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

haaaaa

Living the dream

i don't even remember placing the order. didn't eat the sandwich obv

Dang man, door sandwich is the best kind of sandwich

I am lucky enough to live walking distance from work but I am a lazy moron and run late every morning and this morning I was running extra late and it was raining quite hard so I got the bus, which was bad because it was v full (which on reflection was inevitable since it was raining quite hard) and so I was pressed into several other people, and then by the time I got to work a) there was nobody else here who would've noticed me being late and b) it had stopped raining anyway

I disinfected my hands with a wetwipe after getting off the bus, and then with hand sanitiser on arriving in my building, and then washed my hands when I reached the right floor of the building, but yeah, I need to 1. get better at mornings and 2. maybe talk to my boss who is a p. reasonable person and will almost certainly agree that it's better for me to be 20 minutes late (and stay 20 minutes late at the end of the day, which is fine as I walk home anyway) but at a lower risk of making the whole team ill

Boy oh boy is the train ever empty this morning.

Yes, I should be walking to work, laziness + shit weather is my excuse.

This is so true..... @rivm #COVID2019NL #Corona pic.twitter.com/0tfcWnPmJl

— Lisette Paap (@Mama_Liset) March 12, 2020

This is indeed otm. Dutch gov not bothering with any real measures up till now, and it's beyond irresponsible at this point. It's mostly pointing to regional govs, science and health institutions and individual schools to come up with things. So it's p much left to everyone individual's judgement. Which will of course be totally fine, because people are sensible and logical beings erring on the side of caution amirite?

I would happily have walked to work, but I would've needed to get up an extra (checks) 3.5 hours early.

Yet another argument for switching jobs and ending this ridic commute.

The messaging (across the globe, tbh) has been a mess. It's everywhere. It could be everywhere. Limit exposure. You're already exposed. You may have it. You may have already had it. Stay inside. Avoid crowds. Avoid big crowds. Avoid everybody. And for how long? Each and every one of these things alters my personal daily calculations.

For example, our in-the-balance trip to Hawaii. Do we need to go? Of course not. What is gained by not going? Well, maybe we won't get exposed, on the plane, in the airport, in Maui. Or maybe we'll stay and get exposed here. Or maybe we've been exposed and we might bring it to Maui. Maybe we've been exposed, might go to Maui, come back, and *then* exhibit symptoms. Maybe we've been exposed, go to Maui, and then exhibit symptoms there. Maybe we stay and nothing happens. Maybe we go and nothing happens. Maybe it's all over Maui. Maybe it's all over Chicago. Maybe it's not all over both places but is by the time the trip comes around in a week. Maybe it all happens midway through the trip.

It feels like the *right* thing to do is not to go, but I'm also having trouble pinpointing exactly who that helps, or at least how it helps them.

I'm going to meet a newborn baby tonight and I'm very nervous about this.

It helps everyone. Very interaction is a chance you could pick it up or pass it on. So the fewer interactions the slower it spreads, the less chance someone vulnerable gets it and the more chance there is to find a vaccine before more vulnerable people get and the more able the healthcare system is able to cope with acute cases that do arise.

Babies and children have been ok so far haven’t they? They’re not getting it as much and I don’t think I’ve seen reports of fatalities.

xpost I can't remember when your trip is or if it's direct, through Honolulu, but if the airline(s)/accommodation loosened up the cancel policy, I would probably take it. If you are already having these thoughts you will be too stressed to enjoy it properly. Like IS THIS SNORKEL PROPERLY SANITIZED!?!?!

P sure I heard some casual Sinophobia on my way into the building this morning. Something akin to 'Asian people get it more easily! It started over there!'

I've heard a LOT of that.

heh, someone actually told my friend on the ny subway to get away from her (he's from singapore). Relatively pretty mild, he was so upset.

Heh, good point re: sanitizing snorkels. No, we're direct to Maui, and yes, they loosened up the cancellation policy, so I don't think we would lose *too* much money. It's more a thought experiment. Yeah, I know limiting exposure is the right idea, but there is no indication that, let alone self quarantine, is happening on anything sort of a large scale in this country. Yeah, the reason we wouldn't want to travel is, in the off chance we have it, we don't want to spread it. But in the off chance we have it or get it here, we don't want to spread it here, either. And that is a consideration every time we leave the house. Yet the messaging has not been clear or consistent on that point. Even Italy, they imposed quarantine .... with a bunch of loopholes, incl. closing restaurants early but not entirely. And they since seriously tightened restrictions, because half measures might as well be no measures. It seems if America is seriously about stopping this early, we all have to stay home. But America is rarely serious about anything, and I doubt that would happen.

and maui is not dense at all comparatively. We've driven all over that island and you could totally hide out on some beaches and not see people.

there was a recent article though about a canadian doctor who just returned from HI and tested positive, but they don't know when she got it (she had still been seeing patients).

