COVID-19: Chapter 10 - Mission Achomlished!

Not here.

There’s also more cause for concern on long covid, which also should factor in.

But most people here also would still have an income if they had brain fog, I would not.

I mean right-wingers in the US. They cared about COVID for a month or so.

That’s true, but that wasn’t my point. My point is we definitely don’t know that more infections means more risk. If long COVID is a thing, it simply could be that some people have a predisposition to get it even with one infection. While others won’t get it despite multiple infections.

That’s not really that implausible. Certainly it is also possible that the opposite is true.

I’m only going to respond to this one as it was the topic of the post I made. First of all, as I pointed it out, it’s not necessarily my argument. I still mask in nearly all public indoor scenarios. It is simply an argument one could make. There are problems with it, some of which you have mentioned.

But there to equivocate this with April 2020 is absurd. At that time, we had lots of evidence that COVID had a high morbidity and mortality rate, no vaccines and no treatment. Now we have scant evidence that long COVID is real (certainly nowhere near the level of evidence we had about COVID being deadly a non-trivial amount of time), vaccines, and treatments (which dramatically reduce the risk of the immediate consequences). And even if long COVID proves to be something that is real, unlike someone who goes down the tubes quickly in the ICU, there could potentially be decades for someone to come up with a cure or treatment for it.

So the two scenarios are really not parallel at all.

This is super fucking scuzzy to suggest.

Yeah this dude is a scumbag of the highest order.

Given how you reacted to the SCOTUS decision about the Border Patrol and the 100 mile limit, I’d say that you may not have the best ability to assess very low frequency events which lead to bad outcomes.

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I think that this long covid stuff is probably not as bad a thing as CW is worried about. However I also think that the risk of ruin is high enough that CW is acting rationally by worrying about it and continuing to take maximum precautions. I still take those precautions as well.

I haven’t caught COVID yet, and I continue to wear a mask everywhere indoors, including when I’m in the common areas of my apartment building.

However, I’m doing this for my own benefit because I don’t want to get sick, even if I don’t develop anything worse than 3-4 days of feeling like crap.

Consequently, I don’t think that the average person who is boosted and trying to live life as normally as possible now after two years of COVID is “taking crazy pills”

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I don’t think he was saying people living life normally are taking crazy pills. I think he’s saying people dismissing the long covid stuff as definitely not a thing, when it could be a thing, are.

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I only wear a mask now where it’s required or when I’m somewhere that vulnerable people may be forced to go like airports/airplane, grocery store, pharmacy, etc. I couldn’t take it anymore and precautions were doing more harm than good to my family and this shit isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

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Man I shudder to think what you were imagining that’s worse than what actually is happening. I remember getting super depressed at the Zeke Emmanuel “it will take 18 months to defeat COVID” article in March of 2020 that turned out to be very optimistic.

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IMO, changing your behaviors three years into this isn’t being unreasonable or taking crazy pills. Many, many, many things are different now than they were then, and a whole lot of the cataclysmic uncertainty has been mitigated through science, technology, and human behavior.

A triple or quadruple vaxed person saying that being ill with COVID is similar to being ill with the flu isn’t in the same galaxy of a statement as it was in April 2020. Is there still uncertainty? Absolutely. Are precautions appropriate for some or even all people? Absolutely. Is sheltering in place appropriate for everyone? I don’t think so.

We shall see though, if it turns out that everyone who caught COVID gets 10 years taken off their life expectancy, that will be bad. I’m still not certain that would make sheltering in place for our entire lifespan reasonable, and as a random moron I put the chances of that outcome as being vanishingly small. But, anyone who feels like that is a reasonably likely outcome is certainly justified for taking any and all precautions. Heck, for me folks are welcome to take ANY precautions, masks, isolation, anything, and I don’t find it unreasonable.

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We are way past the point of judging individual decisions. Society isn’t interested in a collective response and any measures at this point are indefinite outside of changes for parents coming because their young child can be vaccinated.

I’m personally not caution to the wind, but definitely not living like 2020 or 2021 either. I’m taking more risk with the full acceptance that the cost may be I’m not going to see a 70th birthday or worse, the scale and scope of long COVID isnt clear but I’ve seen enough to conclude that repeated infection are going to be generally harmful to health even post vax. My bigger worry is that I’m making the same trade off for my kids without their informed consent, but yeah, the options all suck.

When I say collective response I don’t mean lockdowns, that isn’t really a sustainable societal response. But there’s no good reason we havent normalized masking and routine rapid testing and there should be a Marshall plan like response to clean indoor air. Current vaccination campaign sucks too.

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Who’s “we” here? Because I’m not sure this is true for even just UPers, let alone American society. I saw Jim Breuer trending yesterday (who is he? I’m not really sure, but he was trending yesterday) for a dumbass “comedy” routine making fun of anyone who’d ever worn a mask during the pandemic or who got vaccinated. There’s been plenty of conflict here over not being cautious enough. I expect that we’ll be having these fights pretty frequently, now, even if covid were to magically disappear tomorrow. We’ll still have people masking up for flu every year, and thanks to covid being so politicized, we’ll have people who yell at them for it.

I’ve always maintained that it’s reasonable for people to have different risk tolerances, and that the real ethical concern is much less about catching it than it is spreading it. But, much like how everyone driving slower than you is a moron and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac, it’s only natural to assume that one’s own level of precaution is the right one. The costs of precautions are a real thing. Like, sure, masking up for one trip to the grocery store is almost nothing. Masking up for every trip every time for the rest of my life adds up. And to think about never participating in social drinking or dining ever again (because it’s pretty obvious covid is not going away at this point)? Home schooling my kids and keeping them away from perhaps all but a small bubble of other kids? Or if not home school, then insisting that they eat lunch outside far away from their friends every single day? Those are massive costs that I would absolutely expect people would trade some years at end of life in exchange for fundamental, timeless human pleasures right now and for the vast majority of their shortened lives.

If one isn’t willing to go to those sorts of lengths, then getting covid at some point in one’s lifetime is practically certain, if I’m correct that it isn’t going away. That’s not an argument for going out and getting it as much as you can or to never take any sort of precaution ever again, but we have figured out a really great precaution that dramatically reduces the risk of serious illness and death, and that’s taken the median covid experience for people around us in age from “this shit sucks I feel like ass you really don’t want it” to “yeah, it’s like a cold, the isolation is worse than the illness.” It’s pretty reasonable to change one’s behavior in light of that.

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Still on the Novid list despite not taking much in the way of precautions this spring. We will see how that lasts through Dad’s memorial in a week.

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Probably most famous for being on SNL on the late 90s. He played Goat Boy, which might be the worst SNL recurring character in history.

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Jim Breuer was “Goatboy” on SNL decades ago. Just a very untalented comedian who made it somewhat big. He likes weed and I think he was in a movie with Dave Chapelle. Not knowing who he is a good use of your brain.

apparently my pony is a goat.

Oh, he’s the goat boy guy? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a goat boy sketch, but I remember him being mentioned for that here.

The only one that seems to be on Youtube. If you last until the end, I’ll be surprised.

Well, yeah, COVID twitter still judgmental and this thread exists but a very very small minority of people being like “wow person X is doing Y that’s not good given COVID”. There’s no collective response so makes very little sense to criticize individual actions any more.

Not really sure if this was in response to my post, I would be confused if it was. I certainly don’t have any certainty over the right individual responses given our current reality. I do think our collective approach is sort of depressing and awful for public health.

Getting COVID at some point is sort of a straw man, but otherwise again a little confused why this was in response to my post.