The lesson I’m learning is that we should have worn masks during “flu season” all along. In crowded and poorly ventilated spaces at least. It’s a cheap and easy measure and I don’t know what the BFD is with masks.
I didn’t know lemmy was full of anti maskers. Wear a mask ffs. You should have kn95s or n95s. They work and prevent all sorts of illness. Even a regular mask works better than nothing. They did plenty of studies.
But fuck it, let’s all just return to the office anyways. Amirite? SMH
Well yeah. If we don’t the landowners will lose money on all their ugly and useless office buildings and that would be sooo awful :(
I wonder how much of the wave is due to return to office
How many people haven’t returned? My company, and nearly everyone I know has been back for 2 years.
My company only started cracking down on it a couple months ago. Nominally the majority of employees were supposed to be working in the office three days a week as of April 2022, but most of the roles don’t require physical presence so people just kept working from home. Now the company has shifted to tracking badge data to make sure people are actually coming into the office, despite three years of data demonstrating we’re just as productive as home…
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It’s not totally clear yet. My role is fully remote, so the info I have is second-hand from memos and word of mouth. The company has apparently been using an automated system to send scary emails to people not badging in (with their manager CCed), but I don’t know what happens if you just ignore those. Memos have made vague threats of implications for performance reviews, but those haven’t happened yet since they announced they would be tracking badge data.
My company is just doing the big return to work push now, the turnover that they’re gonna get hit with is hilarious. They have no idea how mad everyone is about it.
Here in Norway there was a marked shift to acceptance for more home office post-Corona. We did have stricter and longer restrictions than you guys though, and basically things didn’t go back to normal until winter 2022. At my work I’d say 80% do home office at least 1 day per week, and 30% do home office 4/5 days in the week (we have one mandatory office day per week). I’d also say that a few percent have taken that opportunity to do “quiet quitting” and essentially do nothing (joining meetings from the car in the middle of the day on their way to IKEA and stuff like that, never engaging in or starting initiatives by themselves etc.), but that’s on management for not getting rid of them.
Personally I still go 5/5 days by own choice, because I live right next by, prefer the ritual of switching into job/focus mode that it is to walk to the office, and like sitting in a separate place that has no distractions (compared to home, where I would take 5 minutes to do the dishes, take an extended trip to the grocery at lunch, etc) and that my brain only associates with working.
In the UK at least, most people I know who work in an office can choose to WFH or do hybrid working. I do hybrid by choice, I don’t want to WFH full time.
Just in time with school starting back up too for kids. A lot have already gone back, hence where I think the spike patterns originate.
Not sure about other countries, but at least in Europe we had quite a few comments, including by health officials, that the school closures should not have been done and upheld to the extent that they were.
And I agree, the impact on learning and children’s mental health was not justified by the real or potential dangers of the pandemic imho
Edit: One comment from the German Health Minister here, describing prolonged school closures as a mistake
Meanwhile in Asia we moved lessons to zoom for a few weeks and that was it. But Germans think giving kids a tablet or notebook is exposing them to the devil
Lol for real, can’t wait til I find a new WFH job. The brain drain that my “return to the office” job has on the way is going to be monumental. EVERYONE that doesn’t have a direct report in my department is looking for a new job.
Get over it. COVID is a lot more minor than anyone made out to be. Have you not had it yet? You will if you haven’t. And then you will get over it like a cold. COVID is over for good.
Don’t be so dense. Maybe for you it was fine but my dad has never been the same since, and he had covid 18 months ago.
I’m young(ish), fit and healthy and I was ill for 6 weeks. I don’t know how you could be unaware of its effects after all this time.
This is one of the most out of touch comments I have read
Yeah, okay. Read the Cochrane review.
I guess Lemmy is filled with a bunch of folk that like to live in a pandemic dystopian state. Fuck that. I love people’s faces and read the fucking science on it.
Except for the million that died.
Nonsense, it is a novel virus, effects can vary widely. I got it for the first time last Christmas and my heart still hasn’t recovered, dizzy spells after climbing stairs or bending over.
Covid put my healthy 26 yo friend in hospital when he caught it last year, and I have friends who took several years of suffering before they recovered from long covid. It’s definitely not as harmless as you’re implying.
covid or no covid, its not the worse thing to wear masks and stay safe!
Wear a Mask. Get vaccinated. Stop spreading misinformation
Since the anti-mask/vax comments seem to be flooding in, figured I’d make my opinion known too… as obnoxiously as I can, because apparently that’s how it’s done
I still wear a mask when going out to stores because I’m immunocompromised due to a kidney transplant. It’s ultimately up to me to protect myself from others but what bothers me most lately are people who either laugh or think I’m stupid for still wearing a mask. Some even go as far as to call me out and shame me for it. Can people just mind their own business? I’m not trying to get them to wear a mask so why are they so fixated on me taking mine off?
