Lemme rephrase that as
Somebody who has high occupational exposure has an even greater need to be super-duper-extra-scrupulous in their off duty time. That will reduce their risk as much it can be reduced. Which still may be uncomfortably high.
5th edit is the charm here. Sheesh!
You are correct, I do not personally know any nurses.
From my earlier post:
My predisposition does not mean “guilty for all time, incontrovertibly and without possibility of refutation.” It’s merely my default position, one which can change if/when new information is presented. I know there are essential workers out there whose exposures are much higher than average due to the nature of their jobs, and they surely get infected at a higher rate than work-at-home folks in spite of rigorous adherence to best practices. But how many of them are there?
I posted that back in September. the current 7-day average here in the US is 170,000 new cases of COVID every single day. Do we have a sense of how many of these cases are front-line workers who followed all the recommended safety practices, and how many of them were people who flew across the country to a big family Thanksgiving gathering that didn’t involve any masks?
I tend to judge people (new neighbors upstairs, I’m glaring at you) who do these things anyway, whether they get sick or not.
The new people upstairs hosted a big, loud, rowdy party last weekend, that went until 2:30am, and involved at least one fight in the hallway. The apartment where it was officially held apparently couldn’t contain it well, because it spilled into the hallway most of the night.
It made my dog bark a lot, which is the only reason I didn’t call and complain to maintenance, because I didn’t want retaliatory complaints against my dog, who would have been perfectly quiet had it not been for all the banging and shouting and loud music.
There are multiple studies out there now that demonstrate front-line workers (especially health care but also essential services like food service, retail, etc) are at an alarmingly elevated risk of infection, despite precautions. And they are a significant part of the daily new infection burden.
So don’t blame the victim automatically, folks. The PPE available to the average frontline worker is typically inadequate in the extreme.
Literally tens of millions.
Every grocery store worker. Every postal worker. Every delivery person. Everyone involved with pickup/curbside/delivery sales. Every police officer. Every firefighter. Every utility worker repairing downed power lines, investigating gas leaks, or dealing with water main breaks. Everyone making needed repairs like furnace repairmen in winter, plumbers, etc. And I’ve probably forgotten a few groups.
You can not run a nation of 300+ million people without the above. You can not ask that the majority of that 300+ million shelter in place without these others enabling them to shelter safely.
None of us can avoid occupational exposure.
In some ways we are worse off than medical people because the environments in which we work are less controlled. The most virulent anti-maskers probably won’t go to a hospital and start pulling masks off other people and coughing into their faces but we DID have one do exactly that at my store. Sure, the police showed up and arrested the maskhole, but not before potential damage was done.
Keep in mind, too, that N95 masks have been reserved for medical personnel. All of those tens of millions of “essential workers” are having to make do with lesser solutions. It’s not that we don’t want to wear an N95, it’s that we don’t have access to them. We are exposed daily, just like medical personnel, but less protected.
If you don’t realize that there are tens of millions of people outside of the medical that can NOT avoid occupational exposure you are ignoring and regarding as disposable a lot of people that make civilization run.
I asked the wrong question. Sorry. What I’m really wondering is this:
Of the 170,000 new cases every day, how many of them are frontline workers who were followed best practices and still got infected because of their high exposure?
Frontline workers are unable to follow best practices because they are can NOT access PPE like N95 masks.
So really, millions of people - and by extension, some number of those infected every day - should not be judged by a standard of “best practices” they are UNABLE to comply with through no fault of their own.
The vast majority of people I know who’ve had it, have caught it through working in healthcare or schools, or from their children who caught it at school, or because they live or work in a care home, or from family members who’ve caught it from the above. So I feel concerned for their health, and grateful I work from home and don’t have kids. I guess it depends on your experience.
