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

At least Philly is willing to bring them back. With Illinois gubernatorial elections and Chicago mayoral elections both coming up, I have a feeling they are never coming back here.

The idea of bringing back face coverings seems relatively innocuous to me - but it feels like it would be perceived as "a lockdown" here (UK).

the local Sainsbury's has removed its 'please wear mask' notices. but nothing has really changed apart from the people who ignored the signs no longer have signs to ignore.

the perspex barriers are still there. they did take them away once before, came back within a week

uk weekly deaths up 45%, 1600 a week. 170k total.

It should be relatively innocuous, but I still see people losing their goddamn minds when being asked to wear a mask.

If the venues don't require masks, there's no way people are going to wear them because the bands tweet about it. I wonder if venues are going to start re-instituting mask requirements from a money perspective since shows keep getting canceled (also wonder how many bands are catching COVID from literally playing shows, working with the local crew, or is it more from generally being on tour aside from the venues themselves).

Who knows, seems like they are still going the other direction, even in cities that are seeing a rise in cases, such as D.C.:

A handful of D.C. music venues, including all the venues under the I.M.P. umbrella — 9:30 Club, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Lincoln Theatre, and The Anthem — have dropped their vaccine requirements to attend shows.

Masks wearing is still a legal requirement in this part of the UK (for another 6 days). Compliance varies wildly from day to day, place to place and class to class but overall, is probably hovering around 50% generally. 30% in Asda, 40% on buses, 95% in Waitrose, 90% at Dead Can Dance last week, though once audience seated it was probably 10%. Around 10% of people in my city currently have Covid.

I think it will take me a considerable amount of time to stop looking at anyone not wearing a mask in certain situations and not be thinking they are a total ****.

if you want to avoid getting infected, don't go to tightly packed rock concerts. Masks are not going to give you the kind of prevention you want in that environment.

i have been to a load of tightly packed concerts recently and am fairly surprised i haven't been infected again.

Twitter feed seems to be filled with show cancellations due to positive results (Low/Divide & Dissolve and Superchunk being two of the higher profile ones)

Mercury Rev fell off the tour with BJM for similar reasons.

We've gone to three shows so far (maybe 300-400 in attendance and 50% masked?) and N-95'ed it the whole time. So far, so good.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/04/us-1-million-covid-death-rate-grief/629537/

ty, karl

that yong article says dozens of things that badly need to be said and publicly recognized. they could stand being said frequently, too, because people don't absorb those kinds of truth in one sitting.

Thanks for sharing that

patti just called out two people who weren’t wearing their masks during this Company talkback. she asked nicely, they were horribly fucking rude to her (imagine saying “we pay your salary” to patti fucking lupone), they got kicked out and she walked offstage

— sarah jae (@sarahjaeleiber) May 11, 2022

patti just called out two people who weren’t wearing their masks during this Company talkback. she asked nicely, they were horribly fucking rude to her (imagine saying “we pay your salary” to patti fucking lupone), they got kicked out and she walked offstage

— sarah jae (@sarahjaeleiber) May 11, 2022

Don't know how that posted twice.

honestly I wish Patti had just ripped their hearts out and screamed KALIMAAAAAAAA

nobody pays Patti's salary!

plantation owner mentality on parade

Anecdotally, COVID appears to be absolutely tearing through our area. I would say with nearly 100% certainty that I know more positive people in our circles right now than even at the height of Omicron. Just yesterday alone learned of six separate families that have at least one positive member, most of them have 2 or 3. Thankfully no reports of anything more serious than cold symptoms and low grade fevers from any of them, but it feels everywhere. Every single one of them did at home testing, so none of these are reflected in the numbers.

do they suspect where they might've caught it?

Three of the families that we are closest to all suspect school because their kids tested positive and displayed symptoms first, but all three kids are in different schools (our district dashboard confirms a sizable uptick at pretty much every school in the district over the past few weeks). One friend thinks she got it at a work event and I don't know about the others.

I’ve known more people who’ve gotten it in the past two months than the rest of the pandemic, myself included.

Indeed, for nearly everyone, it seems to be simply a very bad head cold, so the vaccines are doing good work, but Christ it’s fucked up the next week or so of my life.

how you holdin' up?

which obviously is better than dying or being very ill, i should say.

Im fine, thanks for asking. Feel better today than I have the past two, and my husband and I even had a cheeky little argument, so we’re both on the mend.

Cool! Let me know if I can provoke an argument with you in the books and gay threads.

Glad you are on the mend, tables. Actually heard from two more people since my last post, one of my son’s baseball teammates won’t be at the game tomorrow because he is quarantining after two siblings tested positive and another kid in my son’s grade. It’s kinda wild to be hearing this so much right now.