I still wear a mask because I stand in soldiartiy with folks like you.
Not only do I want to prevent the spread of the disease that could kill immune compromised folks like yourself, but it also helps normalize mask wearing.
Sincerely and from the bottom of my immunosuppressed heart: thank you.
Seriously thank you, thank you, thank you.
Finally a fucking cool person
thank you
warning potentially big emote
Ooh spoilering emotes until that bug gets fixed is a good idea.
Thank you. I genuinely appreciate you and others who do this. ❤️
Genuinely, I think it’s probably because they feel a little guilty when they see you wearing one, and that’s uncomfortable for people, so they respond by taking it out on you.
A while lot of liberalism and liberal
involves feeling uncomfortable about someone else caring too much in a way that isn’t convenient for treat consumption.“feeling uncomfortable about someone else” that’s what fascism is dear. Conservatives so are so uncomfortable about what people have in their pants and what they do with it that they want to ban people from talking about transgender and sexuality topics
Maybe you’re new here, but fascism and liberalism are two sides of the capitalist coin. Liberals stopped masking almost the instant Biden set foot in the White House, despite the fact that 2/3 of covid deaths occurred while Biden was office (liberals will also excuse Biden’s “inaction” while claiming that Trump, who occupied the same office, was a tyrannical authoritarian totalitarian dictator who ran roughshod over the hallowed institutions of our precious democracy). Capitalism is a death cult, workers should run the world, not bourgeois scum and their running dogs.
Biden’s been in office 2.5x as long as US covid was a thing under Trump.
I agree Biden has decided to throw some lives in the chipper to keep REITs and employers happy, but the “twice as many deaths under Biden” stat is empty ragecalories.
You’re such a fucking idiot. 😂
it must be embarrassing to be a child amongst adults
It’s actually embarrassing seeing what garbage the human race has produced where we actively try to regress instead of progress… but yeah, whatever helps you sleep at night sweetheart. 😂
It’s actually embarrassing seeing what garbage the human race has produced where we actively try to regress instead of progress… but yeah, whatever helps you sleep at night sweetheart. 😂
Reliance on ableist insults reveals a casual comfort with eugenics 😉
Right. Sugar coat it however you want, sweetheart, but you’re talking like a fucking moron. 😂
Im not sure; while fascism is certainly the logical conclusion of lieralism. And we can observe so in the protofascist regimes in early 20th century mexico and turkey. i think liberalism is paraphiletic to fascism sort of like reptiles are to birds. The material conditions that enable one over the other are distinct enough, and the core ideological asumptions seem to be different.
fascism as an ideology is still at it’s core a defense of capitalism. liberalism has many flavors but it includes everything that exists to support, reinforce, and defend the capitalist project. fascism is only different in that the violence liberalism wreaks in the colonies are turned inwards, towards the nations of the imperial core. but violence itself is a central pillar of all ideologies and it does not differentiate liberalism from fascism.
despite the fact that 2/3 of covid deaths occurred while Biden was office
yea yea fuck capitalism, eat the rich, etc., but this “statistic” is disingenuously presented. The pandemic has existed for much more of Biden’s elected years than Trump’s. If your only criterion is that we’ll pretend both prezs were equally apathetic (they weren’t). Do we have to count the years for you? Don’t let ideology make you forget basic arithmetic.
Nothing disingenuous about it. Biden’s entire shtick was about following the science and doing the right thing (and being able to win over Republicans on controversial issues, that was the whole reason why we couldn’t gamble on anyone else) and he almost immediately tossed that out and adopted his predecessor’s “ignore it and it’ll go away” attitude. The White House pushed a vax-only approach which was proven to be ineffective before he even took office and then went out to brunch. For fuck’s sake, the man had to be publicly shamed into sending out masks and tests during a surge his feckless ass engendered because he pretended the pandemic was over in April 2021, when less than half of the adult population got their first round of shots.
I’d be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt considering how poorly even the states that did give half a fuck in 2020 were managing and there is no doubt that it is a complex job, but once you start mimicking the guy you lambasted a few months prior for exacerbating the problem (not to mention spending the next year and a half prematurely stripping people of basic protections and the ability to reliably test and track within their own communities), you lost what little sympathy I could muster. For all intents and purposes, he owns all of the deaths from the day he stepped into the Oval Office. Worst of all, it’s both set the tone for how future leaders will be able to respond to crises, as well as reinforced the notion that our government is ontologically incapable of providing anything for its own citizens besides more terror.
