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

it's just in the UK every public place has had posters up saying you must get a free pcr test if you have one of: a temp, a continuous cough, or a change in sense of smell or taste. for nearly two years.

so I thought it would be odd for it not even to occur to you if (as per this person) you were ill enough to stay off work with a fever. but actually I think it's fairly common.

in the US prior to the pandemic, we were pressured to go to work with fevers all the time, so I think that's ingrained in us.

so my brother works at Universal Studios and a lot of his co-workers have COVID. he mostly works outside and they have masks, but Universal makes them wear cloth masks (I gave him KN95s and told him to wear them underneath the cloth mask).

but he visits my folks tonight while I'm out and he's here when I get back, and he has two cloth masks on. folks aren't masked. a little frustrated cos I think the best way to mitigate the risk of his potential exposure (we don't know that he's been exposed for sure), everybody should have been. he kept his distance, but he was indoors with them so y'know....

so now I wait and see if they get sick. I'm guessing it's low likelihood, based on all the unknowns, and two cloth masks are better than zero msks. and while I've been worried about them, chances are they would fare ok because they're triple vaccinated, neither are immunosuppressed. but I don't want to TEST that damn theory, ya know?

Definitely feel this wave inching closer - as noted we had 23 months without a scare, then two in one day. But my little tribe remains lucky. On Christmas day we delivered some cookies to my sister, who we felt needed cheering up. Spent ~15 minutes distanced/masked/outside. Two of her kids are positive now, with one sick.

My immediate fam all tested negative this morning, but as close calls mount, we're getting anxious, ngl

are there any figures on how many boosted individuals have died of covid? have any at all? might be nice to have this sort of thing in the news. my suspicion is that the risk of serious illness for triply jabbed individuals is essentially zero.

There was news early last week of a dude in Texas but was unjabbed.

are there any figures on how many boosted individuals have died of covid? have any at all? might be nice to have this sort of thing in the news. my suspicion is that the risk of serious illness for triply jabbed individuals is essentially zero.

oh yes i recognise all sorts of people will continue to be very vulnerable. i mean for reg’lar folks.

I don't think I've come across any reported cases of someone triple vaxxed who still died of infection, and even those triple vaxxed that have been hospitalized I think are often also dealing with some pretty serious co-morbidities.

We all flew on the 20th and came back on the 27th. No one got or felt sick during our stay, no one feels bad now (jetlag aside; or is it covid!?). Both kids want to hang with friends/have sleepovers on New Year's Eve, so we'll give them each home tests, and ask that their friends be tested, too, just to be safe(r).

I seem to recall seeing a chart recently that said something like 0.1% of infected, boosted people have died? They might not have been reg'lar.

From personal experience, of the 19 of us who caught Omicron at my running club Xmas party, 4 had had their boosters and were virtually asymptomatic.

The rest of us were double jabbed and were pretty rough for around 2-5 days before feeling better again. All recovered at home without needing any external treatment.

I feel like this is the endgame we’re striving for, bar another worse variant. Everybody’s just got to get vaxxed (if they can).

Wait, there are vaccines?!

From the Independent:

"NHS hospitals have been asked if they can host temporary “field” hospitals amid fears over bed capacity as Omicron admissions rise. The plans, first reported by the Health Service Journal, comes amid rising concerns over the coming wave in Covid admissions in January. According to the HSJ report, trusts were also asked to review their mortuary capacity."

what happened to the Nightingale hospitals? afaicr they didn't have enough staff to make them have any impact?

It's amazing how quickly things change. In heavily vaccinated Miami-Dade County two weeks ago I'd see about 60 percent of store customers masked; now we're back to eight or nine out of 10 masked.

masking is utterly shot here. maybe 20-25% in our stores is my guesstimate, in places that even during Delta were maybe 80-90%.

wow -- that high during Delta but not now?!

x-post to kinder: my impression was a combination of a) not enough staff and b) too basic (that is, the treatment was more complex than expected so needed more equipment than you'd realistically put in a field hospital. (With a disclaimer of not a health care professional in this field so might be chatting nonsense).

(UK) Prior to it becoming law again, face-covering wearing had seemed to increase dramatically, here ... in my local supermarket. It had become unusual to see anyone without a face covering, after a period of it seeming to slip a lot.

I think Omicron is moving so swiftly that it hasn't yet sunk in with a lot of people. I heard various holiday anecdotes of friends or relatives making "now that COVID is done" remarks. Masks will probably continue to ramp up as more realize how widespread it is once again.

