Quite sleepy and warm. I now appreciate how scary this was two years ago.
Yeah, now that it doesn’t automatically mean a trip to the ICU on a ventilator, it’s not quite so scary.
It’s weird-- the mental and emotional gymnastics we’ve gone through over the last 2+ years.
Hope you feel better soon.
I actually think there’s plenty of morally and psychologically questionable behavior on the pro-Covid restriction side at some point.
For one, I think that some people are comforted by the “permanent state of emergency” that Covid brought, they prefer it, it makes them feel good and moral. These are feelings that are not necessarily connected to actual goodness in the world at large. They are feelings.
If you care about Long Covid, then freaking define it, what symptoms people are claiming, etc. Not to do so at this date is an abomination. Of course there are some studies out there that I don’t think are well done or applicable, and those are the ones that get re-stated again and again. From a cynic’s point of view, one could certainly argue that Long Covid is being presented in such a way as to be as vague and scary as possible in order to continue or reimpose the restrictions some desire. Yes, I do believe Long Covid exists, but it needs to be DEFINED. Lung cancer is defined, heart disease is defined. Getting shot by a gun is defined. All of these are things that have varying bad outcomes, but they’re not this vague thing. Covid and Long Covid REALLY need to move out of the vague and scary universe. Frankly I think people are right to be dismissive of such techniques at this point.
You need to define your terms. Again, there is going to be resistance to this, because advocates of restrictions long for the heady days of 2020. For the ability to extend restrictions for two weeks into infinity. It’s going to be a credibility issue with people. If a cynic believes that people like you are going to be in the same place in 2024, “I’m not sayin’ I’m just sayin’” your way into another two or four year hitch of sheltering in place, are they wrong? Are they wrong not to trust you and those you admire? Should they believe that you EVER want them to have a birthday party again, visit their relatives again?
I agree with you - I think one thing that TPTB need to do is define things better. Give people an idea of how lethal COVID is if you’re unvaccinated, vaccinated, vaccinated & boosted, double-boosted, etc… Give people clear guidelines about how likely you are to catch it.
Right now, it feels really vague across the board to me.
What I want to know is how likely I am to get it in which situations, and how serious it will be if I do catch it, relative to other diseases like influenza that I have had in the past. And what symptoms can I realistically expect to count on having if I catch it?
But they can’t manage that- it’s a morass of conflicting messages and vague & unclear definitions. Like what does “mild” symptoms mean? Does that mean “sick as hell, but didn’t have to go to the hospital” or does it mean “not even as bad as your average bout of influenza”? Is masking just virtue signaling at this point, or is it a sensible precaution against silent surges that are masked by at-home testing? If I’m congested or have a headache, should I be testing myself?
I’m fairly annoyed by all this; I personally am not that concerned, but my FIL is immunocompromised, and my wife is visiting her family fairly frequently these days, so I want some clarity on how my family should be navigating this- I don’t like masks, but nor do I want to possibly infect my FIL either.
The problem is that these arguments dip into being illogical at best. No one is arguing that we need to go back to where we were at in 2020 at this point. Heck, few are arguing we need to go back to 2021. So those making that argument are being disingenuous, manufacturing reasons not to listen. Or they are listening to people who are doing so.
Sure, having actual risk factors for long COVID-19 would be nice. But I can’t agree that it’s ill-defined. It’s whenever COVID-19 symptoms last more than two weeks after the infectious period. It works just like most other post-viral syndromes: the two most familiar being fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome—though those are the ones which tend to last a long time.
The problem with getting more data is that it’s a long term issue. That inherently takes a while. We don’t know how many people eventually recover. But there is zero chance we’re not studying this to find out.
All that is going on is that some people are insisting on more caution. They think we should not be thinking solely in terms of what is good for ourselves, remembering that other people exist. They find it stupid that sick people still won’t wear masks, even though it’s such a minor inconvenience. It’s just so not a big deal to wear one when you’re traveling or in a large group. It’s not a big deal to test yourself before a party or trip, especially when you have 20 free tests.
It does seem dumb that we’re still seeing death numbers as high as we are, yet so many people are acting like we’re completely back to normal. Hell, we learned how much wearing a mask stopped colds and flu and such, and yet people still won’t at least wear these masks when they’re sick (except at hospitals). People aren’t following the actual recommendations where you should be wearing masks in public transit and so on.