Yeah. I wish we could drive there! A couple of our friends, driving is their compromise. One has a sick mother in Milwaukee, but may drive to visit rather than train it. Another was going to NY, but may drive instead of fly. Not that either ultimately may help. Just perhaps slow. By, like, a couple of hours.

I should, er, stress that I'm not particularly stressed. I and my family are healthy, and there is no one in our lives (here) at particular risk. Our older parents, who recently traveled, are out of the incubation range and doing well. Our families overseas in the UK and Australia are doing well. We are in a position to weather things for a while. For that we are quite thankful. My biggest issue these days is getting over a cold (yes, a boring cold, nothing but the sniffles) that my kid gave me that has somehow reduced my sense of taste to next to nothing.

so it's 5 am and i just wrote this up, hope it's not inappropriate to c&p, i don't have anywhere else to say this shit

Everybody wants to be judgemental now. Monday morning quarterbacks, looking to assign blame, whose FAULT is this. Honestly? Honestly I don't see how things could have gone down any differently. No, we didn't immediately recognize the scale of the threat or understand how best to respond. It's something that we've never faced in our lifetimes! Learning through experience, this is a necessary expedient. You can make all sorts of plans for whatever might possibly happen, but shit is happening now and it took us some time to figure out what, exactly, it is, and what we need to do about it.

So this "If we'd implemented a global quarantine two weeks ago we could have saved so many lives", it fails to recognize that underlying reality. I'm not an expert, but what I believe and how I react matters, what I'm willing to accept matters. The Overton Window has to move and it doesn't do that instantaneously. Last week I was focused entirely on two statistics - the mortality rate and the infectiousness of COVID-19. And I was reassured because everybody else was "OH MY GOD WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE" and I did not see that as an immediate outcome. I assumed that I already had the coronavirus and that I was going to live.

Well, now we're starting to understand the actual fucking problem of this epidemic. Which is not mortality, but the number of people who are going to get seriously ill. For 80% of the population COVID-19 is mild, we were told. The implication of that is obvious and I chose not to think about it, chose to focus on the positive. There are going to be a lot of people who are going to be very sick, and the number of them who are going to die is directly dependent on our healthcare systems' capacity to treat those people. That is why this is a crisis. For a quarantine to have started two weeks ago, you would have had to convince the global population that what appeared to be a minor inconvenience was a major crisis, that everybody needed to stop leaving their house immediately despite nobody being sick, and more importantly to do that without having the entire populace completely overtaken by mass panic.

I've lived through a few hurricanes. People are capable of being convinced. People are capable of preparing for this shit. As long as, you know, it's happened in living memory. Which it hasn't, and all we can do is make pointless comparisons to the Spanish Flu which are about as valuable and useful as talking about the Antonine Plague as far as I can tell.

This is going to be difficult. People are going to die unnecessarily. A lot of things are going to go down that are outside anybody's control. My personal priority isn't pointing the finger right now, it's surviving and learning as much as I can from the experience.

xp I think my calculus in a situation like yours Josh, if indeed the factors seem to be too numerous and contradictory, would be to err on the side of caution and just not go.

The only certainty is that by not traveling you reduce the odds of becoming a vector. Yes, it's impossible to know by how much, but if it's the welfare of others we're talking about you may decide that doesn't matter.

xp Kate otm. Speaking of pointing fingers: I heard your presidetn referred to COVID19 as "the foreign virus"...

Not my presidetn.

xxpost I tend to agree. But I just got my first real world example of personal calculation. My daughter just asked me for a ride to school, and I said ok. Then she asked if we could give her friend a ride, since I prefer to carpool. OK. Then she added that her friend needed a ride because her friend's mom was sick. Whoa, wait a second. Sick how? She had to write her back for me to make sure it wasn't bad, and indeed no fever or vomiting, just doesn't feel well (turns out it was a UTI, which my wife knew). But if her mom *was* exhibiting ay flu-like symptoms, I guess I would have said ... no?

xpost kate: Modern people are very reactive instead of proactive (ex: their health) and that really needs to change. And the idealized/fetishization of separateness and individual freedom means people don't have an understanding of how everything is connected and what could be impacted.

I'm pretty much as lucky as I can be w/r/t risk to others or myself - I'm young, no risk factors, and in Canada where so far the confirmed infection rate is not very high (knock on wood); more importantly neither work nor life puts me in contact with elderly folks except in briefest passing via public transit; I did have US travel plans this summer but it seems like it'll be possible to get refunded on most if not all of that so all I'll experience is mild disappointment; I can work from home as needed so there's no financial risk.

