC, but on seeing how much fewer people are masking now, I definitely have changed my mind and think it really hurt us. so vaccinated people went from being told "you can live your life again, with minimal disturbances for the most part" to "nope, you gotta go back to masks and distancing/avoiding crowds again too".

that's nobody's fault, but psychology doesn't care. At some point, people have to have something to want to stay alive for. I struggled last year when I was living alone because I didn't see my friends for months, Zoom was miserable because it just felt like what I do for work so I didn't enjoy those calls, and I couldn't date anybody or do any of the activities that actually helped keep my mental state at bay, so...I was seriously worried! Moving in with my folks alleviated that a bit as at least I had contact with loved ones, but brought a new set of worries.

I think the messaging could use a bit more compassion, though I understand why beleaguered medical employees who are basically themselves about to snap from stress, depression, and fatigue aren't willing to give that now (given what they've seen and lost themselves). not to mention Scientists know their messaging will almost immediately be distorted so they're afraid of how to craft messages.

But what's really frustrating is how civilians have been set up to fail by their own governments. Like - if the US even tried to lock down right now, people would freak the fuck out. because like last time, we wouldn't have a relief bill in place before most states started locking down, and after facing two years of this, there aren't many people who could be without a paycheck for a month or more while we worked out stimulus/enhanced unemployment. AND - whatever benefits we did get would be meager, because Republicans and moderate/conservative Democrats would whittle the benefits down to bare bones, and since nobody is going to abolish the filibuster apparently, we'd wind up getting a dinky one time check and maybe a little extra weekly unemployment and we expect struggling families/individuals to put their faith in THAT after what happened last year?

It's just not going to happen. Not that it's the best way to contain at this point anyway, but it's not even an option on the table BECAUSE of the political reality. there's this semi-obscure dickhead 'scientist' on twitter who spends much time self-aggrandizing about how well he follows pandemic guidelines and keeps smugly saying "we could solve this problem if we just paid people to stay home", as if that's a political reality in this country that's ever going to happen (meanwhile, this dude is actively making six figures so of course he can stay home comfortably).

People can't stay home because many of them have jobs that won't allow them to. and they can't afford to find other jobs that do allow them to. and they work around people and customers who won't mask and there's nothing they can do about it. and sometimes, in the messaging, when they get COVID, we make them feel shame like it's their fault for getting it.

our government (US) doesn't give us access to cheap/free testing, and wait times at places where free testing is offered is long and often not same day, so infected people go on not knowing they're infected and spreading. Scientists and doctors scream "WEAR N95 AND KN95 MASKS ONLY" while ignoring that it's not a negligible expense for some families (I can afford constant re-upping of KN95s, but I know a LOT of people who really have to go the surgical route as it's so much cheaper and gives them a much longer supply).

so it also makes the populace feel defensive a bit to be under attack like they're not doing enough because many people can't do better. A lot of people (probably the majority of us) can do better and don't. Likewise, a lot of people haven't seen family in years as they avoided it, thinking it would be temporary, and now they legitimately don't know when they can see them again unless they just risk it.

People are giving up and saying "this virus is never going away, fuck it, I'm just gonna do whatever", and constantly screaming invectives at those assholes might feel good temporarily as a coping mechanism, but changes nothing. any time a doctor or scientist tries to help people understand activities they can do safely and how to do them safely, they get widely criticized by scolding peers for suggesting anything other than staying inside permanently. whereas this safer activities, while carrying some risk, carry far less risk than just going for broke, are not likely to contribute heavy to the spread, and give people peace of mind and make it easier for them to carry on another day. and to actually play ball and do what needs to be done.

I know I'm rambling but I'm just fucking wrecked. I've spent the last week doing the thing I'd avoided for 2 months, which is reading doom Twitter en masse, and it's like a sick addiction to candy. I feel gross and depressed every day, because the messaging is mostly "we're all gonna die" or treating it as a forgone conclusion that we aren't going to take the appropriate actions, with few people spreading hope. one prominent loudmouth doctor (who I won't name) said it was irresponsible to put any positive spin on Delta when it came out. and her news is just dour fatalism every day.

anyway. I wish all of us the best. I hope we stay sane through all of this. and alive.

