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

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.

yeah we are totally fucked

we should probably start a new thread in 2022, this has almost 14K messages

In the span of 13 minutes tonight we learned that my brother’s 3 year-old son tested positive for covid today and my wife’s adopted sister’s 3 year-old also tested positive. In both cases just minor sniffles thus far and no other family members have tested positive yet, but still waiting on results for some. Christmas Eve with my family has now been canceled, other plans are still up in the air. The local school district has quintupled the prior case peak in the last two days. This is just absolutely tearing through us now and, not to say we shouldn’t take additional measures to slow things down, I think we are largely already too late.

starting to hear about a bunch of cancelled NYC shows for APAP and it sucks

possibly insensitive question: does anyone know anyone who has been hospitalized during the omicron run? Because i am hearing about A LOT of people getting positive in the past week but no one who has done anything but just stay home. continuing to hold onto the "best case scenario" hope that this is going to be a massive flu wave that we can bounce back from in january once it sweeps through the population. Unclear about how easy omicron is to be reinfected with.

i am going back and forth to acupuncture and physical therapy and the city is very much on edge. Something like 5% of folks on the subway going maskless and people are straight up staring. therapist telling me that they are getting half of their clients and physicians calling in for the past four days. i don't know if i should be leaving the house or not and for the first time during the pandemic i don't have a lot of choice.

xp to myself: i'm not sure i know anyone who isn't fully vaccinated and most everyone is boosted as well, so that's a definite mitigating factor... right?

I'm supposed to be flying up to Scotland after Christmas, which is why I'm furious I'm still having come into work this week - especially as there's been numerous cases there in the last week or so.

I'm supposed to be relocating to Scotland in early January, and we've idiotically invited a vaccine-hesitant friend for Xmas. Why did we do that?! Fingers crossed really, I think they're fairly cautious at least. Resolution for 2022: think before you act.

forks, I am in PT currently for my foot had similar thoughts regarding whether I should be going or not. Therapist said all her patients were vaxxed fwiw, but they aren't checking status or that it's 3 v 2 shots. I cancelled my appt for tomorrow, mostly because I am going to see my parents and wanted to give a chance for any symptoms to develop before I show up. But I am planning on picking up again next week because it is actually helping. You gotta take care of other aspects of your health, too.

I don't know if schoolkids in the US are wearing masks or not but they certainly aren't here and I've got to travel on buses with the little bastards every morning... oh, and if their parents are with then they don't wear masks either.