Mostly I just wish there was something useful I could actually DO rather than just avoid doing. (I expect there will be no shortage of Gofundmes etc to help keep ppl afloat when they inevitably lose their jobs or risk eviction so I guess there's that.)

I'm uncertain who the we/us is in Kate's post?

i assumed it was a general we/us? And for clarification my post was also in general and not a criticism but just an add on of what kate wrote.

i will totally blame the US government though for lying and wishing it would all just go away and our entire history of failing to provide an adequate healthcare system that cares for everyone.

To clarify, too: "your presidetn" wasn't meant to in any way align you with Trump, Kate.

I just feel there's been some variance visible even in this thread on the metric "recognize the scale of the threat or understand how best to respond"?

I love this article (my post was touching it). It's mostly about climate change but also could be applied to how we got here.

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/07/the-ideology-of-isolation/

oh shit. sorry. I just realized this was not apolitical anymore.

Schools close, Tom Hanks, trouble in the big banks, no vaccine, quarantine, no more toilet paper seen.

Travel ban, Weinstein, panic COVID-19, NBA, gone away, what else do I have to sayyyyyy https://t.co/N86qx9wZxq

— The Caffeinated Therapist (@bellabee13) March 12, 2020

You're covered by the thread title tbf xp

Got a weird email from my manager at 10pm about figuring out how to keep our operations going remotely. So I guess I might be working from home soon.

Having said all that, in retrospect it does occur to me that "if you think you're sick stay home" probably wasn't terribly helpful advice. I'm not interested in assigning blame, but I am interested in knowing who on earth thought propagating that message was a good idea, and why they thought it was a good idea.

This is a new pathogen that none of us have experienced before. We don't know what its early symptoms are. We don't know in detail how it spreads. There's reason to suspect that there might be some period of time - we don't know how long - wherein an infected person is asymptomatic but can still infect others. Differentiating it from cold or flu or other common upper respiratory infections is extremely difficult. Under these conditions, what's the functional difference between "If you think you might be sick, stay home" and "Stay home if you feel like it"? And what logical thought process would lead one to conclude that either of these statements might possibly be an effective containment measure?

-

This is mostly apolitical but since it came up... I don't speak for the President, the President doesn't speak for me, listen to me, care what I have to say, acknowledge me as human. I don't know what I can do here but shrug. We have in office a professionally incompetent President whose ideological and political base is centered around the sorts of people who only a few years ago were spinning wild conspiracy theories about "FEMA death camps". Do I think this bodes well for the effectiveness of the federal response to the crisis? No. Is it likely that people who listen to the President are more likely to suffer adverse outcomes because of the President's words and actions here? Yes. Would I like to see the President held responsible for those words and actions? Yes. Do I, at this point, have any practical opportunity to make this happen? Not really. Is all this even a priority of mine right now? No, my priority is, like I said, surviving and learning as much as I can out of the experience.

Like I said, a lot of things are going to go down outside of anyone's control, and if I can say anything about the last four years, it's that I've gotten very used to that. I have a much better sense now, I feel, of what things I can practically affect, and how, than I did in 2016.

I think a lot of state and local governments recognize that they cannot rely on the stupid asshole for help, let alone competence.

Looking into our trip, it seems the only catch is airbnb, whose cancellation policy is linked (for now) to explicit outbreak destinations. Ergo, if we cancelled our trip to Maui we'd likely have to eat the cost, unless the owners themselves (did the right thing and) allowed us to cancel or at least reschedule.

Oh great, another US politics thread

Babies and children have been ok so far haven’t they? They’re not getting it as much and I don’t think I’ve seen reports of fatalities.

― gramsci in your surplice (gyac), Thursday, 12 March 2020 11:58 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i understand why ppl are being fuzzy out of sensitivity to those held to me most at risk, but imo this us why clarity about this stuff has to be prioritised.

ppl will be dicks with the info ir not, but the info has to be clear

I’d be nervous about meeting a baby in case it gave it to me

Try to avoid handshakes with babies.

don't share a snorkel with a baby.

If you're going to a business meeting make sure no babies have been invited.

*must not make masturbating in front of babbies joke*

2020 Babby Annual Meeting has been canceled.

If you're going to a business meeting make sure no babies have been invited.

― God gave toilets rolls to you, gave toilet rolls to you (Tom D.), Thursday, 12 March 2020 13:21 (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

would that twere so simple

id be nervous meeting a baby, only cause they’re so judgmental

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAG-Ec4b-zw

lol