You want to look at what reasonable looks like to me, you would look at SGDQ 2022. In previous years, they had a virtual-only show. This year, they were back in person, but had a mask requirement–even wearing them on camera. That makes sense: they went from very cautious to less cautious but still concerned. With the meetup being indoors, a lot of people flying in from all over the country (and even some internationally) and the ubiquity of “con plague,” they insisted on reasonable precautions.
No one can reasonably say they were acting like it was 2020. They acted like people who looked at the risks involved and employed some level of risk mitigation, knowing that massive events like this often result in outbreaks. They mask for the same reason we’re supposed to on mass transit.
That’s being reasonable. Not claiming people are saying that you should never have a birthday party again. Those people aren’t being cynical. They’re being disingenuous.
But who is dying is become more and more concentrated in the very vulnerable. If the impact on a particular demographic is so stilted, on the order of 100 to 1 or 1,000 to 1 even, shouldn’t we shift towards different measures? Protecting the very vulnerable, and letting the rest go more?
That’s where the Long Covid and organ damage arguments are brought in. “See, even for the young, nothing has changed, it’s still 2020.” Of course, Long Covid and organ damage were around in 2020 in addition to increased risk of death. But people no longer fear dying of Covid, so those have filled the vacuum of Covid fear. Logically, that makes no sense I would agree. IMO it has more to do with PR/clickbait and filling a vacuum in people’s psyches. And I do think that Leaper has done a sort of yadda yadda handwave “it’s still all the same” in his posts.
I do think that some arguments are more nuanced, but others I’ve seen online do seem to have a heavy dose of older fear factor tactics and attempts to arouse feelings that it’s still 2020. My views have always been more small p political, believing that we had a limited time for any social control tactics and we needed to ration those for maximum impact. I’ll not particularly moved by appeals to emotion or morality.
At the risk of coming off as antagonistic: What do you mean by the bolded?
Yes, i had the same thought. Covid deaths have been highly concentrated among the very vulnerable from day 1.
We didn’t know that in 2020. Long covid, by its very nature, took a while to manifest itself. And yes, data is still being gathered, because it takes time to understand things that take time to happen.
“Long covid” isn’t just one thing, which muddies the waters. But among the things that have been studied, there’s good data demonstrating an increased risk after covid of:
- Propensity to have respiratory symptoms/not really get better
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Organ damage (including brain damage/” brain fog”, sudden onset diabetes, pancreatitis, kidney damage, myocarditis/pericarditis)
How much risk, for whom? That’s still being studied. Although it does seem that those at higher risk of serious illness are also at higher risk of everything else, which is what one would expect. And the first (“can’t shake this bug”) seems to be much more common than the others.
As for my take? I don’t know what
Is, but that’s pretty much my attitude. In 2020 i hid at home. Now, I’m traveling and attending social events, but I’m wearing a good mask when i do it. I’m doing that because I’m over 60, and have a history of having trouble “shaking colds”, so i figure I’m at high-ish risk.
Long Covid was identified fairly early in the process, well before vaccines etc. IMO some have simply shifted their arguments from hospitalization/death to Long Covid as the reason for supporting restrictions.
Well, i stayed home because i was worried about serious illness and hospitalization, not death, after looking at the early data. Now i wear a mask because of long covid. So… Okay.
I’m not sure who you think is gung-ho in favor of restrictions, though.
I’ll explain, but first (at the risk of coming off as antagonistic) what’s your take on my comment?
My initial assumption was hyperbole. My second thought was not to assume hyperbole.
I don’t know what you mean by that. Your comment is cryptic.
What I meant was that when COVID first started it seemed like a sentence of death or at least a sentence to a miserable hospital experience (hence “ICU on a ventilator”) but now, after a couple of years AND vaccinations/boosters, it isn’t as scary. Partly because deaths and hospitalizations are down (although NOT zero), and partly just anxiety fatigue, i.e., we’re getting used to it. Yes, people are still being hospitalized and some are dying, but now (I think) most of us know someone who has had COVID and recovered, maybe even had it more than once. So it no longer seems inevitable that if we contract COVID we will wind up in the ICU on a ventilator. In the beginning, there were even ventilator shortages, remember? Seems an eternity ago, but only a couple of years.
