They are sheep who do what they are told. It’s why they all became big Kanye fans for a couple months.
I’m probably somewhat jaded by my own experiences. My mom came down for the 2nd week of March for my wife’s surgery. I got her away from Fox News and AM radio. I just rationally told her all the ways Trump was screwing up the coronavirus response. She agreed and was disgusted. Then she went home to my dad who is a rabid right winger and started watching Tucker every night like normal. Now she thinks Covid is overblown, wants to talk about Obamagate and along with my dad have been pushing and planning hardcore for my sister’s large wedding that has always been scheduled for the end of May.
And my parents aren’t dumb my dad has an engineering PHD and has headed up some pretty intense military projects. My mom is college educated and generally curious about how the world works. They are just literally brainwashed from their car radio and tv every day. So they still care about what happened to Seth Rich, are all in on Gyna purposefully sending us the virus, and tons of other insane shit. It’s sad AF.
Think about this as percent of normal. Say normal is 70. At 97 it’s really 10% of normal out and about. (100-x)/(100-70). Cause it’s moving about that’s the key measure. So 94 is twice the activity as 97.
You might think. 97 vs 88 isn’t a big deal but it’s probably a big deal for R. Especially if we scale 95 as R=1 and 70 as R=2 (let’s assume R>2 requires large crowds with frequency).
Let’s also just assume it’s a linear function. It’s probably a log mean average but I don’t think we have to go that detailed since we are guesstimating anyhow.
So Out and about from 5 to 30 (remember =100-stay at home) then we can ball park every 1% as 0.04R. So 97 to 87 is an increase in R of 0.4 give or take.
(I picked 95 as R=1 cause we think we’ve been a little below R and at 98% stay at home).
And as a reminder the main spread is happening in rural areas and say half the folks are wearing masks, so the native R may be impacted by our behavior more than just no sports and concerts and limited church weddings etc.
The second part sounds shitty. I feel like the first part is maybe not that crazy expensive, compared to say getting Starbucks all the time or something like that.
I have a strong caffeine habit and probably spend 1k/yr on coffee. I am addicted to nicotine. It’s not really that similar, despite the way people often refer to coffee.
The prior post I mentioned referred to nicotine delivery systems as being the dangerous factor, cigarettes, cigars, chew, and probably vaping. Gum and lozenges are safer but typically more expensive, so many people addicted to nicotine will default to harmful delivery systems.
I was a nicotine addict for 30 years. I still fondly remember smoking and all the benefits of nicotine. I continued to use nicotine long after quitting smoking. And now that I’ve finally broken the physical addiction, a process that took years, I will fucking never do anything to risk getting addicted again.
I mean, maybe subways are really bad. It seems like we’re fairly ignorant about disease spread and transmission, especially for this novel disease, and some places are getting lucky/unlucky based on factors we are poorly aware of.
Thing is, I’ve quit nicotine before for a number of years. It’s a fucking bitch, but doable. But if I’m drinking I’m getting cigarettes, and ain’t nothing going to stop me. I only drink 1-2 times month, so it’s not bad, but I feel like I’d almost need to not drink at all for 3-6 months to really quit. Haven’t had a beer the last 2 months and wondering if I should refrigerate the microbrews I have so they don’t go bad. Unfortunately I didn’t plan ahead on using lockdown to quit nicotine.
Yea… stop using nicotine right now if you can. I was a smoker for a decade, vaped for a few years after, then used the lozenges for a while before I quit. It’s crazy how addictive it is. I’ve been off nicotine for about a year, and I still crave cigarettes and would snap pick up smoking again if I had some kind of terminal situation.
I considered just dropping this because I like you and your posting and don’t want to piss you off unnecessarily, but internet arguments are definitely an area in which I do not behave rationally, plus I think it’s useful to have some pushback ITT as we have people discussing dipping their vegetables in denatured ethanol, for Christ’s sake, which has the potential to actually hurt people. Anyway the truth is: I’m just annoyed by your pretence to hyper-rationality as the basis for what I see as clearly emotion-driven behaviour.
Here’s an article on the subject of SARS-CoV-2 and food, takeout in particular:
Don Schaffner had Thai takeout for dinner a few nights ago, just as he did occasionally in the weeks and months before the current COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s worth knowing. Schaffner is a distinguished professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey whose expertise includes quantitative microbial risk assessment, predictive food microbiology, hand-washing and cross-contamination.
“I know people are worried, but from what we know currently about the virus, it’s safe to eat food prepared at restaurants so long as you take the proper precautions — in particular hand-washing,” says Schaffner.
“While COVID-19 is new to us, coronaviruses are not, and with all the studies done on these viruses, there has never been any information to implicate food-borne transmission,” says Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of medicine in the department of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn.
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is primarily spread via droplets expelled through coughing or sneezing, says William Schaffner. If you’re standing too close (within about 6 feet) to an infected person when the person coughs or sneezes, or even possibly when the person speaks or exhales, viral droplets could make their way to your nasal passages and mucous membranes. Or if you touch a surface with droplets on it and then touch your eyes, nose or mouth, that could also lead to infection.
All this means that transmission via food is incredibly unlikely, say both professors Schaffner — unless you actually inhaled your food. “Even in the so unlikely scenario of virus through a sneeze or cough coming into contact with, say, a salad, that would enter the body through the throat,” William Schaffner says.
William Schaffner explains that the virus is primarily risky to us when it attaches to surfaces in our respiratory tract, not when we accidentally eat it. “The virus seems to be latching onto cells in the upper reaches of the nose, a place food doesn’t enter,” he explains. “Virus that found its way into your gastrointestinal tract would be killed by the acid in your stomach.”
Here’s another one:
Yes. The USDA, CDC and FDA all say that there is no evidence that the novel coronavirus is transmitted through food or food packaging. A study did show that the virus could survive in the air for several hours and on surfaces like plastic for up to three days. But, Paula Cannon, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Keck School of Medicine of USC, said it’s important to remember that the study was done in a laboratory in a controlled experiment with conditions that are not found in everyday life.
“I will tell you as a virologist, I’m not worried at all about the risk of there being anything on packages, Amazon boxes, food containers or anything like that,” Cannon said. “Having said that, it’s totally OK to be a bit freaked out. I’m not going to criticize anybody for that, and it’s OK to be, you know, kind of a bit of an obsessive sort of hypochondriac at the moment.”
Expert opinion is absolutely universal on this. Find a counterexample if you don’t believe me. My question is this: what would you think of someone, in any other area, who when shown universal expert opinion on some question of fact, says “bro, that’s all very well, but I’m doing my own research”? Like, you get the annoyance of that in other contexts, right? I just don’t buy that as you being more rational than other people, sorry.
Something like 40,000 people die on the roads each year in the US. Huge numbers more are badly injured or are permanently traumatised by killing someone else. You will not get any experts telling you that car travel is totally safe. Think about all the car trips you have made in your life for trivial reasons. I simply don’t believe that you apply this level of risk assessment to anything else in your life.
A friend had a cigarette while we had coffee together last week. I couldn’t help thinking she wanted to see how I’d react because she knows I don’t approve. I overthink everything though and maybe she just has a nicotine monkey on her back.