How are u posted:

I would say: try to let go of the things that you can't control and live your life the best you can.

The pandemic die has been cast, the bell can't be unwrung, and the path we're on (slowly ratcheting up vaccines for a couple of years until covid burns out and becomes a nuisance disease) is pretty well set in stone. Set expectations accordingly. That's me, anyway.

Stickman posted:

It never ceases to amaze me that you manage to simultaneously argue that any collective control measures are impossible / personal measures are too onerous / the path our government has taken is the best possible AND ALSO have the audacity to throw the "doomer" label at people who agitate for alternatives and argue that likely outcomes are unacceptable.

HonorableTB posted:

I spent 15 months until vaccines were available protecting my type 1 diabetic partner and the reward for doing everything correctly for so long is the crushing realization that it will be years at a minimum before it will be safe enough to go to a concert or convention again without the risk of drowning in my own fluids let alone how dangerous it will be for her, who also has asthma and high blood pressure, and it's largely because a minority of contrarian assholes would rather poison themselves to death with everything they are told to take except for a vaccine. And not being dead I guess, that too. That's a reward I suppose

Number must go up but no one said whether that number was economic activity or virus laden corpses of the vulnerable, what the gently caress is the point when we are denied even the schadenfreude of some these assholes dying from the thing killing all of us because like with all things they are insulated and protected from consequences by their wealth and privileged status

MadJackal posted:

It's not like NYC is majority N95 or elastomeric wearers. Dicknosing above cloth masks or flat out non-masking on even the subway is happening with a good ~1 in 4 people I see. Even with the city's "vaccine mandate" for indoor dining, none of the places I went to last weekend checked for proof. So what is going on in Florida that makes it special? Did COVID just finally breach into the most vulnerable areas and is taking its inevitable toll?

HonorableTB posted:

I spent 15 months until vaccines were available protecting my type 1 diabetic partner and the reward for doing everything correctly for so long is the crushing realization that it will be years at a minimum before it will be safe enough to go to a concert or convention again without the risk of drowning in my own fluids let alone how dangerous it will be for her, who also has asthma and high blood pressure, and it's largely because a minority of contrarian assholes would rather poison themselves to death with everything they are told to take except for a vaccine. And not being dead I guess, that too. That's a reward I suppose

Number must go up but no one said whether that number was economic activity or virus laden corpses of the vulnerable, what the gently caress is the point when we are denied even the schadenfreude of some these assholes dying from the thing killing all of us because like with all things they are insulated and protected from consequences by their wealth and privileged status

https://twitter.com/getvaxxedstat/s...ingawful.com%2F

nexous posted:

NYs first wave and FLs delta wave have two things in common: lack of testing and intentionally suppressing numbers

Professor Beetus posted:

my heart goes out to all of you who have children.

jetz0r posted:

You can still go enjoy life with your partner, just not the same way as before. My partner and I have been doing a lot of picnics and walks outside, when the wildfire smoke is clear enough. Along with some joint arts and crafts to have some cool items that we both helped create.

Flappy Bert posted:

Isn't a problem with Florida that the vaccine counts are not necessarily all residents? People come to Florida during the first lull in 2020, get vaccinated, and it shows up in the FL numbers even though it's effectively in a different state. Has anyone tried to quantify this?

Professor Beetus posted:

Hell yeah. I have started learning guitar chords, perfecting recipes, sketching. You know, I loving went to college and got an English degree specifically for writing, and this is the first time in thirteen years I've written a short story, because I finally took charge of my mental health. Not to make this thread good vibes only, this is serious poo poo, but I am grateful that this thread is here with y'all posting in it because it's absolutely been a sanity check for me. Thanks for keeping it real and halfway chill.

e: BTW the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters are 100% worth it for the in game audio player alone, much less the games themselves. It kinda sucks that the garbage versions came out for so long but these are absolutely a labor of love and it shows. In typical goon fashion I'm sure many of you are already playing them, but just in case you live under a rock that's my gaming rec currently. If you're looking for a good book I'd recommend The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson. Absolutely great book, and apparently it has good sequels, though I haven't read them yet.

How are u posted:

I don't think that the path our government has taken was the best possible, but I do think that it was pretty inevitable. Again, looking at the vast vast majority of nations across the world bears this out.

Phigs posted:

Pure coincidence that the vast majority of governments across the world that prove it can't be done all follow roughly the same ideology.

How are u posted:

China isn't a communist / socialist / marxist-leninist nation, either. They are authoritarian capitalists, and heading the direction of fascist.

How are u posted:

China isn't a communist / socialist / marxist-leninist nation, either. They are authoritarian capitalists, and heading the direction of fascist.

i am harry posted:

S1E3 of ds9 has a virus spread through the station and everyone is supposed to be quarantined but they all went out to Quark’s instead lmao! And a space trucker is forced to stay and lose his shipment despite not wanting to get sick and trying to gtfo before the problem started hahahahaaaaa and then it mutates and becomes airborne within a day

Blitter posted:

If you're going to public events unmasked or restaurants or bars, stop wondering who the problem is.

Lord Stimperor posted:

I can totally get the position pt6a and Tagesschau are in.

