Thanks. At least I get to work from home an extra week for this.
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Man, take care, all of you. Lots of rest and comfort for that little girl, lots of video games for you : )
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Well… totally over this covid stuff now - I am just refusing to test. Can’t catch covid if you don’t test right?
The government here has decided that to diffuse the situation, they don’t want you to report if you test positive. Test positive and asymptomatic? Just look after yourself and have a few days off.
Kids in our Condo tested positive whilst asymptomatic… causing much hand wringing. Again, not testing my kids because they aren’t showing symptoms and I don’t want them u to I miss school.
Faster we all get this, faster life can resume!
This would produce a rapid and unending tide of variants and kill millions more people. In the UK alone we have about 3.7 million people who have cancer, autoimmune disease, transplanted organs, etc, who effectively have no immune system, and would simply die.
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While this may be true for things like the chicken pox, unfortunately covid does not work that way : ( People can catch it repeatedly, and it can be worse in the second or third round. Fortunately, the vast majority of kids seem to handle it better than adults!
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This is what’s been driving me bananas whenever I think about it. Whatever decision you make which increases the probability of variants is vanishingly unlikely to cause a new variant to arise, but so many people are making those decisions that further variants seem almost inevitable, and a worse variant has potentially horrific, global consequences. So you’re constantly trying to approximate comparing a incomprehensibly low risk of an incomprehensibly catastrophic consequence against a certain modest benefit.
So I feel a lot of sympathy for people who are constantly put in this impossible position and eventually give up, which is how I’m thinking about Baelnor’s comment (correction invited, of course). I’m grateful that these past few years haven’t ground me down to the point where that’s where I’m landing. And everybody faces different challenges, so I won’t say people saying things like Baelnor are blameworthy. But I will say this: hearing and seeing people not taking the pandemic and its associated risks seriously makes my life harder even aside from the spread they may generate or the variants that might incubate. It wears me down, and feels like an expression of hostility rather than solidarity.
Which, come to think of it, is probably a big part of the problem. If you just give up, you can hang out with other people who’ve given up and mutually support one another. If you don’t, you’re acting in solidarity with people you can’t encounter; the usual social rewards of solidarity are inaccessible.
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We saw 150 dead kids in the UK last year from covid. I stopped following the count at that point. I know we write off old people, and they have been the majority of the dead, but the lack of intervention in schools, and it’s half-hearted nature when it has been implemented (masking in communal areas but not classrooms, for instance), has resulted in completely unnecessary deaths and disabilities in children. Vaccinations reduce the chance of long covid, which is good for adults, but we haven’t been vaccinating children, and their chances of long covid are not any lower, that I’ve seen.
We used to have entire wards for polio victims. We don’t any more, because we vaccinated and we made sure everyone didn’t get polio.
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I’d been worn down to the point of “let it rip” and I said so much to a work colleague. Later I remembered he had lost a young daughter to cystic fibrosis many years ago, but if she were alive now then “letting it rip” would probably be a death sentence for her anyway. Made me think about what I was saying
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I have half drafted a response to this a couple of times. Appreciate the understanding for my mini rant.
Literally the next morning after I posted, my 8 year oldX single vaxxed son spiked a temp with covid.
We managed through the small fever for a couple of days, daily testing before we went in public as per health advice. His sisters went to school as normal.
7 days later, no one else in the house has it, and he has been up and about and super Bored being caged inside after a couple of days lying on the couch.
Now, I know this is my loved experience and it is different to others, and I also know that we have the vaccine and a weaker strain running about.
But I am glad I have the thought on the back of my head of “we shut the world down for two years for this?” I am privileged to have such a mild experience.
Also, fun fact, no one else in the house got it. He didn’t isolate, we didn’t keep distance or do anything different.
The omicron is the “flu” the anti vaxxers have been using to question the motives of the politics. I can see why. This is no longer the covid of 2019 - and we need to start living with covid the way we live with a lot of other infectious diseases.
Unless you have elderly or immuno-compromised people near you. Then it’s not “just the flu.”
Be very worried when MAGA & anti-vaxxers start making sense to you. That’s an infection no vaccine will cure.
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Not sure what a MAGA is.
But as a society, we have accepted terrible outcomes as a cost for having something. Road deaths to be able to drive | gambling addiction for gambling | domestic violence, assault, drink driving, addiction for alcohol.
In the countries I am in (australia and Singapore) vax rates are 95%+ double vaxxed. The virus has mutated to be the omicron version which is not putting high % numbers in hospital or causing death.
I am not saying kill old people, but the Flu already does a solid effort of that. In Australia every flu season we expect 10,000 people to die from complications and I am sure that is terrible. But we live that risk now.
Early covid days I was fully behind the flatten the curve, still am, we did the right thing. However it has to start moving towards an end game.
Long covid freaks me out, but that’s for future self to deal with
MAGA is shorthand for a hardcore Trump fan, from his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. Many of them, particularly among those who get attention, are abrasive enough to have left many of the rest of us mildly traumatized, such that anything which sounds even close to like them often gets a harsh reaction. As a group, they tend toward epistemic closure, being more likely to reject contrary evidence and attack the source than to change their commitments.
It’s actually been quite heartening to me to see many in that category clearly denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and denouncing Putin specifically. Lots of them are sticking by Putin (Trump apparently included, though I’m not going to read or listen to his words if I can help it), but lots aren’t.