For me, Omicron was the big "lots of people I know getting it" moment, lately I haven't noticed any uptick though I can see statistically it's there

Bunch of students out, cases going up throughout the district. Looks a lot like January.

Cool! Let me know if I can provoke an argument with you in the books and gay threads.

lol hugs

feeling you back, tabes :)

Well, turned out my dad got it last week, for the first and hopefully only time, though he is already on the mend and said the impact was more like a very bad cold. I was rather curious, since he's been fully vaxxed up and boosted and been very careful this whole time. Turns out he and a couple of fellow track coaches and their students went to a meet in a shared van and they assumed that because the students were tested daily and the coaches were all vaxxed and etc. they were fine. That...was not the case. Half the van caught it. I refrained from giving my dad grief since I know he would have already done that to himself. But I expect not to hear a story like that again. (My mom apparently doesn't have it, which is good as she was NOT amused by any of this.)

As with any virus, it fascinates me how you can, like, share the same bed yet not catch it entirely.

I hope your dad's okay, Ned.

Based on the chat yesterday I'd say so. But given everything we know and don't know about it, I'm going to retain at least a slight worry given his age (81) for some long while to come.

Deservedly. It's another example of how, more than two years later, the urge to return to some kind of normality has mental health benefits worth risking potentially disastrous physical costs.

Good luck, please.

Echoing what others have said, I know more people who have it now than at basically any point.

I've got Boy Harsher and Stereolab tickets over the next few months and I really don't know if I'm going to feel like being around so many sweaty strangers in close confines... particularly since like 8 of us would be wearing masks.

Mm. It's a wrench to not see Six Organs of Admittance this Sunday, since I try to never ever miss any show by Ben, but given the circumstances, I'm probably avoiding it. After that, aside from one show I was iffy on in early June, I'm not planning on seeing anything until at least late August.

My wife is supposed to go to her niece's college graduation and her brother and SIL have covid, but everything is still on because some doctor said they were fine to participate (even though still symptomatic) five days after testing positive provided they are masked. I haven't heard this exact permutation of advice but hope she reconsiders.

Hope you are still doing better tables.

Really appreciate the *chef's kiss* timing of our spike around here peaking (I hope) right at the exact same time as allergy season kicking into overdrive.

PBKR, if you go to the CDC website, at least as of last week, thats the advisement— after five days you are good if you wear a mask everywhere. It’s wildly stupid, imo, but oh well.

I am doing fine, jvc, thanks for asking. I will say that I also have horrible allergies and woke up this morning with a face full of snot—luckily, this seems to be due to the fact that one can literally see the pollen floating through the air right now in Philly, as the rest of me feels better than it has in days, and I also slept like a rock last night.

Huh. Good luck everyone!

Well not even a week since my last post and I've lost track of new COVID infections in our circles. Learned of five more just today alone.

Pandemic party planning:

Our local numbers have still been low but starting to go up. We had a party at our house over the weekend, mostly outdoors, and had windows and doors open in the house for when people were inside. I think we timed it about as well as we could, we planned it right when our local numbers had hit all-time lows and managed to get it in before they climbed up again. We had probably about 50 people here over the course of the evening. So far have not heard of any cases resulting from it. I realize this is an inherently risky thing to do, but not having social occasions for the last two years has been killing us. (Well, not literally. Not like COVID is killing people. But you know what I mean.) And we heard from everybody how happy they were to get out and see other people. Some of the crowd were people who have already returned to being quite social, but for others this was their first real time out in two years.

We take risks as much based on our mental health as anything else, tipsy. I sympathize.

Two years is a lot of life. If you are a person that thrives on socializing, it can really take a toll to just not be able to do that freely (or at all) for so long. Even moreso for kids for whom that two years might be a quarter, a third, or half their life.

Oh, the end of my relations with various bartenders around town during the pseudo-lockdown killed me, I realize, as banal as it sounds. I'm single and a hermit for the most part during the week; bringing a book to a bar or bar-restaurant on a Saturday and wiling away a couple hours while chatting to the bartender refreshed me. I returned to it when positivity rates bottomed out in late February; I've retreated, slightly, in the last couple weeks, preferring outdoor joints. But man...

I had an interview yesterday for a once/week bartending gig at an outdoor seasonal spot near me, and the people interviewing me were like, "Oh yeah, totally recognize you— you always tipped well. Haven't seen you in a while, tho," and I had to explain that I'd basically stopped going to indoor bars during the pandemic. I hope I get it, would be nice to make a couple hundo under the table once a week.