Where I am there are practically zero protections anymore. When kids at school get infected, the state doesn't even recommend self isolation for their mates anymore. Health care is so overworked that some surgeries now have a waiting list of 2 years, but everyone around me is acting like 2019. I have to defend why I'm wearing a mask at the doctor's office. The only place where I occasionally see people still keeping up any kind of hygiene is the Asian supermarket. I am expected to show up in person at at least some work functions.

I constantly feel like a crazy person because the reality I live in seems to be a completely different one from my colleagues and most IRL friends. By contrast when o go onto this thread I feel that I should be ashamed of myself because I visited a supermarket in person. It just gnaws on your sense of reality and maintaining that dissonance is tiring.

HonorableTB posted:

I spent 15 months until vaccines were available protecting my type 1 diabetic partner and the reward for doing everything correctly for so long is the crushing realization that it will be years at a minimum before it will be safe enough to go to a concert or convention again without the risk of drowning in my own fluids let alone how dangerous it will be for her, who also has asthma and high blood pressure, and it's largely because a minority of contrarian assholes would rather poison themselves to death with everything they are told to take except for a vaccine. And not being dead I guess, that too. That's a reward I suppose

Number must go up but no one said whether that number was economic activity or virus laden corpses of the vulnerable, what the gently caress is the point when we are denied even the schadenfreude of some these assholes dying from the thing killing all of us because like with all things they are insulated and protected from consequences by their wealth and privileged status

Bizarre Echo posted:

I've been thinking through a lot of this as well. I'm still masked up and distancing as best possible, but my institution just held the first football game of the season, and my boss is trying to eliminate remote work. Meanwhile, our main hospital just cancelled all non-critical care to devote resources to intensive care. My office is mostly keeping to masking, more or less because I and a few others have enough social cachet that we're able to set norms.

Look, I get it. I did everything right, and when I hear people choosing to pretend like the pandemic isn't a thing, I hear the DOOM music kick in. The posters who said that state- and federal-level interventions are needed are absolutely right, because widespread problems like pandemics need widespread, organized responses. But the lack of organized response doesn't absolve me of my own responsibilities to the people around me.

Stimperor, I get what you were saying about feeling like you're the crazy one because I've been struggling with it too. I've had two thoughts rattling around in my head; "the rain doesn't stop because I don't want to be wet anymore" and "do I need to roll these dice?" I'm soaked, but that doesn't change that what I'm doing does impact the people around me. If I choose to roll dice and contract COVID, I'm increasing risk of people who may be in a worse place to deal with it. Like, think of the level of contempt it would take for me to endanger my person who just got out of surgery, or the one who is taking medications that knocks out their immune system, because I just couldn't be without college football? How would I even explain that to their faces? "lol sorry, your well-being is less important to me than a night out?" It's not.

You keep doing it for another fifteen months, or thirty months, or whatever, because your partner is worth it. The contrarian assholes are infuriating and them getting their comeuppance would be viscerally satisfying, but it's not the point. The point is keeping her safe.


e: your cloud pictures are amazing, I wish I had your view. Please post more.

https://vtdigger.org/2021/09/07/fbi-opens-criminal-probe-into-3-troopers-over-fake-covid-19-vaccination-cards/ posted:

Three Vermont State Police troopers out of the Shaftsbury barracks have resigned and a criminal probe is underway to determine whether they may have violated federal law by making fake Covid-19 vaccination cards.

MadJackal posted:

There's enough data in to start making comments about Delta with more nuance than "IT'S GOING TO KILL EVERYONE!"

Delta is a game changer on top of a game changer, and everything is made more complex by the hyper party/socioeconomic/demographic splits in the US.

Let's take two states with two different generally different approaches to COVID: New York and Florida.

NYC has gone through three distinct waves of positive cases, the latest coinciding with Delta.



The most surprising thing to me is that while this third wave is likely hitting somewhere in the ballpark of 60-90% unvaccinated, we aren't seeing that tidal wave of deaths like back in March and April of 2020.



I'm going with the idea that the vast, vast majority of the most vulnerable elderly are vaccinated, leading to very few deaths. The positive cases I've personally seen have been in clusters of relatively young (<50 years old) uniformly unvaccinated families where Delta hits every last person. This is in contrast to COVID wildtype, which had a funny tendency to occasionally avoid family members in the same household in my anecdotal experience.



And for a city of 8,804,190, having a current hospitalized head count of 56 is nothing short of amazing considering my one team alone on Long Island was taking care of 20-something COVID cases 18 months ago.



Now Florida.

Cases are the highest they've ever been.



The wildfire spread is killing the most vulnerable at the highest rates they've ever seen.



Vaccination rates are surprisingly high considering this chaos.



It's not like NYC is majority N95 or elastomeric wearers. Dicknosing above cloth masks or flat out non-masking on even the subway is happening with a good ~1 in 4 people I see. Even with the city's "vaccine mandate" for indoor dining, none of the places I went to last weekend checked for proof. So what is going on in Florida that makes it special? Did COVID just finally breach into the most vulnerable areas and is taking its inevitable toll?