As for which one of these shitstains is more apathetic: Trump gave me more cash (and it wasn’t means-tested), suspended my student loan payments, afforded me a rent moratorium if I had lost my job, and didn’t end federal mask or testing mandates for traveling because his buddy at Delta Airlines whined to him in a letter. Nothing spells “apathy” like going on 60 Minutes amid yet another surge in cases and saying “the pandemic is over,” or cutting off extended UI prematurely, or instructing cities to use their unused Covid funds to give to the pigs.
If Trump was smart enough to even utter the words “wear a mask” at any point in 2020 he would still be in office today. This is not an endorsement, for the record. I don’t doubt Trump would have done all of this and worse eventually as well, but the difference is that his callousness was consistently met with resistance and vocal opposition. For Joe Biden, whose callousness is every bit as harmful, there is no effective resistance, no organized campaign to combat the president’s anti-science blathering. We all have to get over it and live even more precariously in this shithole lest we be accused of helping Trump win again.
Trump was actually very pro mask at the beginning of the pandemic until the CDC told him they didn’t have enough stock for everyone. The CDC first said not to mask up so that they could secure enough supplies for government workers. This is all recorded fact.
Biden literally said it was up to the states to deal with…which is partly what liberals were upset with trump for–not having a cohesive federal response
The pandemic has existed for much more of Biden’s elected years than Trump’s.
Wow I wonder how that could be 🤔. It’s almost as though Biden’s covid “policy” has been criminally ineffective! He can’t even claim credit for the development of the vaccines, since Operation Warp Speed began under Trump!
Biden said that he would listen to the scientists, but forgot to add that they would be eugenicists 😉
fascism and liberalism are two sides of the capitalist coin
Oh, look, a HexBear dipshit in the wild! I wonder how we can figure them out so easily!
This is “both sides are bad” bullshit, a destructive force from apathetic people. Don’t listen to this shit. Vote every year, twice a year!
The people pointing out both sides have dogshit covid policy are not the ones not being apathetic. It’s the liberals who all went back to brunch and demanded everything re-open.
Gaslighting is telling people that Covid isn’t a threat even though you know it’s not and you deliberately cooked the books to sell that delusion. Gaslighting is telling people you’re supposed to be responsible for governing that a vaccine that was never shown to stop the spread of a disease does, in fact, do that. Gaslighting is telling people that you must personally assess your own risk to a collective, public health crisis with the paltry tools that have been provided, then strip away or sabotage every last one of those tools so they cannot provide even a sliver of usefulness to anyone but the most bad faith interpretations.
All of these things are things both Amerikkka’s fascist wing and liberal, fascist-enabling wing have done and are currently doing (if they’re not outright ignoring it). To anyone with a pulse, there is no meaningful difference, and indeed they are so often intertwined.
Also, Marx was based.
You’re gaslighting. His post was bookended with political critiques on how fascism and liberalism are the same thing, with a poor attempt to use COVID to prove his point.
Also, he’s a Marxist, a political ideology so successful, it’s produced countless fascist regimes.
This is “both sides are bad” bullshit, a destructive force from apathetic people. Don’t listen to this shit. Vote every year, twice a year!
Biden has been in office for almost four years. Abortion was banned under his watch. He could have prevented it by expanding the supreme court - he chose not to. He chose to let thousands of women suffer and die.
Student loan forgiveness was promised by Biden - a promise he failed to deliver. Again, expanding the supreme court could have prevented this.
Biden has done absolutely nothing to stand up to the military-industrial complex. He pulled out of Afghanistan, then almost immediately began sending billions in “lethal aid” to Ukraine.
Biden has upheld the deportation laws at the Mexican border that Trump put in place. He is actively choosing to do that!
I don’t understand how any rational person can look at Biden and say he’s doing anything even slightly left-wing. He is not. Objective reality shows is that both sides (Democrats and Republicans) ARE the same because they are DOING the same thing. Ideology says they are different. Reality says they are the same. If you believe they are different, you are valuing ideology over reality.
Vote every year, twice a year!
lmao this really is all politics is to shitlibs
The good cop brought me some chips, the bad cop yelled at me, how dare you suggest that the good cop and bad cop are the same!
I do vote every year and have since I turned 18
Last year I wrote in names for every candidate
here's who I voted for
There’s more than two political ideologies. The person you’re replying to isn’t talking about American political parties.
There’s a lot of history and theory about how different ideologies, especially liberalism and fascism, interact with each other. This is what they were making reference to.
Its not a both sides are bad. Its an academic discussion about the genealogy of facism. And when you look at protofacist regimes like the young turks its very clear their ideology has a basis in liberalism.
Thank you, I will vote at least a dozen times in at least a dozen counties just for you. Be the change you want to see in the world.
The fact that we care about life more than the blood altar of capital tends to make it easy to find us. And remember: losing ideological battles online is but a prelude to losing such battles in the real world.
