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

A ton of Chicago bars and restaurants are closing until the new year either because staff has tested positive or “out of an abundance of caution.” I was in a few slightly risky situations yesterday and today (no crowds, but eating indoors) and am feeling paranoid. Lots of positive cases this week from friends and friends of friends.

Airport this morning was fast and masked. Where we're going required us to upload vax cards (or recent negative test), which got us a health survey and QR code, which was scanned at the gate for a bracelet. Just like going to a concert.

Central London today not that crowded and pretty good on mask wearing (as an aside, traditional retail models, esp. department stores, are even more doomed than I'd thought). 100% masking or near enough on the tube too. Still not going anywhere near a crowd again for as long as I can manage, I know/know of several fully-vaxxed people who've come down with the 'rona in the last week or two. Fortunately all with v. mild symptoms, but still.

Definitely some absent minded dick-nosing here though.

got some ffp2 masks for the first time, mainly for any unavoidable busy shops. Relatives have got some for train travel.

Admittedly I went too far with my graph and I've been insensitive at times, but a lot of what I've been pilloried ITT for people have come around on. First I was said to be advocating teacher genocide because I thought schools should be open. Now schools have been open a long time and it hasn't led to mass death of teachers. Then it was me saying in summer that we're all eventually going to get COVID and it was time to come to terms with the fact that as long as you are vaccinated, you'll likely be ok. Now with Omicron that is becoming the standard line. I'm not saying I have any special insight, I just ignore scare stories and read credible experts who aren't twitter jockeying. There were plenty of experts saying COVID is never going away well before I came to accept that was the case. There were also plenty of liberal, developed countries that didn't shut down schools, and there are plenty of liberal countries who don't mask young children in school. I think the hyperregulation of child behavior for COVID reasons is just a function of power dynamics, culture, and anxiety. Closing bars is politically hard, making kids eat snack six feet apart on a cold blacktop is easy. Adults can say no, kids can't, so we force bullshit on kids that doesn't even make a difference, just to feel like we are doing something and being appropriately reverent of the pandemic.

Flag my posts all you want. I really don't care if a handful of people here only want to hear the opinions of people who agree with them.

Okay, I fp'd u

why are you here?

Now schools have been open a long time and it hasn't led to mass death of teachers.

Bullshit and bullshit. No one mentioned "mass death" of teachers. As we're seeing now, and have kept seeing for months now, the kids bring it home, sending someone to the hospital or -- best case scenario -- to get tested. Do you realize how taxed our system is, how weary our public health employees are?

Forget doctors and nurses for a sec. Do you give not one damn about the Curative lab workers putting up with the stupendous willful sociopathy of Americans?

Man alive is sick of his children, what a surprise. Wonder if they’re as sick of their dad as we are. Also, as the sister of a teacher who did get covid and who got it pretty bad despite being fit and healthy, fuck you.

best case scenario -- to get tested. Do you realize how taxed our system is, how weary our public health employees are?

Remember he doesn’t believe in testing, let alone public health even having the data from testing.

Too bad they don’t have the kind of jobs that allow them tons of time to bitch on here and make occasional trips to the office bathroom for a bit of light relief.

It was when man alive's posts became indistinguishable from the bad faith "my freedom" trolls repeating the same talking points on fourteen different reddit threads a day that I quit paying attention.

"COVID is never going away" does not equal "We shouldn't even try to slow it down for as long as possible to give healthcare systems/scientific advancements enough time to mitigate the harm to all people, not just those for whom the current protections are sufficient."

also everyone i know in healthcare or education, who are most certainly tremendous assets to their field, have noped out over the past year. institutional knowledge and skill is being attacked by this pandemic

which leads to further mass death, missed learning, etc etc

on another note, a good recent argument for boosters:

guys if we do not get covid under control the celebrities are gonna start singing imagine again

— matt (@mattxiv) December 18, 2021

I cannot fucking believe man alive has not been permanently banned yet, dude go fuck yourself

everybody please please ban this guy forever

fuck you

also, fp eligible for this parting shot:

only want to hear the opinions of people who agree with them

which shows he didn't even read beyond his own posts

I cannot fucking believe man alive has not been permanently banned yet, dude go fuck yourself

everybody please please ban this guy forever

fuck you

― chaos goblin line cook (sleeve), Monday, December 20, 2021 11:03 AM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink
^^^

I actually think man alive's posts are pretty different from "why are liberal pussies afraid of the flu" nonsense but I still disagree with them in pretty fundamental ways and I will explain why:

First I was said to be advocating teacher genocide because I thought schools should be open. Now schools have been open a long time and it hasn't led to mass death of teachers. Then it was me saying in summer that we're all eventually going to get COVID and it was time to come to terms with the fact that as long as you are vaccinated, you'll likely be ok. Now with Omicron that is becoming the standard line.

"Schools should be open" when there's no vaccine (Jan 2021) is pretty different from "schools should be open" when there is a vaccine (fall 2021, now) so this is not an example of people grudgingly coming around to your always correct point of view, it's an example of people correctly changing their view because conditions changed in an important way.

As for "eventually all going to get COVID" -- I think the reason people were not saying that in summer 2021 and are saying it now is, again, not because the scales dropped from their eyes and they saw the correctness of the view, but because there was not a very strong case for this in summer 2021 (when we didn't even really know what to expect from delta) and there is a much stronger case for it now.