Masking is so inconsistent, we spent the holiday with family in Ann Arbor and though we didn’t go many places at all, saw very consistent masking. That is until I had to run into the local Meijer to pick up a prescription for my mother in law and maybe 40% of the people in the shop, employees included, had masks on. A few had masks pulled down below their chins, but most didn’t even appear to have masks at all. Didn’t click until the way out that they had no signage posted about masks.

I think Omicron is moving so swiftly that it hasn't yet sunk in with a lot of people.

Where I'm at in NJ it's very much the opposite. I'm seeing more masks, and I'm seeing block-long lines outside pharmacies and lab vans for tests. People are scared here.

x-post to kinder: my impression was a combination of a) not enough staff and b) too basic (that is, the treatment was more complex than expected so needed more equipment than you'd realistically put in a field hospital. (With a disclaimer of not a health care professional in this field so might be chatting nonsense).

Boston area is pretty hard-core these days, I'm seeing runners and bicyclists wearing masks, single people in cars, etc.

I myself am starting to play Sidewalk Chicken again, when passersby approach.

In my part of Chicago (not bougie, lots of first-gen immigrants), I’m seeing mostly masked people even outside now.

wow -- that high during Delta but not now?!

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 29, 2021 2:40 PM bookmarkflaglink

really how it sort of materialized is that mask-wearing began declining immediately after Desantis made mandates illegal, so they were that high during Delta simply because many people were still doing it due to habit, but over time more and more people stopped.

Where I'm at in NJ it's very much the opposite.

well yes, different places are going to have different responses. Also, New Jersey has one of the highest concentration of cases in the country

I've never seen much of anything less than full mask compliance where I am, but today at a (shitty) supermarket I saw three people without so much as a dicknose.

people should wear masks, yes, in this omicron wave

government should be clearer and more forceful to even out the stresses on health provision

but goddamn unless i'm with my immunocompromised mother i am done with being worried about other people masking or not

if you wear a KN95 or an N95, chances are you're well protected. you'd be better protected if others had it on too, but you are still better off (significantly) than if you didn't.

I get more mad that they're not wearing it because they're prolonging this fucking pandemic though.

it is definitely better to mask up, especially right now, but more people wearing masks will not end the pandemic

Yup. But it does slow it down until some of the newer treatments become available.

Xpost it would drastically reduce transmission if everyone was supplied and wore N95s.

The pandemic is not ending through eradication, but containment. Masks are a measure of containment

it will only end when enough people have either been vaccinated, infected, or both

a mass change in behavior isn't going to happen, irresponsible people will continue to be irresponsible

Herd immunity is not happening. Just about every epi has given up on that
Esp when infection from one strain doesn't protect against all.

Containment, controlling the number of cases in circulation is going to be the way out. Countries will decide what acceptable levels of death are

Moodles, I'm not sure what you're arguing?

that masks are decent way to protect yourself and people around you, but they are not going to be adopted on nearly a wide enough scale, and even then, they are probably not the key to actually ending the pandemic.

There is no one key!

This ain't Lord of the Rings.

they are probably not the key to actually ending the pandemic.

No one says they will.

We've become so used to picking off serious diseases one by one, through mass vaccination and improved treatments, that when a new serious disease emerges and becomes endemic it feels like the 'natural order' of continuous medical progress has been grossly violated. It hasn't.

The anti-vaxx idiocy is deeply troubling, but that won't stop the development of new tools and treatments. Those new treatments should help to mitigate the worst consequences of having covid with us for the long haul. One may also hope the anti-vaxx cult will weaken and fade as years pile up, covid vaccines improve, and irrational fears become more and more ridiculous in the face of long term positive results.

I think you overestimate the intelligence of anti-vaxxers

I'm not relying on their intelligence, but rather their attention span.

i'm not saying i'm right

i'm not 'making a case'

i'm just sick of passing judgement

anti-vaxxers will either finally get vaccinated, build up some immunity through repeated infections, or die. The rest of us will muddle through, masking up as needed, avoid infection and spread as best as possible, probably also get covid at some point, and then pray that boosters, etc come through.

masks are definitely needed right now, but given how much Omicron is spreading in states that have previously had solid mitigation in place, I'm guessing they are not as effective as they once were. This is leading me to think that the line of thought that if we just get some more people to wear masks things will be alright is a rather large false hope.

also there's no realistic path to getting more people to wear masks.

Focus on mask wearing and case numbers just seems like anxiety treadwheeling for the sake of it

Things are long past case numbers being a key metric

Maskwatching- and reporting on it- for me at this stage would be almost a compulsive level of covidsharing

No one has ever said "things will be alright."

Masks are to prevent your beloveds and strangers from catching your infection. The science says they still works.

Stop worrying about it.

hypervigilance :(

This is once again the strawman thread