I’m thinking they don’t know how to wear a mask. But I’m really not certain. I’ve seen enough of it to wonder, too.
Hm, just found out that someone at my company tested positive. They did visit the floor I work on, but wore a mask the entire time in the office (it’s optional at desks), but had “little” contact with coworkers and was vaccinated, for whatever that means for viral load.
I feel fine, obviously, but I’m not sure what to think right now. It seems both reasonable and unreasonable at the same time to take precautions even though I have no idea if I have any exposure whatsoever and am not feeling sick. It’s an odd dilemma/mindset.
…and case #2 on my floor. Yet I’m not concerned enough yet to wear my mask at my desk. That may change; I’m already considering my lunch location more carefully…
As the rest of the world learns to live with the virus and things are pretty much back to normal. China continues treat the virus with an iron fist. Lockdowns, heavy restrictions, compulsory testing and a pretty poor roll-out of a pretty poor vaccination.
There is no suggestion that any of that is likely to change in the near future either. The political commitment is to a “zero covid” approach, something that the rest of the world (and China’s own) experience should clearly show is not practically possible whilst trying to maintain something akin to a pre-2020 world.
I’m very glad I’m not in China.
I don’t know which part of the lockdowns I find more shocking: The very real possibility of starving to death, or the near indiscriminate slaughter of everyone’s pets “just in case.”
Here’s a good discussion of the future of covid vaccines in the US
It looks like a lot of the reason we wait so long is FDA rules.
Still struggling with a topic I’ve started other threads for: by not socially isolating (and not demanding it of all) in any circumstance below life sustaining, I am objectively creating risk for the immunocompromised, children, etc. who are around me. Is this morally acceptable, or am I no better than the anti-vaxxers?
There were four cases at my office last week, and some people are (very understandably) panicking, which makes me wonder if I am morally culpable for their fear. FWIW, I’m wearing masks in public and at the office except at my desk and lunch (which is part of what’s factoring into my thinking; if I don’t mask at all times, am I doing any good for those coworkers at all?). If I’m not afraid to go to the optional social event held by work that I do want to go to, am I equivalent to a Fox News viewer?
If you want that, we’re pretty much shutting down all non-essential social interaction forever. We’re building a separate set of hospitals for Covid or flu patients only and another for the rest, so the other people needing hospitals don’t get infected. Other than hospitals, all other in person social interaction will be gone. Period. Forever. No bars, restaurants, concerts, sporting events. No working together either. No small parties. No dating. People really shouldn’t live together either, families should be split up. Forever. That’s what it would take.
Yeah, but you can’t tell me it’s the moral thing to look the immunocompromised and vulnerable in the eye and tell them that it’s completely on them to make sure they and their loved ones are safe, then just shrug and go about our business.
Not in the least. Succinctly: COVID is not what they think it is anymore.
The most severe solution is not always the best. Even if it works.
This happened with Prohibition. I don’t question that the pre-Prohibition society had a huge problem with alcohol, brought on by its industrial production. It needed to be fixed. Prohibition went too far. Even though it worked, it kept people from drinking. Created too many other problems like contempt for the law and people getting injured or killed drinking stuff that wasn’t made safely. But it did massively decrease alcohol consumption.
Even though it did that, helped some people without question, we were better off helping those people on an individual level rather than doing things en masse. If people need individual help with Covid, maybe that’s where our focus should be, not force placing solutions over the entire society.
I guess my issue is that from the start, we’ve been (rightfully) excoriating people who refused to accept mild inconvenience and temporary discomfort to keep people from literally losing their lives. The anti-vaxxers seem to have poisoned the very idea of pushing back on restrictions of that nature at all, to the point that I’m not sure anymore if I’m being selfish for, say, not actively pressuring management to have permanent WFH available for all.
Since this is a problem that requires community effort, in my opinion, if you’re doing more than the average person, you’re at least trying to drag the community status quo in the right direction. It’d be great if the bar for average were raised, but that’s a community problem, not specifically your problem unless you want/need it to be.
Despite Jay_Z’s hyperbole, there’s a lot that could be done to adapt to a post-COVID world. Outdoor restaurants and concerts, more norms of social distancing, masking in riskier situations, requiring vaccinations, testing before intimate gatherings, better ventilation and air sterilization, etc. Yet, despite having our second deadliest wave in the U.S. just over four months ago, despite the current daily death rate is still over three times the flu, and despite variant after variant emerging, we are increasingly doing basically none of those things. The memory hole works fast these days.
This pandemic and the Trump era has shed a lot of light on how marginalized people are actually treated when push comes to shove. It’s not been a pretty picture.
There was a national conference in Kentucky last week. Three people from our affiliates came down with COVID, and one is seriously ill. Our own office was COVID-free for more than a year and a half, and then we had three cases (two serious) when things started opening up. To date, our office has been COVID-free for five months.
Isn’t that what we all did before COVID? Surely the flu was (is still, I guess?) a pretty big risk to the immunocompromised. They were always on their own up until 2020.
The flu was much less common than covid, and typically makes people sick enough that they stay home, at least after the first day or two of being infectious.
Covid is currently ubiquitous, despite cheap testing, people are wandering around in public while contagious, and it’s quite deadly to those who are immune compromised.
Doesn’t the flu kill 50,000 Americans a year, or at least it used to before COVID? I think you’re downplaying that quite a bit. If those really were the numbers, that seems like a non-trivial threat to the immunocompromised.
Psychologically, the measures that were done were more akin to wartime measures. It’s the whole way things were implemented in the first place. We don’t expect wartime measures to be continued indefinitely.
By the way, if Leaper really feels that it’s a moral issue to ever pass on Covid to someone else, or to not do everything to protect the immunocompromised, then we truly have no choice but to adopt extreme measures effectively forever. Typically infectuous diseases countermeasures are only for a limited time.
I think I’ve figured out (at least part of) the reason for my reaction: I seem to have a visceral reaction that if I take the safety concerns of others seriously, if I do not have a similar level of concern for myself doing the same thing, that must be wrong somehow. Either I’m underestimating my risk, or I’m not taking the concerns of others seriously enough, or that I’m being judged for not being as safe as others are and therefore increasing their risk. As I think I’ve said before, we were and are properly disgusted by anti-vaxxers putting everyone at risk by not getting vaccinated, not wearing masks, and not being careful, and I think a big part of it is that I’m still, in my own moral sense, feeling out where that line stops.
I would think the most ethical approach would be to follow the CDC guidelines. Be vaccinated (and boosted) and wear a mask indoors when your county’s ‘Community Level’ is high. Regardless of community level, also wear a mask if you’ve had recent contact with someone who has covid.