LOL
As broomie already said, “best practices” are impossible for the typical frontline worker. They’re hard as hell to follow for us medical workers. Not enough decent PPE. Too much of the recently mass produced masks, face shields, gowns are CRAP compared to pre-covid products. Add in that the 6 foot distance rule goes unenforced constantly and the front line workers are not empowered to complain about it or enforce it, and I’m stunned we’re not up over a hundred million cases by now
I think there is a middle ground between “having unmasked indoor parties” and “taking every conceivable precaution”. I am very risk adverse. But I take a few that I don’t “have to”. I let my son have a once-weekly outdoor playdate. He’s an only child, and if I didn’t do that, he’d have gone since March 2020 without contact with any other child. I think the risk is worth the benefit. But I sit at the park, 10 ft from his mom, and we talk. I have kept my twice-monthly housekeeper, because I can’t keep the house clean otherwise and it has profound effects on my mental health. I’ve “bubbled” with my mom and dad. So if I got COVID, you could drill into my life and find places where I could have been more perfect and maybe stayed safe. But my behavior is a far cry from running around maskless, licking strangers on the mouth.
I think this is a “glass houses” situation. I think most people have some small calculated risks they have accepted and that’s okay. And no one should judge others for selecting a slightly different slate of risks.
How about an opposing question: what percentage of the country do you imagine can work from home?
N95 masks were available for sale to anyone last time I looked. The worldwide shortage is much abated. They are expensive, and perhaps not feasible for you to use properly. But they are no longer strictly reserved for medical workers.
These are all companies I did business with before the pandemic, and as far as I know, they are all legit. (They all sent me what I bought, anyway) One is a light bulb company that sources its stuff in China, and seems to have leveraged those connections to add PPE to their inventory. The other two sell medical supplies, and I had bought surgical masks from them. And one of those had no PPE, and the other would only sell PPE to qualified medical establishments, at the start of the pandemic. Both will now sell them to you or me.
(I’ve linked to a single product at each, but they have a variety of products. The N95 rated are more expensive than the KN95, and the rating is probably more reliable.)
https://iremedy.com/kn95-mask-white-pack-of-20.html
https://www.allheart.com/allheart-kn95-face-respirator-box-of-10/p/gtkn95mbx/
It’s still a struggle for our medical office to actually get orders for decent N95 masks filled, despite all the ads for them. “Out of stock”, “delayed shipment” etc are frequent notifications we get AFTER the order is placed and billing info sent
puzzlegal if you’re getting mass orders filled quickly let me know whom through
I guess our definition of “best practices” is kind of fuzzy. Outside of a health care setting, you are correct, people can’t really get their hands on N95 respirators. But they can wear other masks, and they usually can keep their distance and/or work behind physical barriers. If they still get infected while doing a job that they have to do (as opposed to attending an underground rave), that’s unfortunate and I can find no fault with them.
The question still stands: of 170,000 new cases every day, how many of them were doing stupid things like going to parties, and how many were just doing their job? If 179,999 of them got it from attending maskless political rallies and concerts, then in the absence of any information about a specific case, an assumption of “probably was taking stupid risks” is pretty reasonable.
I asked google “how are people getting COVID”, and one of the more relevant answers was this:
That’s a news article about a report from the Seattle & King County Public Health Department. If you want the actual report, it’s this PDF.
Having now gotten my hands on a little bit of actual information, it seems I’ve forgotten about some other COVID-positive folks I’ve heard of who are neither essential workers nor reckless lunatics. The article lists some of these folks, most notably “<a certain group of people” got the virus at home." AIUI, this is one reason LA County has been blowing up for the past month or so: Latinos tend to live together in big multi-generational households, so if one person brings it into the house, it’s a fair bet everyone else in that household is going to get infected.
According to that article/report:
Essential workers comprised 29 percent of cases.
Social and community settings were where 18 to 24 year olds most often got Covid – more than a third of their cases.
More than a third of people in north Seattle and Shoreline got Covid from social gatherings or from being out and about in the community – the biggest source of exposure in those areas. Meanwhile in south Seattle and cities such as Renton, Auburn, Kent the most common site people contracted the virus was their home.