On the other hand, I fully agree with man alive that closing bars would have done more to slow COVID spread than closing schools, and would have had less bad non-COVID consequences. (But was there a political universe where that was even remotely possible?)

i also agree that some of the protocols in place in schools and elsewhere take the form of public health theater, but he has made it clear since this start that his one and only priority is returning his family's life to "normal" regardless of any consequences to others.

fwiw bars closed, schools open was basically what happened in Quebec for a while

I am curious though man alive, how many teachers have died? I only listen to twitter jockeys and pandemic devotees so haven't heard that partic data point

Pubs were closed for months in both Ireland and the UK. Schools never fully closed in the UK because they were always open for children of key workers.

Lol I qualified last year because I was making a 'parents' survival guide' podcast from home for the national broadcaster and the kids would have been audible in the background - a few layers of irony there

pretty clearly a suicide by cop here re: man alive's post upthread but was glad to supply my FP anyway

Its not astonishing that the only measures that would appear sensible to a fella are the ones that would suit him perfectly regardless of the many arguments against made many times (never yet acknowledged btw in any of my scannings these cursed fucking threads) but it is astonishing how heavily a fella has just casually leaned into being as close to an actual "nyah nyah cant hear you im right" troll as we've had in a long time

Id imagine covid times have had a lot to do with it, lord knows many others have doubled down on old or found new schticks but this has been a dickish routine for months now tbh

guys, i've given it a lot of thought and i've decided not to vote for man alive in his effort to join his local school board

I'm supposed to fly out on Thursday to see family for 4 days, but I'm really on the fence about it. It seems riskier and riskier. The likelihood of getting the bug in the middle of such a trip now seems pretty high, and it would suck to have to stretch the trip out another week or so while I isolate who-knows-where. I'm double vaxed and boosted, but I'm just not feeling so confident, given how people seem to be dropping like flies.

cancelled xmas travel plans. covid wasn't even the main reason. (driving 12 hours in a snowstorm in a kind of crappy car was.) feeling really good about it now.

feels like things are going off the rails again. My kid's karate class is cancelled because the teacher has Covid. My sister-in-law's workplace is shut down because staff members have Covid. 70 new cases in the school district yesterday.

Yeah, it's getting pretty nuts everywhere. Our town, which is 83% vaccinated for everyone 5 and up, and pretty reliable in terms of masking, just posted a higher single day case count last Friday than at any other single day during the entire pandemic.

I'm in Hawaii, on the trip we were originally going to take in March 2020. One of the few states, like Illinois, that requires masks everywhere. So much is open air, of course, and beach and ocean don't need precautions, not really, but I do see some masking outdoors, here and there. I think COVID while obviously rising is currently modest in count here. Trip here was the longest I've had to wear a mask in a row. Ten or eleven hours? My family that is currently visiting in Australia essentially had to wear a mask for 30+ hours to get there.

I do have a good friend back home, among the most cautious and paranoid of all my friends, who, vaxxed and boosted, tested positive for the first time last week. Tired and fever for a few days, which are also the exact symptoms she had after the first two shots, fwiw.

Ten or eleven hours?

Monday through Friday, five days a week here. One of the biggest things I'm looking forward to about being off work around the holidays is to not have to wear one all day, every day.

Oof. Do you ever get breaks?

I'm hearing lots of things about stuff back home shutting down, either primitively or because of outbreaks.

People are shutting down establishments with clubs and rocks? Seems kinda, um, primitive to me.

xpost - not really? I’m in an open plan area all day, every day, so it’s on all the time (except when I’m taking a drink or a bite to eat). It’s annoying and yet another reason the open plan thing is a terrible idea.

Yeah, lots of Chicago bars and restaurants and closing early for the holidays and hoping for the best next week. Among hospitality folks on Instagram, there are also stories of places *not* closing that have positive-testing employees.

Bleak current city stats:

COVID Daily Update (Resumen Diario de COVID)
Daily averages, updated: December 20
Confirmed Cases (Casos confirmados): 1,776
Tests Conducted (Pruebas realizadas): 29,604
Deaths (Fallecidos): 10
Test Positivity (Tasa de positividad de la prueba): 7.3%https://t.co/UrMNMrLjQU pic.twitter.com/IaFmNkE2e3

— Chicago Department of Public Health - CDPH (@ChiPublicHealth) December 21, 2021

*are closing early

Lol at this take:

Twitter friendos, if you're freaked out & in despair right now, congratulations, you can assess situations accurately. And feel free to vent on this thread. Remember, we *can* do hard things. Now is the time to stick together & help where we can, in constructive & authentic ways.

— 🔀🍃😷💉no hopium zone 🔀🍃😷💉 (@LoboGerda) December 21, 2021

Nothing wrong with feeling freaked out, but weird to position it as a path to lucid thinking

it's called the power of dialectical drinking

Wow, didn't realize that my lifetime of free-floating high anxiety was actually just a manifestation of my ability to see through the Matrix

Judging by mask compliance at the three airports I went through today, we are truly fucked. A year ago I would've thought triple vax, double mask, and daily rapid tests would've been more than enough precaution but today I feel like a reckless fool.

i switched to an N95 today. definitely a lot tighter on my face. but i'm getting used to it.

that's what -- well, never mind.

Just as a report from the ground, the clinic my wife works at was so overwhelmed with patients that they closed the doors around 2 pm. At 8 pm, they finally finished treating all those who had registered by 2.