This kind of situation, full of constantly shifting prognostications, rules and recommendations, is where it's a big help to maintain an attitude that it's ok to just muddle through as best you can, coupling low expectations with a measure of hopefulness. This attitude seems to be an alien mindset for lots of Americans.

my attitude lately is "take a shit, you'll feel better"

i'm usually correct

evergreen advice

everbrown really

That's an incredible post Neanderthal, with a lot of great points. Not much to add, but thanks for putting it out there.

There's a whole lot of room between one pole of locking yourself in your house/apartment for weeks on end and interacting with zero people and going out unmasked every night to bars, restaurants and huge events where there are no restrictions, masks of vaxx requirements. Everyone has to constantly evaluate their own personal comfort and risk levels, be it due to family circumstances, work requirements, etc. But the internet only amplifies the worst scolds from both ends, so it ends up feeling like if you aren't doing the former (sealing yourself at home), the only alternative assumption made by others is that you must simply be proceeding with reckless abandon. At the other end, the careless, selfish assholes act like any step to protect yourself is "giving up your freedoms" or "refusing to live your life". It all gets so exhausting.

I mean, I was demanded to go back to work at the start of August and have been back in an open plan office since, so I had no choice but to give up a little control there, though I still wear a KN95 mask every day (and thankful that I can afford them!) and really tread carefully in crowded situations. And once my son went back, well, there's another unavoidable "weak point" in our bubble. There is no perfect way to proceed through this mess and a little compassion goes a long way, I guess. And other than people who blatantly dismiss the real concerns of others and act dangerously, I try to keep it all in mind and not be a scold.

On another note, I don't know about you, but my social media feeds are just lousy with show and tour cancellation updates (Guided by Voices and Wolves in the Throne Room being the latest two that just came across).

Thanks for this Neanderthal and jon.

YES -- most people are BOTH "living life" AND "taking reasonable personally calibrated precautions that contribute to mitigating the crisis rather than pretending there's no crisis."

But boring muddy reasonable accommodation like that doesn't get clicks and so what we see shared is "in REAL America we don't wear masks yeeeeeeeeeehaw, suck it you neurotic cucks" and "keep your kid home from school if you don't want them dead, now and forever"

Anyway, definitely take a shit though, that's solid advice

so to speak

Booming post, Neanderthal.

I stocked up on Binax tests at my CVS, where they were, I must say, plentiful.

Do you think animals noticed that humans had retreated?

Don't tell my turkey sandwich.

To add to my earlier anecdotal data, there are tests out there, just definitely getting harder. I walked to the local CVS at lunch and they had some of the Binax tests, but you could only purchase one box per transaction. Bought two boxes, but didn't want to push my luck since I was already getting the stinkeye from people behind me in line for running two.

Anyway, Chicago isn't cleared out just yet, guess it's hit or miss.

my local Walgreens has the FlowFlex tests that are popular overseas for 9.95 a box. I bought two there and I have two coming from CVS on order.

there is also a local lab that does free testing that has kinda been a godsend to me as they never have lines, but I just went there the other day to do a test and while it wasn't a 'huge' wait , I can tell people are more aware of it now and I am betting I can't bank on them being my go-to anymore. it's literally in walking distance from my house.

I'm taking my kid for her booster at Costco in 45 minutes, curious if they have tests there.

costco has the cheapest rapid tests in america if they have stock! fill yer boots!

Id say, now im no expert, that covid restrictions will likely continue until the pandemic thats killed millions upon millions has finished, now im no expert

In light of that, man alive jr can just manage with whatever simply intolerable conditions are being imposed for the moment

Im no expert now

― fix up luke shawp (darraghmac), Friday, December 17, 2021 1:29 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

There is no "has finished." That's the point.

man alive, for months you've pretended to lie on a fainting couch as you agonize over this COVID development and that imposition it makes on your life. You have made clear what choices you and your family have made. Why you keep posting here when no one wants to hear it convinces me (a) you want a cookie from the rest of us as a reward or (b) you're no different than the conservative trolls on Twitter.

Either way, you have shitty politics and grotesque timing. Go away.