Edit: imagine thinking that voting every few years for bourgeois puppets equals democracy. Real democracy is practiced in every home, school, and workplace every day by every person. Liberals don’t want to hear this, though, because they tend to do poorly when everyone everywhere is able and willing to participate in a truly democratic society 😉
If you want to really see how democratic the USA is, try forming a union in your workplace. Try protesting in a way that inconveniences capital. Try going to a city when you have no money or connections. Try speaking publicly about how Biden has given $75 billion+ to Ukrainian Nazis. Then see just how amazing and democratic life in the USA really is.
And yes, both sides are definitely bad, as evidenced by the fact that by any objective measure, everything in the USA is worse than it was when Trump was president. But thankfully there’s a third side called Marxism. If it didn’t work and it was really such a failure, then you wouldn’t be panicking daily about China’s rise. And if China is not actually communist, I assume you would have no issue with the CPC taking over the USA, since the result would be the same, right? Whatever human rights issues they supposedly have pale in comparison to the multiple ongoing genocides perpetrated by the USA’s ruling class. The Iraq War alone—supported by both American liberals and fascists—is far worse than anything the Nazis in the CIA say that China has done.
“Waaaah waaaah ad hominem attacks waaah”
Man I was reading his comment and I was like what is this whataboutism nonsense he’s talking about, then it made sense when I read your comment. Guess I gotta start looking at usernames again before reading comments
Guess you need to put down the Harry Potter and read actual theory/history before discussing topics about which you are willfully ignorant.
please god go back to
Yeah, you’re probably right. They see someone wearing a mask, they feel bad, they decide the person wearing the mask made them feel bad.
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Same. I never stopped wearing a mask because I’m immunocompromised from my lung transplant. People call me names all the time. Even here on Lemmy.
Protect yourself first, never apologize.
People that call you names are also telling you they don’t have your back and do not care if they give you covid or if you die from it.
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I find this hard to believe. Especially considering that your post history shows you calling others names like ‘simp’.
Wonder why these comments replying to me were removed…
I was refused service at my bank the other day for not taking off my mask when they asked. They never had a problem with me being masked up before, even when I opened the account. I went and used mobile deposit instead, but it was a really disturbing precedent. I wrote in asking about their policy and instead of a straight answer I was dodged by management.
I don’t want to sue them or anything, I just want them to come to their senses and not prohibit me from making a deposit to my account because I don’t want to get sick.
I wrote in asking about their policy and instead of a straight answer I was dodged by management.
I feel like over the last few years organisations in general have become far more likely to try to just brush off an issues someone raises than just cleanly and easily address them.
Not just the last few years, that’s just how the system is set up in general; companies are rewarded for reaching over a wider population, not for the quality of the established coverage. They need to keep growing or die.
It’s more financially incentivized to put time to get at least a handful of new customers onboard than it is to address the grievances of a single customer, so the quality of marketing gets boosted while customer support gets shafted. Any public negative feedback can be drowned out by the larger pool of customers that aren’t involved in any direct interactions with the company, and there’s also the classic astroturfing + plausible deniability combo for good measure to maintain that public trust.
It’s real bad. Fun fact: I am very big, and I’ve worn straight up gas masks at some points during the pandemic, and no one has ever said anything to me. Plague rats are real brave as long as they’re pretty confidant there won’t be consequences. It’s gross.
The thing that bothers me more is when they seem actively annoyed to see someone in a mask. Like somehow me wearing a mask in a shared public space in order to prevent someone from dieing horribly is unfair to this rando but this rando doesn’t think that them hacking and coughing everywhere in a shared public space without a mask on is unfair to anybody.
I really hoped that the mask stigma would change, but it’s sad to see it go this way. I might just start wearing a mask again to do my part to normalize it.
If people are sick, they should feel like it’s the right thing to do to wear a mask. It needs to be a normal thing and people that make fun of it are pieces of shit .
This is why I started exclusively wearing kn95s because it became clear after a time that people simply don’t give a shit about anyone except themselves, they don’t care if you or I get covid and die.
So I stopped pretending like I’m doing my part since we all know surgicals and cloth masks are only truly effective if everyone else is wearing them. They know too but choose to fuck us anyway. So fuck them too and protect yourself first. Wear your p100 respirator with the exhaust vents that filter nothing for extra vindictive points
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Claims submitted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
You got a source on that? No of course you don’t
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So you have nothing to back up your claim and you’re instead going with the ‘trust me bro’ defense.
Another genius trump voter here folks
P100 is the best. Ain’t no fart going around that filter.
