He’s an old man. He should ask John Prine about the safety of full concerts. Oh wait… he’s dead. At least when Prine got sick we didn’t know how dangerous the virus is. Morrison has no excuse for his idiocy.
“Fight the COVID-19 pseudoscience and speak up!”
Noted epidemiologist Van Morrison arguing for 100% capacity shows
The cool room, Lord is a fool’s room
And I can almost smell your COVID sheets
And I can almost smell your COVID sheets
On your sick bed
I gotta go, I gotta go
I just had my first door to door solicitor in years. It was on behalf of a realtor or mortgage broker trying to get First Time Homebuyer customers.
I’m ashamed to say that I reacted like this was normal times, letting him go on for a few minutes, but I retained enough awareness to keep the door open only a crack. I actually don’t know if the dude was wearing a mask.
Only after I shooed him away, after I saw he wanted actual contact information from me, did it occur to me fully how crazy it was. I’m tempted to call to complain, but I don’t want to give this guy a phone number.
I’m just angry at myself for not reacting more appropriately in the actual moment. I’m going to be so pissed off if I come down with COVID now because I was a drowsy idiot.
I’m retired and live alone and I’m pretty much isolated. There have been a few times that I have gotten caught off guard. I think this is because I’m not out in the world having to deal with this every day. It’s very easy in the moment to just act naturally since I don’t have a lot of experience with avoiding potentially dangerous encounters.
The latest was last week when a neighbor knocked on my door. When I got to the door, he had stepped off the porch into my yard. My door does not face the yard so I opened it and stepped out to talk to him. I realized afterwards that I had stood in the space where he had just been breathing. Yeah, it was probably no big deal but I was mad at myself for not putting on a mask and going out to the yard to talk to him. I try to be vigilant but it’s easy sometimes to forget.
A couple of weeks into this (so probably back in March) I was out in front of my house, and I allowed a delivery person to walk up and hand me a package (neither of us was wearing a mask). It was just unexpected and caught me off guard. I felt so stupid afterwards.
I could actually understand the compliance you see: workers in an office aren’t doing anything more strenuous, on average, than walking down to the coffee maker - while someone in a warehouse is likely doing some physical labor. While you CAN breathe just fine through a mask, I have to say it’s slightly tougher when I’m exerting myself more.
Can’t say much about the Covidiot / cow-orkers refusing masks though.
There’s some plain old burnout going on in general, I imagine. I was nearly the Covidiot myself this weekend: I keep a mask in the car so I always have one when running the rare errands. I went to pick up our produce box from the local produce / garden store Saturday, grabbed my crate, started walking toward the pickup spot, and realized I’d forgotten the mask. Whoops. It’s nearly second nature but not quite…
Last weekend we dropped Dweezil off at college. We’ve got concerns, especially since he’s sharing a 4-br apartment, and does not have his own bathroom this year, but we have to hope for the best. We took him for lunch before we left town; We ate outside, well distant from the other diners (this was mid-afternoon so it was very non-crowded) and I think we amused the waitress as every time she came near us, we put our masks back on. The other diners were not doing so, as far as we could tell. It seemed to us to be a rather obvious courtesy to protect her (all the staff were wearing masks).
Oooh: just saw this article this morning. A superspreader event in rural Maine:
We do the same masks-for-waitstaff thing. More and more of the conscientious people around here do it. The clueless remain … clueless while the anti’s get more noisy and also more ostracized.
Curiosity … Is there a big distance or social difference between where you live and the college? IOW, is the local COVID-culture likely to be the same, similar, or wildly different?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”–Upton Sinclair
I should have clarified this – “warehouse” is a catch-all term used at my workplace to refer to the area of the building that isn’t finished office space. While our warehouse does have typical storage areas, and areas for doing labor-intensive work like engine teardowns and welding, it also has work areas set aside that aren’t that different from an office (aside from the lack of carpeting, full walls, or proper dividers between workspaces). Employees in this area cheerfully wander from desk to desk, or over to the file cabinets, without masks. The first positive tester in the company worked in one of these spaces; there are four desks crammed in that enclosed work area, but I’m not sure how many of them were in use at the time this person got sick.
It’s about 140 miles away - and in a very rural area. We’re a DC suburb. The college is in a small town in a red-leaning part of the state.
HOWEVER - the town is predominantly largely a college town, which changes the dynamic, at least in the town, quite a bit. I’m certain it draws people in from outlying areas - it’s the economic center of its county, even has a WalMart and a movie theater. I don’t know if this has led to any clashes.
The college itself has policies in place, requiring masks, smaller classes, at least some online. I haven’t heard, yet, of any outbreaks tied to the place but they’ve only been back for about 10 days.
I’ll have to ask my daughter what the mask-wearing culture is in her area. She’s in a similar small town - which is also the economic center of her part of the state (not just a WalMart, but a Dick’s Sporting Goods and a Bed Bath and Beyond, plus even a TJ Maxx for nicer clothing). HOWEVER - her small town is in Vermont, so the statewide political leanings are quite a bit different.
^That’s great! When a server approaches us and we put our masks on for the interaction, the server always goes out of their way to thank us.
Here’s a funny one. A criminal applied for house arrest vice imprisonment because of the danger of Covid-19. Sadly, for him, the judge noticed his social media accounts Lawyers, Warn Your Clients About Social Media in which he calls Covid a hoax and boasts about going to restaurants and parties without a mask. He’s also irate about criminals having rights - so the judge took that into account.
In the “now I’ve heard everything” department.
A woman just called to explain that she wanted to come in to my business today but couldn’t wear a mask for a medical reason. What is that reason, you ask? She is too sick coughing to keep a mask on. Her “tests are pending”.
Hell no. Are you fucking kidding me?
We’ve not been out for a meal since all this started so I’m wondering if the servers have called a detente on coming over to the table to ask how your meal is at exactly the moment after you’ve just shoved food in your mouth. Because there’s no fucking way I’m ever going to be able to get that mask on in time when I can barely anticipate their sneak attack under normal circumstances.
Where I’ve gone, servers have evolved. They make eye contact from 20 feet away and if you give a thumbs-up they smile and don’t approach. Similarly, if your beer glass is empty, holding it aloft lets them know you need service.
A friend sent me a link to a video on COVID. The video claims the vaccine, which will be required “by governors of every state,” is part of a plot to create “human 2.0”, “melding humans with AI, like The Matrix,” and that the RNA modification in the vaccine will enter every cell in our bodies and modify our own DNA. “The hydrogel inside [the vaccine] is nanotechnology which gives the code inside the ability to connect with artificial intelligence.” As is always the case with this kind of BS, there’s just enough scientific terminology to convince paranoid people with limited education that it’s the real deal.
The friend believes the video is revealing the truth. She’s angry with me for pointing out its many glaring gaps, errors, and twisted logic, so I guess she’s a former friend now.
We were dining outside yesterday for lunch. The server came by as often as in before times.
We didn’t mask up each time. She remained masked, of course.
If I’ve learned one thing in the last seven months, it’s that some of my friends are more stupid and more embracing of their own gullibility than I ever would’ve guessed.