Strong links, i.e. you see them once a week or more (under normal circumstances) or would if they lived in the same area as you.
Do you know me? My uncle and aunt died of confirmed covid.
Haven’t been vaxed yet, but I’m sure that after I am vaxed I won’t be any less antisocial than I was two years ago.
Fully vaxed, still antisocial. The last couple of years has really shown me how much I don’t like people.
OTOH, I was waiting for a friend in a parking lot when a different friend I hadn’t seen in years showed up. We hugged without hesitation. That was really nice.
I did know through the rumor mill that she was fully vaxed, or I might have hesitated a little because I still can carry it.
Well done you. Well, except that I wasn’t talking about exactly the same thing you are (I mentioned people actually testing positive after a vaccine), and I wasn’t intending a specific number, just using a very large number to illustrate how unlikely that event is.
I still don’t think I’m a likely vector for covid at the moment. Sorry, but less than 10 in a million is definitely what I’d call “unlikely.”
I get Pfizer #2 tomorrow morning. I am going to be a hugging machine (as appropriate). I normally go to one or two concerts a week and most of those are hippie/Deadhead/jam band shows. In a typical week I would easily hug over ten different people. I am live music starved and hug starved and I miss my friends so much. Things are finally opening up and I can’t wait. I bought a little plastic vax card holder and I am going to wear it around my neck on a lanyard.
Last night I saw Ziggy Marley at one of those drive in shows at the Ventura Fairgrounds. It was so much fun. I saw a few friends that I haven’t seen in over a year. It was amazing.
Saturday we attended an outdoor concert at a friend’s bar. He’s a cool guy, hires bands that he wants to hear and sets them up in his carport. The crowd was small and people were spread out nicely.
I know you to the degree any of us know each other here online; you do loom large in my list of Doper friends and I do read many of your fine words almost every day. And I did know you’d lost close relatives.
My question was really trying to decide what constitutes closeness and degrees of separation in a social media environment. e.g. If Kim Kardashian has 50,000,000 twitter followers and tweets that her gardener’s mother in law died of COVID, are all 50M of those people now 2 degrees? or 3? Or no connection?
In other news, yesterday I worked a whole day with a co-worker I’d never met before who lives across the country from me. It’s a big company and that happens often. Anyhow, during the 6 hours we shared a windowed broom closet together I learned that his aged late-70s mother had contracted COVID over Christmas 2020 & died in Jan 2021. That was the first co-worker I’ve encountered with a first degree connection to a COVID death. I will probably never see that guy again, so he fails @DMC’s test of ongoing contact. RIP Rob’s Mom, and I hope your family will eventually be able to have a proper funeral for you.
I have one neighbor acquaintance I see regularly whose institutionalized 50-something daughter had died of COVID back around midsummer 2020. So that person definitely meets @DMC’s standard and I’m within 2 degrees of a death.
I was really just using back of a napkin calculations. Using the Dunbar number for “meaningful contacts” of 150, I then guessed that some significant number of their contacts would overlap with mine, so gave them only 75 unique meaningful contacts, leaving us 2 degrees away from over 11,000 people. Since roughly 1 out of 570 people in the US have died from COVID, I think it’s pretty likely an accurate claim. We might not be aware of them, as not every shares details like that even with coworkers.
Obviously, there are lots of margins of error in the above, and also numerous exceptions, but I wasn’t trying to be particularly scientific.
Well, you can pick different degrees of closeness to count, but if I were counting, I would include that. Especially if she wrote a little bit about it and humanized the person.
Every article I’ve ever read on human networking talks about how uneven the distribution is, and how some people have enormously more connections that others. The Kardashians have a LOT of connections. You might way, “Kim doesn’t know most of those people, so it doesn’t count”. And that’s fair. But I’d say that to every one of those people, dying of covid is suddenly a real happening to a real flesh&blood person, and not just something abstract on the national news.
But it’s not Kim, and it’s not even the gardener, whom she knows directly. It’s only the gardener’s MIL, so 3 degrees, not 2.
Nor was I, and I hope I didn’t come across as sharpshooting your observation/question.
I was more trying to understand about where you were coming from so I could calibrate my response and “grade” those of other folks that came in according to the same standard you were thinking of.