Honestly, I am not immunocompromised and I still wear a mask because I haven’t gotten sick since the pandemic started, and it even helps my sinus’ when I’m cleaning the house. I’ve never been one to worry about what someone thinks of me, so I’m sorry if this comes off as tone deaf, but fuck ‘em. Why should you care about what they think about you? When was the last time you thought about that person who was doing something you thought was strange in the local mart? I will assume not until I just made you think about them. Live your life as safely as you want. For every moron out there trying to make fun of you (they can try, but ultimately they themselves just look foolish and stupid) there are more like me and the others who wear masks alongside you. Stay safe and have a good rest of your day!
it even helps my sinus’ when I’m cleaning the house.
One of the best parts about having a bunch of cloth masks from early in the pandemic is they’re great for cleaning. I wear one when I clean my cats’ litterboxes every day.
I wear N95s outside the house, but cloth masks have still proven useful.
For every moron out there trying to make fun of you (they can try, but ultimately they themselves just look foolish and stupid) there are more like me and the others who wear masks alongside you.
That does not match my experiences. Assuming you’re happy saying so, where in the world are you that this is true? Are they accepting new residents?
To distract themselves from their own problems.
This is the same issue the LGBT community suffers from, as well as people of color, people with accents, etc. People always find ways to make themselves feel superior to others by pointing out something different. You choosing to wear a mask just makes those kinds of people laugh because they either 1. Feel better than you for not wearing masks or 2. They are uneducated/ignorant and follow others’ opinions without question.
I suppose the only way to turn it back around on them would be to try scaring them by saying you have something contagious like strep throat, or worse, so they’ll shut up and leave you alone. Otherwise my only other advice would be to just do your best to not engage with these types of people.
I suppose the only way to turn it back around on them would be to try scaring them by saying you have something contagious like strep throat, or worse, so they’ll shut up and leave you alone.
I do find that I suddenly feel like I need to clear my throat when this happens.
No one should shame anyone for wearing a mask. However no one should shame anyone for not wearing a mask.
I don’t begrudge anyone for wearing a mask in solidarity or to do what they think they can to save lives, but I’m on the side of feeling like I’m taking a personal bag to the store, or recycling plastic bottles like it’s actually doing something. I personally don’t like wearing a mask, and I feel like in most cases it’s just theater to do so.
Get a ventilator. Make them afraid
Someone called me a libtard under his breath, but loudly enough to make sure I heard…in a CANCER center, where many of us were having our immune systems weakened by chemo.
You can’t fix stupid so I don’t even try. I’ve been in remission for almost two years, I’m healthy and he’s out there sucking in viruses. We both have ticking clocks, but mine is ticking much more slowly than his is.
Our track record dealing with covid shows us that our approach was largely unsuccessful. Masking must be enforced, not suggested. This is the only effective solution.
People were such dimwits about it though. Even if you had a security guard at the entrance to every shop challenging people to wear properly fitted n95s, I’m certain heaps of people would remove it after they walked past just on principle.
The American culture is uniquely garbage because of the unique history of having a frontier for self serving pieces of shit to murder a patch of land empty for themselves and assert their right to tell everyone to fuck off. When the frontier was exhausted the homestead became the small business. When the small businesses were absorbed, “you can’t tell me what to do” became having a big truck and eating hamburgers with the motivation of spite.
We’re also uniquely garbage because our nation was founded by a bunch of religious zealots who pissed off everyone in Britain with their dickishness so much that they were told to fuck off and be assholes somewhere else.
You clearly haven’t read anything about the American revolution. Stop spewing your bullshit in an attempt to elevate your holy thank everyone mantra. Have you heard of taxation without representation? The stamp act? Freedom of expression?
If you think the British had it right and the American colonies were in the wrong, you are clearly ignorant. The constitution of the US, once it was formed, reshaped the entire world in a more positive way.
I don’t think (s)he was talking about the revolution so much as the founding of certain colonies. Massachusetts, for example.
The pilgrims were very different from the puritans
The pilgrims were Puritans. Not sure where you got the idea that they weren’t.
how many heart attacks has that attitude caused for you
Ah, you are upset it isn’t authoritarian enough for your tastes?
The most expansive police and military state that’s ever existed? Are you high?
And this is why I’m glad we’re still federated.
Huh
I enjoyed their comment. If I was on lemmy.world I’d never have gotten to read it.
You people are such weird babies. It’s a piece of cloth.
Yeah it was a shitshow, all because of how politicized it became. No one in 2018 would have thought that asking people to wear a face mask would become such an embarrassing ordeal.
But trust me, it’s easy to catch a mask less person in a store. It shouldn’t take more than a couple incidents before they learn their lesson and make an example for others.
“Police are bad unless it is to arrest people over a mask”
Thanks for coming over from reddit
Police are bad because they don’t serve the interests of the community
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Curbing the spread of a lethal viral infection is in the interest of the community
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I tend to agree, but realistically who is going to enforce it? You’ve got to take into consideration the impact the constant stream of conflict has on low level employees who end up responsible for this enforcement. For those who want to protect themselves, N95 masks are highly effective when used properly.