I tend to assume that American news and media are so widespread that everyone has a clear idea of what things are like here, but (getting back to how everyone’s doing) it’s been deeply disheartening to see the right abandon principle, democracy, and cooperation for most of my adult life. Until I was in college, it seemed like most people in government would try to get done what they thought was good policy, and would respect democracy enough that if they had fewer votes on their side, they knew they’d have to give more than they got. It seems as though, in the mid-90s, that stopped, and the right changed their goals to preventing any successes by the left. They largely abandoned compromise, and accelerated gerrymandering and voter suppression, culminating in the Trump-era attempt to simply ignore votes that didn’t go their way, on the thinnest legal excuse or via straightforwardly illegal and even violent means. These are the people with whom the politicians I support have to try to work, and the citizens who support them largely seem to want them to be this way, even when it means that policies they prefer get blocked.
So that’s who I’m sharing a country with: basically, assholes. It’s like having an astoundingly shitty neighbor whose kid is your kid’s best friend. You can’t escape it, and it’s exhausting and horrible and warps your perception of basically everything. These are the people who stood in the way of a sane and effective pandemic response, resulting in, I think, hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, simply because they can’t admit that they’re wrong or work with Democrats who were closer to right. They’re the people who don’t just oppose the costs of environmentalism, some pay to modify their vehicles to pollute extra. They’re folks who shut down streets in another country and border crossings to it to promote freedom. They support threatening to deliberately default (or actually defaulting) on the country’s debts with horrific systemic financial consequences, for themselves as much as anyone.
So, in some important ways, I’m not okay, and haven’t been for a while. While I try to be understanding and not judge from a with-me-or-against-me perspective, America is putting itself through some fairly traumatic politics, and some of my reactions reflect that. It means a ton to see people willing to sacrifice for the common good, because that’s pretty much what the MAGA types have decided is for losers. So that might give you some ideas about how to make the distinction between you and them clear enough that people don’t react with the weight of all that in their responses, and why it’s hard for us to avoid.
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I absolutely get what @Baelnor is saying and agree that we need to figure out how we’re going to live with COVID long-term. And, in countries where the vaccination rate is that high, the consequences of backing off restrictions now probably won’t be as severe. You can treat COVID more like the flu, which is what we’ll have to do long-term.
In the U.S. … yeah, @rinelk summed up that situation pretty well. The people saying it’s time to move on have been saying it for a while, and the loudest ones seem to (1) only care about themselves, and (2) actively want to hurt people who disagree with them, so they don’t give a damn how many immunocompromised people die because they have no interest in trying to contain the spread of the virus.
I could rant about these people for a while–a lot of them are my neighbors. Our upcoming town election has two measures on the ballot that damn well better not pass: one to limit voting hours and another to ensure all ballots are paper and counted by hand. I don’t think they have widespread support, but just seeing them pisses me off. And that’s pretty tame compared to some of the crap going on in the rest of the country, as Kelsey outlined. I think we’re going to have to find a happy medium, but I don’t know what that is, and I don’t trust a lot of people to have any interest in the compromise required to get there.
Oh, and as for long COVID … all 3 of my kids, who we’ve vaccinated as much as possible along the way, managed to contract COVID this winter. My daughter and one of my sons got through it fine. My other son, who caught it in early January, is still dealing with pain and fatigue that his doctor attributes to the virus causing inflammation in his muscles–he’s got long COVID. He was cleared to try some activities, so we went skiing yesterday, and a run down one of the easiest trails on the mountain left him as tired as he normally is at the end of several hours skiing double black diamonds. Everyone’s recovery from this damn virus is going to be a little bit different, so whether future you has to worry about long COVID seems to be just a roll of the dice.
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So sorry to hear about your son’s struggle, @geigerm. It is an all too common story right now, unfortunately, but at least that is driving a lot of research and funding for finding treatments to combat long covid. I hope his situation improves, and that you guys continue to try new activities.
I also don’t know what the “happy medium” is that you referenced, and it really seems like those in the government on both sides have little interest in finding it.
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Wishing your son all the best and hopefully a quick full recovery… Damn how I hate Corona.
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For us, we took it serious (especially since our March 2020 bout with the virus was so rough on me and my older daughter), went nowhere for a year until my wife and I got the shots last spring. Still kept the girls home all the time, only went a few places on our own, always masked. Then in November we got them vaccinated since they were in the 5-11 range. But at that point, it was basically over for us. Because I have no clue what else you would be waiting for after this.
There is no viable path to eradicating this virus. It is too contagious and people are too unwilling to do what is necessary. So if it will always be around, and we all have fresh vaccines against it, it seems like the logical thing is to treat it like the flu. We got our shot, now we go about our business. Especially since we now got it for the second time, which makes sense since the girls are now in dance and jiujitsu (each is in one of those, not both in both), as well as in their one day a week homeschool group, and it was…well, not fine, but way less serious. Mission accomplished, no regrets about our pandemic time and the sacrifices we made. And no regrets about ending it, because it could not go on forever. And once you accept that, the question becomes: if not now, when?
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For me, hospitalization rates are key. If the medical system is currently stressed by the pandemic, the community should intensify efforts to slow the spread. When rates are low enough or cases mild enough that the medical system is operating normally and has excess capacity, I’m willing to eat out again.
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