Cancel my gym membership and buy a new wetsuit and hiking boots.
Underwater hiking???
Nah. Just trying to summit Mt. Neoprene, presumably.
Just in case the confusion isn’t just smartassery, surfing and hiking are my two favorite outdoor solo activities.
Tis better to be a smart ass than a dumb ass!
Idk, as a healthcare worker I didn’t get to stay home but I did get to enjoy the traffic-free commutes. I guess the only thing I’d do differently is see more of my parents, who were truly stuck inside and fearful because of being +/- 80yo with health issues. I was afraid of bringing it home to them but in retrospect I could have found a way to be present.
Do not kink-shame. That’s not nice. 
I’ve already purchased more. Yes, they do expire, or rather, are less effective, but I bought some in a couple of different form factors since they’re currently cheap.
But, even in the face of a global pandemic, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that the USA would go into any sort of lockdown under this administration. So I’m assuming any efforts I took would be to protect myself and wife from the exposure caused by the indifference of others and the state.
So more masking, and I still have enough sanitizer in house. We have actually been working at reducing the amount of pantry staples from our still rather high levels, so once a pandemic was confirmed, I’d buy more and overstuff the pantry again. I have no idea if work from home would be possible for me, but it would for the wife, though not 100% most likely.
We don’t eat out much (we’re pretty good cooks, the wife is vegetarian, which reduces our choices as well), but that would be off the table though we’d probably do distanced take out from one local place we love and have a good relationship with to help support them.
This time, we’d probably (in terms of positives) get better about cleaning the whole house (needs it) and I just got a new exercise bike, so maybe succeed at some health goals, though Covid added at least 10lbs for me (stress/bored eating).
I’d desperately try to get my now-fatalist father to take precautions since he’s high risk, but he’d probably not bother.
Same. Covid though relatively spared kids from severe disease and they were not highly efficient spreaders. Next one I’ll be older for and kids are more typically great spreaders with younger kids at relatively higher risk of significant disease.
So being morbid I’ll likely do the same thing, go to work each day, but better odds that I’ll die.
It’s not kink shaming coming from a guy who crawls around underwater
Next pandemic is due 2118-19 so I’m not worried about it.
The only thing I was short of early in the COVID pandemic was masks and hand sanitizer, though they became available relatively quickly. There was never a problem running out of TP because I always look for sales and buy tons when my favourite brand is on sale, so when we had the Great TP Shortage, my cupboards were full.
I was anxious about vaccinations and kept on top of news about the mass vaccination clinics and signed up for notifications and online appointments. I don’t remember the timings but I got the first vax fairly early in the pandemic, then the booster, then a third shot later.
On balance, I don’t think there’s much I’d do differently.
I’m lucky to have been in the “pandemic was easy enough for me” the last time. I’m a programmer and already worked from home sometimes. I upgraded my home office setup when it was clear work was going to tell us to do it full time. I also was ahead of the curve on prepping, because I had good friends panning a wedding near Milan in March of 2020. That kept me up on the news.
I think the biggest change for me has been/will continue to be that I no longer let my hurricane supplies dwindle during the off season. I don’t keep quite as well stocked, but I do make sure I maintain plenty of food and other supplies. Cash, in particular - I keep a few hundred in small bills in my safe. I used to spend it at the end of the season, but now I maintain the supply all year, just in case. (I don’t expect a pandemic to interrupt the money supply. The world where I can’t go to an ATM is likely the same world where physical cash isn’t very useful. But it’s easy enough to do this, so I do.)
The pandemic is what prompted me to begin studying Spanish in earnest, but not until we were well into it. If I had it to do over again, I would pull the trigger a lot faster.
Well, it’s easy to criticize…
Not much, but there’s also not much reason to believe the lessons from COVID would carry over.
For example, the early obsession with hand sanitizers and such were largely worthless in retrospect as COVID doesn’t transmit well by fomite. But that doesn’t necessarily apply to whatever’s next. Maybe it’ll be dominated by fomite transmission and airborne particles will play a much lesser role. Who knows?
Our health institutions did a pretty bad job at quickly identifying the main transmission vectors and putting focus on those specifically. That will likely be the same as well, which means playing it safe and treating all vectors as risky. But there are limits to that.
I pretty much always have a year’s worth of TP on hand so I doubt that’ll be a problem. A roll lasts a long time ~5 squares a day.
I may be goin’ to Hell in a bucket
But at least I’m enjoyin’ deride.
There is definitely going to be another pandemic. Hell, the previous one is still ongoing, no matter what the US government says.
The next one absolutely nothing will be done (at least in the USA). No lockdowns, no vaccines, no work from home.
Even if people are dropping dead in the streets.
I will do what I did last time. Hoard masks, avoid people, and work from home (I luckily can do that). I never caught COVID (knock on wood). I’ll do my best not to catch the next one.
Really? I thought pretty early on, the science was converging on airborne transmission, mostly in enclosed spaces, and that fomites weren’t a big deal. That was in the first few months, IIRC. But it took a long, LONG time for that message to spread through the general population. I was working in a science museum at the time and even there they were freakish about the hand sanitizer long after fomites were considered relatively safe to ignore.
I mean, is it more an issue with health institutions, or just science communications and probability evaluations in general? Hmm.
Oh… and happy birthday!
probably die. They’re saying the CFR for bird flu is likely 30%, and few if any of us have gotten any younger since 2020. This is before considering that the CDC is already being gutted and censored.
That’s fine by me. The COVID pandemic was a truly miserable time. I’m really not interested in living through something that’s even 20% worse than that, and bird flu will likely be a lot worse.