You also need to wear eye protection. Even just regular, prescription glasses showed a 30% reduction in infection rates. Masks don’t protect if other people wont also wear them.
Make good paying security jobs whose sole purpose is covid enforcement (joking) (maybe) (people who refuse to mask make me angry as fuck. It’s such a low effort way to save lives)
We also need lockdowns where people are supported in staying home long enough to eliminate the virus, regular and updated testing, updated vaccines, free high quality accessible healthcare, and changes to make workplaces safe - like letting people work from home; changing in-person work to be socially distanced, and unlimited paid time off so people can get medical care when they need it.
And we can concentrate those who refuse in special camps!
You people need to be stopped, you are insane autoritarians. The crisis is over, we are but fin to wear mask forever. You had your time in the lime light, now it’s back to normal. Continue to abuse this position and you will not get the population to mobilise again to alleviate the situation.
Masking must be enforced
How authoritative. Personal responsibility is the answer. Not forcing others to your level. If your threat level is that high, ok that is your choice. However everyones threat level to this thing should take into account that not everyone in your community will be on the same page as you.
Unless you want another trucker convoy emerging, I suggest not forcing any mandates. Enforce any mandate on yourself, but only yourself.
You are very, very wrong.
Read this review. https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses
People like you shouldn’t live in the west. Fuck forcing people to wear a face rag when the science is far from clear on its effectiveness.
BuT wHaT aBoUt the ecoNoMy??!!
I mean, we didn’t handle any of this well the first time. That goes for most places on the planet. I’m sure we won’t handle it well if it really does go south again.
I want to share my experience as a disabled person, because I think it’s very easy to simply not notice our non-existance:
I don’t exist anymore. I’m a hermit. It’s been years since I’ve done anything in public. I go to the rheumatologist, I go to a lab to get blood tests, and once a year I get an x-ray to make sure I don’t have TB. I don’t do anything else. There’s about a two week period where being outside isn’t some unbearably high or low temperature that exacerbates my condition.
Please care about covid. Just, please. Do it for people like me if that helps you, but mostly do it for yourself. This virus can make you like me and it’s miserable (I was sick before Covid, but Covid is known to trigger autoimmune conditions which are the primary cause of my suffering).
There was a moment in my life where I was optimistic about masks. I pictured a cyberpunk future we didn’t get sick as much and had a cool new fashion accessory we could have fun with. It is wild how capitlaism couldn’t even resist the power of covid
I saw a study a while back that claimed that good filtration and ventilation systems in indoor public places were more effective than masking. If that’s the case, what I’d like to see is subsidies for businesses and public buildings to get.new systems installed, as well as new minimum air quality standards for public spaces with inspections for enforcement.
Love being immunocompromised knowing I am just meat for the capitalist grinder
Unless the strain is killing a sizable amount of people getting it it’ll be hard to get people to wear masks en masse again.
Even if it kills (which it likely will), our track record shows that didn’t care enough about that, and in a decreasing manner. So it’ll only be worse.
Pretty sure every virus has killed people, from the cold, to flu, and of course covid. It feels like now the death rate for the latest variants of covid are pretty comparable to the flu, the virus has lost a lot of its killing power over time.
Except the flu does not regularly disable those who it infects
As someone who wound up with chronic fatigue syndrome after getting covid, thank you for this. This piece of shit virus is worse than most people want to admit.
Of course it does, the flu kills millions and leaves even more disabled.
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the sheer number of Covid infections has made long Covid into a global crisis
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amazing that you recognize the existence of not only long Covid, but other post-viral illnesses, and think it gives weight to your “Covid is no big deal” argument
Again, the flu disables millions every year.
Yeah, I misspoke in my initial comment. I was under the impression the percentage was lower, but I looked it up and it’s about the same (based on the first thing I read)
So to me there’s two conclusions: Covid, which infects people at a much higher rate and for which the vaccine is not really that effective, is a bigger problem since it will end up giving a larger number of people long Covid. The flu is not infecting people twice a year (or more), and it’s possible to go years without catching the flu, even without masks
Or, what I think is the correct conclusion, we should be taking flu more seriously. We saw how little flu there was during the years of the highest mask compliance. Very weird to say “oh we’ve always had post-viral illness, let’s just have even more.” How about we actually take public health seriously for once?
yes, and we should be masking for that as well. even so, covid is far more insidious because so many of the disabilities it leaves behind are invisible.
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Pretty sure every virus has killed people, from the cold, to flu, and of course covid.
False equivalency intensifies
What is false about that statement? Viruses kill, that’s not false at all. Just because covid has killed at higher rates doesn’t change my statement.
The point is that a virus being deadly is just a fact of all viruses.