I absolutely, definitely would never count that. For me, a “meaningful contact” means we have meaning to each other. I have no meaning to KK.
By that logic a personalized story on the news of a previously anonymous person in another country that you’ve never met or heard of prior is a meaningful contact. It’s just not. A meaningful story, sure, but there is no personal connection.
Or even worse - a whole bunch of people count dead celebrities as first degree contacts.
I don’t object to other ways of counting meaningful contacts. But looking at the interest in the funeral of the price consort, I think a lot of people DO have meaningful (one sided) relationships with celebrities.
Really, it depends what the reason is that you want to investigate contacts, though.
Do all Republican voters have a meaningful first-degree connection through Herman Cain?
Anyway, I wrote something for a mildly similar thread that I’d like to add here: I’ve never really agreed with all the people who say that they’ll wait until The Authorities give the all-clear before resuming “normal” activity; I don’t think an unambiguous all-clear will happen in any sort of reasonable time frame. It might never happen. I think eventually, we’ll all have to make a judgment call without the comfort of an authoritative body giving us a 100% unambiguous and certain okay. And for me, that’ll be two weeks after my second dose.
Is that immoral or selfish of me? Am I putting others at deadly risk for that stance? It’s something I think about often, no matter how right the decision feels for me.
No, I wouldn’t think so. People who voted for him might, under my very loose criteria.
Back to the original question: My social comfort has vastly improved. I feel pretty darn safe. I still mask and distance in public, and I don’t think I’d go anyplace at that was full capacity (not legal here anyway), but I’m chill about the incidental stuff and totally fine with going maskless with vaccinated people.
Of course I live in an NJ, which has relatively strict protocols, and most people I know and interact with aren’t fucking idiots about vaccinations/precautions. We’re at nearly 50% wholly or partially vaccinated too, so the herd overall has gotten safer.
I’m just not worried about catching it anymore. I’m well aware that it’s still a possibilty, but I’m comfortable with the odds, especially as I’m still taking basic precautions.
Likewise… I am really curious to see how my employer will handle it (especially as my employer is a law firm with a significant employment law practice). I mean so far they have not insisted that most people come to the office, ever (I started in September and have literally never set foot there). I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea of personal health information, but OTOH I also have no interest in contracting COVID. I only know a handful of people who have, but now one of them is dead, and two who were healthy pre-COVID and were never sick enough to be hospitalized are having significant ongoing medical issues - one now has congestive heart failure and has been hospitalized for that instead twice in the past few weeks.
And yes, I am vaccinated, but no vaccination is perfect, as I learned when I got flu a couple of years ago from a co-worker who refused to stay home when he was sick. In spite of vaccination and being treated immediately with Tamiflu, I was pretty miserable for a few days. With a disease that causes things like congestive heart failure out of the blue, I am not taking any risk that I don’t have to take. And I am totally picturing some partner in the middle of trial prep refusing to go home even when symptomatic. My personal plan is just to walk the hell out of the office and work from home if management won’t resolve the issue. Let them try to fire me for it.
Love the avatar!
Yeah, I’m feeling much less anxious now that I’m vaxxed. I haven’t really changed much, but I’m more comfortable about it.
I’m facing a similar situation as **ThelmaLou’**s. I’m in a critique group which has been meeting on Zoom for over a year. I’ve volunteered my house for an in-person meeting. Three of us have been vaccinated, one who is the only one under 65 is waiting because she has bad reactions to vaccines, and is nervous, but one is an anti-vaxxer. She now claims that she got Covid - we’ve met every two weeks during the pandemic and at no time was she very sick, so I doubt it. So I get to say no one is invited unless they are vaccinated. We’ll see how it goes.
Controlling the meeting area is a plus.
Otherwise, we went to the real library earlier this week, and went to someone’s house (fully vaccinated) with no masks. Much less fear than before.
Sister and her husband and kids are vaxxed. The husband of my late stepsister is vaxxed. His two kids are too young. My other stepsister and her husband refuse to get vaxxed and their kid is 17 and is not vaxxed so far.
Stepmom refuses to let un-vaxxed people in her house (unless they are underage) nor will she eat a meal with them. My stepsis is furious and is hurt and thinks its unfair.
It’s an impossible situation.