I don’t know if that is a satisfactory explanation to those who wondered about my comment…but there it is.
I don’t remember any point during this epidemic when the claim by the CDC or by anyone else mainstream was anything other than many people having mild or even asymptomatic cases, but some minority percentage getting significantly ill and an even smaller percentage winding up in the hospital.
The problem was, and is, that even a small percentage of 7+ billion people is a whole lot of people; and, at the start, there was neither any immunity nor adequate hospital preparations, so hospitals were overwhelmed in many areas. Maybe that’s the only portion of the news you were noticing?
It never WAS inevitable. If you read the actual articles and statistics, if you were under about 50, you stood an extremely low chance of being hospitalized or dying from COVID. Over 50, it ramped up as you got older, and octogenarians were at very high risk.
But all the rest of it has always been so ill-defined that it’s hard to make what feels like a well considered and competent decision that isn’t also a bit chicken little-ish. What are the odds of long COVID? How sick DO you actually get? What are the chances of actually catching COVID in various situations?
Some of that you could dig up if you dug long and hard enough, but it’s always been caught between “it’s the 21st century black death” and “it’s just another flu” on one axis, and between “if you catch it, you’ll likely have mild symptoms or none at all” to “if you catch it, you’ll be in the hospital on a ventilator” on the other axis.
I mean, what I’d like to know is just how sick it’ll make me, and how likely I am to catch it. Both framed in terms of known diseases like influenza, the common cold, sinus infections, etc…
Sigh.
I read and “noticed” the same news as you. 
Please give me a break.
I’m talking about perception of danger more than the reality of danger. I’m remembering morgue trucks parked outside hospitals, patients waiting in hallways because of no rooms, and as you said “hospitals were overwhelmed.”
I’m pulling out of this rabbit hole.
ThelmaLou:
I don’t know what you mean by that. Your comment is cryptic.
It’s not worth much back-and-forth – I simply wondered if you believed the exacting letter of what you wrote. Your explanation this morning makes clear that you did not.
ThelmaLou:
What I meant was that when COVID first started it seemed like a sentence of death or at least a sentence to a miserable hospital experience (hence “ICU on a ventilator”) but now, after a couple of years AND vaccinations/boosters, it isn’t as scary.
Understood.
You know, it wasn’t all that long ago that a number of companies, including Ford and GM, reworked their assembly lines to produce ventilators, which were suddenly in short supply. But then ISTM that those devices weren’t needed as much, perhaps due to the medical profession understanding how to better treat COVID patients.
I’ve often wondered what happened to all those newly-minted ventilators.
Some of that is just the nature of science. Not all of these things are known, some can’t be known, and as knowledge is gained, recommendations and numbers will change. This really upsets some people.
Day 1: This is extremely dangerous, don’t do it.
Day 100: Research shows that as long as you take certain precautions, risks can be mitigated.
Day 1000: Some of those old precautions aren’t effective, use these new precautions.
People: I’m so confused, how can I trust anything you’re saying, you keep telling me different things, you were wrong about the first precautions, how do I know you’re not wrong about these!?
Sorry, that’s how things work.
Another huge factor is that people are terrible at understanding what probabilities even mean, let alone judging risk. If the scientists say there is a 5% chance of people under 50 ending up in the hospital, one set of people will think that means they need to be very afraid. Another set of people will say they know 10 people under 50 who got COVID and were all fine, so the 5% statistic is bullshit.
So what’s necessary is to listen to experts. That can be very hard, because there is a huge temptation to only listen to experts who say what you want to hear, and because there can be legitimate disagreements among experts.
However, there are many consensus recommendations. Be vaccinated and boosted is by far the most important one.
We’d all like to know that, but I think it just isn’t knowable information.
Individualized personal risk is incredibly difficult to come up with, even for things like heart disease or cancer, that we’ve been studying for decades. It’s going to depend on things like your natural susceptibility to the virus, which is unknown. Your risk factors, which may be known but sometimes people aren’t honest about (“I’m not overweight enough to matter”). Your behavior—how often are you around other people where you could catch something, and how contagious the current variant is.
For me, my gut estimate based on death rates is that COVID is about 10 times worse than influenza. It is also much more likely I’ll catch COVID than the flu, because COVID is much more contagious, and because it is much more widespread in the community.