What is false about that statement? Viruses kill, that’s not false at all. Just because covid has killed at higher rates doesn’t change my statement.
You’re the living embodiment of this emoji
The point is that a virus being deadly is just a fact of all viruses.
That is a false equivalency, emphasis equivalency. Spare us your liberal sophistry.
I think you need to look up the definition of false equivalency, it is not an apple to orange kind of thing to say all viruses can kill. I’m not denying some kill more than others, but they all kill. If you can’t understand this fact, I don’t know what to tell you.
I think you need to look up the definition of false equivalency
You’re stating that all viruses kill (which may have some holes in it already) therefore all viruses are technically the same, which ignores the differences in damage they do to people.
If you can’t understand this fact, I don’t know what to tell you.
If you had any actual point to make with your pedantic bullshit, I didn’t see it. You’re just textually masturbating as far as I can tell.
Death rates aren’t a feeling. I want some hard numbers.
I feel like we just don’t care if we live or die anymore.
Fun fact: the CDC readjusted what the ‘normal’ rate of deaths is to include the years of the pandemic so now it’s harder than ever to find hard numbers because “excess deaths” was one of the last ways to get any information at all!
Plus a world wide fast aging population would increase the death background number even if nothing else happens.
Anything that doesn’t make an observable, statistically significant difference, has no cause to further impose restriction on how people live their lives
Plus a world wide fast aging population would increase the death background number even if nothing else happens.
Sharp edges don’t happen from demographic trends. This is pure rationalization.
Further than what?? What restrictions??
And what are you implying? Covid has no observable affect on public health? Tell that to the millions of people still getting disabled every year.
I know I’ve read reports about the latest variants being much less deadly. I did see one study recently which for patients presenting to hospital covid was a few percentage points more likely to result in death compared to hospitalized flu patients. There were a lot more covid patients though.
Found it:
death rates among people hospitalized for COVID-19 were 17% to 21% in 2020 vs 6% in this study, while death rates for those hospitalized for influenza were 3.8% in 2020 vs 3.7% in this study
So there is some data backing up the feelings I’ve gotten from everything I’ve been hearing and seeing.
So that’s almost twice as bad as the flu.
I mean, that’s one way to look at it. I looked at it as only a couple percent higher death rate than the flu. Either way, a little less than 2x is way better than like 5x worse.
Obviously it’s better than before, but it’s also worth keeping in mind these deaths are in addition to the flu.
Also, there are good and bad flu seasons. I see no reason for COVID to not be the same.
I’m not sure how severe an effect this would have on the numbers, but the death rate would non-negligibly go down after millions of the most vulnerable people died in the first wave. As well, the newer variants get more contagious and bypass immune responses more easily, and we’re taking way fewer precautions as a society. so 6% is a lower percent but still an incredibly high number
I saw it as an evolutionary benefit to be less deadly. The way I’m seeing this, the virus’s purpose in life is to spread, so a higher infection and contagious rate with less death rate is ideal from an evolution standpoint.
Ideal for it, not ideal for anyone who enjoys the full function of their mind and circulatory system.
The mind thing isn’t a dig at you btw, it’s a reference to the brain fog
There’s one crucial thing you overlooked in this: in 2020, most people hadn’t been infected, and hadn’t gotten the vaccine (because there was no vaccine until December,and even then it was in extremely short supply). Now, most people have some sort of immunity, be it from vaccine or from a prior infection. That definitely skews the hospitalization numbers downward. You can’t compare then and now, unfortunately, since there’s no real community that hasn’t been vaccinated and hasn’t caught it - and so you can’t compare their numbers.
That’s fair, but I think you can still compare it to the flu, which is not that far off from covid percentage wise. At this point both the flu and covid should be at an equal level of people having vaccines and natural antibodies, right? Even if you go with covid being about twice as deadly as the flu, twice as deadly as almost nothing is still almost nothing.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans will die this year from COVID. Sure, almost nothing. Just a 9/11 every two weeks or so.
I’m sure “almost nothing” is quite comforting for the families of the 1.1 million Americans who died.
That’s the same shit that businesses were pushing last time because they didn’t want to close for a few months, ended up making everything worse.
Yup. More effective action faster would have had a higher same-day-you-make-the-decision cost but would have been tremendously less harmful economically to all the entities blocking it for fear of the economic impact to them. They were digging a mass grave and then leaping into it.
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I know I am a bit biased here because I didn’t get sick and didn’t really try that hard to avoid it either. I only wore a mask when I had to, I went to bars with friends, really didn’t take any extra precautions, and I washed my hands normally. If I got covid I didn’t notice it.
Personally I would hate if we went into lockdown again, but again, I didn’t get sick, the worst I felt was when I got the vaccine.