The “social and community settings” cases are the ones where people are letting their guard down - and it appears that these cases are not a large enough fraction to warrant any kind of blanket assumption in situations where details are not known. It may be a matter of perception: ever since last spring, the media have been clogged with stories about people being stupid - giant concerts, frat parties, beach parties, maskless protests, holiday travel, and so on - so one develops an unwarranted gut feeling that these must be the people who are propelling this pandemic into the stratosphere. And no doubt they are making things much worse, but they clearly are not the majority of cases that I might have previously assumed.
Ignorance fought; in cases where facts aren’t known, I will temper my judgment from now on.
Remember, precautions are to flatten the curve, not eliminate the disease. We want to take the pressure off hospitals and health care workers. We reduce the risky behaviors as much as possible, and our health care system can most likely handle the burden. But the disease will continue to spread until it either runs its course naturally or we curtail it with vaccines.
I see how it could be comforting to believe that only motorcyclists at Sturgis are getting sick, but that’s the Just-world fallacy. Current best estimates show somewhere around 25% of people in the US have been infected at some point. One out of four people! It’s easy to find salient examples of idiots protesting mask rules at Walmart, but these people are a small minority. The majority of people do try to follow the rules and take precautions. This virus is just extremely contagious.
Some examples of why I don’t judge. I know many people who have gotten symptomatic Covid. Probably around a couple dozen now, one death. Three of them were health care workers (including the one who died.) None of them were anti-maskers nor participated in risky behavior, to my knowledge. One of them is a radiologist who had experience with SARS and MRSA and was sounding the alarm bells early last year and convinced me of how serious and widespread a threat this was going to be and how to take precautions. He is as meticulous and by-the-books and risk-averse as they come. He got it a couple months ago and recovered.
Both my in-laws got it. They live in a gated retirement community. They always wear masks out and wash their hands when they get home. They take it seriously because they’re in their late 70s/early 80s. They only go out for necessities. She to shop for groceries; he for doctor appointments. That’s it. And they got it.
Meanwhile, as safe as I keep wearing a mask, I’m in contact with all sorts of people through the week. I grocery shop every day; I volunteer at a food bank, delivering food to people in need, and I am in close quarters with all sorts of non-mask-wearing people in their apartments, well within 6 feet, sometimes close enough that our bodies touch. I also volunteer at an addiction recovery center once a week. Masks are enforced, six feet is not. I have two children who both go to school in person. I’m not perfect about always washing or sanitizing my hands.
Yet, so far, I’ve managed to evade it, even though I’ve been living in one of the most infected zip codes in Chicago.
Upvote
I hear you. Especially on the “only child” thing. We have let our son, an only child, have pretty much unfettered access to computer and video games, as he is playing online with other kids he knows from school. We also arranged some time, back when the weather was nicer, with other kids where we stayed outside, and everyone was still masked.
We are “bubbling” with the people across the hall and their dog, and they come over for boardgame night every week, which my son has come to love. They are younger than us, but still quite a bit older than my son-- still, young enough to be “cool.” He loves spending time with them. I actually worry a little about how he will feel if things change again, people go back to their former lives, and the cool 30-somethings from across the hall aren’t available for “boardgame night,” or “cheesy horror flick night” anymore with the boychik.
Yeah, this is one of the things that frustrates me the most about media coverage (and there’s seldom any follow-up or self-reflection if predictions that cases will rise after a particular event fail to come true). It seems to reflect a massive blind spot about class, as well. There was a while during the summer when cases among younger people were going up, leading to a bunch of moral-panic articles about college kids partying (and even urban legends about deliberately throwing “COVID parties” where you got a prize for being the first one to catch the virus!) Meanwhile, the demographic that was really experiencing a surge was agricultural workers, who tend to skew young but are not exactly known for their party-hard lifestyle.
I saw someone on Twitter describe the media as focusing disproportionately on “the highest-risk activities among the lowest-risk people,” and I think that’s about right. Meanwhile, it’s like there’s this whole world of people in crowded living and working conditions that’s practically invisible, probably because it’s a lot harder to craft a morally righteous narrative around them.