It’s important to note that every state I’m aware of has long ended their testing and reporting, literally doing the Trump thing. So we actually have no idea what the numbers are.
The numbers I’ve seen are from hospitalized patients, which should still be tracked, and tracked in a similar way to the flu. It doesn’t give us the full story for sure, but it gives us something to compare.
The issue is that it happens out of sight out of mind so it’s just an abstract statistic that it’s easy to ignore or pretend away. If Covid-19 killed you by making your head spontaneously fall off we’d have eliminated it or reduced it to a few tiny isolated pockets simply by the change in the public’s attitude to it. But because it kills you “quietly” out of sight in a hospital bed or at home, people were able to just convince themselves everything is basically normal.
get people to wear masks en masse again
The time when people wore masks en masse must be something that I’m too American and lung-scarred to remember
I’m too American and lung-scarred to remember
Due to a history of smoking and multiple bouts of pneumonia I was already fairly sure that my “dying of old age” (which noone truly does) would consist of drowning on fluids from my own damaged lungs one day. Then the drowning on fluids from your own damaged lungs plague came and people decided they’d rather other people die by drowning on fluids from their own damaged lungs than follow simple enhanced hygiene practices for a bit.
Mostly I try to just block that out but it’s come back into sharp focus today…
If you put about 15 minutes between an action and it’s consequences there’s a strong subset of our population that will just completely lose the connection between the two. That, to me, was the primary problem. Well, that and the fact that it’s impossible to measure how many times you didn’t get COVID due to masking or vaxxing
I keep wearing N95s. Haven’t gotten COVID yet and not feeling like playing the Long COVID roulette. I don’t work 9-5 in an office so I don’t even have to wear a mask for very long periods of time. Buses, stores require it, but there’s plenty to do outside anyway. Patios are fine. Need to take a leak? Put the mask on. No one from my circle has caught it yet. Honestly this protocol isn’t that bad.
It’s like once “their guy” gave them the ok, everyone started licking doorknobs again. Why couldn’t we keep this “social distancing” thing going? I liked my personal space.
I find myself still standing a moderate distance away from people while in line at stores etc.
yeah I always did this even before COVID and I hate being around people who seem to be spatially unaware.
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In a way he saved us from fascism. In the very first months of the pandemic there were several instances of police overstepping and enforcing isolation rules like it was martial law. I know it wasn’t a good response, but we could have been under martial law for years instead.
Who do you think I’m talking about? Trump was all around terrible. He wanted the virus to spread while he and his party thought it was killing black people more then white people.
My original comment was about my Biden friends who all flocked back to theaters then he signaled the “end” to the pandemic.
It was amazing watching the Republicans/Trump’s response change when they realised that they were mostly encouraging their own voters to catch Covid.
And by then, it was too late to their voters behavior. Hell, Trump didn’t really change his public stance either. Him and his voters made anti-masking a point of pride. Whenever the press asked him about vaccines, he never out rite said that they should get vaccines for the health and safety of the county they supposed love. It’s so simple. Love the county? Love the economy? Get vaccinated and stay up to date. Trust the American™ researchers.
I’ve been doing this and still somehow managed to catch it about a year ago. One of the few people at that event that was wearing a mask and somehow I’m the one that gets it…
Don’t know if I’m ever going to stop wearing a mask.
Cause masks prevent others from getting your diseases.
If everyone else wasn’t wearing a mask, then you were prone to getting their diseases.
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It happens. Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve caught something exactly once, a couple of months ago. I did a PCR test however while symptomatic and it came out negative. So did my wife when she got it a couple of days later. My point is that something got through the defense protocol and could easily have been SARS-CoV-2. I only know it wasn’t because I tested for it.
Just remember to try not to touch anything after handling your mask until you’ve had a chance to wash or sanitise your hands again. It’s designed to gather up any Covid you’d breath in or out so ironically is one of the worst things you can touch in terms of risk of spreading infection. (Personally, since I work at home, I tend to just leave my mask on fulltime when I’m out, unless I actively need to take it off for food or water or something, just so I don’t have to mess around with the administration of keeping my hands clean while taking it on and off and making sure it’s properly seated after I put it back on. Wearing a mask for hours on end isn’t my favourite thing but I don’t find it too unpleasant, so I can see why people who really hate it would want to deal with faffing around putting it on and off.)
Everyone in my immediate circles either masks up like I do or hasn’t seen me in a few years lol. I didn’t quarantine and mask all this time to get COVID now goddammit I refuse. Funny thing is my life hasn’t been any worse without those people now that I think about it… Huh.
We got it several times due to having a toddler and other people being selfish and not keeping their kids home when they got sick.
I saw on the CBC last night a story of a restaurant worker who was fired because she wore a mask. That’s how bonkers we in Canada have become lately.