I think the CDC can no longer make blanket statements about good recommendations for the entire nation. The regional differences in prior outbreaks, vaccination uptake, and personal tolerance/adherence with PPE is wildly different and shouldn't be the same everywhere, and are being largely ignored regardless.

HonorableTB posted:

HootTheOwl posted:

Sky Lava?
loving doomers.

Bizarre Echo posted:

I've been thinking through a lot of this as well. I'm still masked up and distancing as best possible, but my institution just held the first football game of the season, and my boss is trying to eliminate remote work. Meanwhile, our main hospital just cancelled all non-critical care to devote resources to intensive care. My office is mostly keeping to masking, more or less because I and a few others have enough social cachet that we're able to set norms.

Look, I get it. I did everything right, and when I hear people choosing to pretend like the pandemic isn't a thing, I hear the DOOM music kick in. The posters who said that state- and federal-level interventions are needed are absolutely right, because widespread problems like pandemics need widespread, organized responses. But the lack of organized response doesn't absolve me of my own responsibilities to the people around me.

Stimperor, I get what you were saying about feeling like you're the crazy one because I've been struggling with it too. I've had two thoughts rattling around in my head; "the rain doesn't stop because I don't want to be wet anymore" and "do I need to roll these dice?" I'm soaked, but that doesn't change that what I'm doing does impact the people around me. If I choose to roll dice and contract COVID, I'm increasing risk of people who may be in a worse place to deal with it. Like, think of the level of contempt it would take for me to endanger my person who just got out of surgery, or the one who is taking medications that knocks out their immune system, because I just couldn't be without college football? How would I even explain that to their faces? "lol sorry, your well-being is less important to me than a night out?" It's not.

You keep doing it for another fifteen months, or thirty months, or whatever, because your partner is worth it. The contrarian assholes are infuriating and them getting their comeuppance would be viscerally satisfying, but it's not the point. The point is keeping her safe.

Phigs posted:

And New Zealand is doing better because its even further behind

Lampsacus posted:

And as far as I can scrape together, it looks like in a few variants time all vaccines will be rendered ineffective. So that's what - a year.

Lampsacus posted:

I've figured out what I'm trying to say. It feels like we're in year 2 of a 10-15 year pandemic and we don't even have the social infrastructure to acknowledge this en masse.

How are u posted:

find it helps to imagine how much worse it could have been if we didn't have these vaccines or we were living through the Spanish Flu or gently caress even living through covid in the 90s.

Keeping perspective and setting very low expectations are helping me make it.

Zarin posted:

This is something I keep coming back to - how long was the Spanish Flu a thing? I mean, obviously, society recovered - I clearly didn't have any sort of true idea about what a pandemic looked like on the ground for the duration. Nobody talked about 'em, no old people hauntedly speaking of it.

Of course, I realize the diseases have different profiles and whatnot, but I'm real curious at a high level what that one looked like, how long it lasted, etc.

But the point is that we made it through it. We'll make it through this one, too. Yeah, it might be a few years, but then a few years after that we'll look back on it and be like "huh, wow, that was wild, eh?"

It's hard now, because we don't know where the end is, it's all unknown, and it's easy to get caught up catastrophizing about how long it'll be. But it WILL end - every other one before now has.

britannica posted:

The influenza pandemic of 1918–19, also called the Spanish flu, lasted between one and two years.

The pandemic occurred in three waves, though not simultaneously around the globe. In the Northern Hemisphere, the first wave originated in the spring of 1918, during World War I. Although it remains uncertain where the virus first emerged, the earliest cases in the United States were detected in March among military personnel stationed at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas. Movement of troops probably helped spread the virus throughout the U.S. and Europe during the late spring. By summer the virus had reached parts of Russia, Africa, Asia, and New Zealand. This first wave was comparatively mild and had begun to die down in some areas, but a second, more lethal wave began about August or September 1918. During this wave, pneumonia often developed quickly, with patients usually dying just two days after experiencing the first symptoms of the flu. As social distancing measures were enforced, the second wave began to die down toward the end of November. Once those measures were relaxed, however, a third wave began in the winter and early spring of 1919. Though not as deadly as the second wave, the third wave still claimed a large number of lives. By summer the virus had run its course in many parts of the world, but some historians suggest that there was a fourth wave in winter 1920, though it was far less virulent.

Lampsacus posted:

wooo hell yeah we are.

One thing, amongst many, I'm finding really bizarre about this pandemic is how disseminated the information is.

There is no single source with cohesive information as to what is going on. You might say, check out the Google covid pages.. but like, they've all been proven to be both underrepresenting cfrs+deaths and by their nature not being able to account for all numbers. So we don't even really know how many have been infected, and how many have passed because of covid. And as far as I can scrape together, it looks like in a few variants time all vaccines will be rendered ineffective. So that's what - a year.

The global effort to give everybody variant booster shots every six months from now in aeternum feels rather outside our capabilities. It feels like we're in for a really long haul with this thing. Like doomer, manydeaths manywinters sort of horrible near-term future. I'm aware this train of thought intersects with doomerism but, like cc, it feels ---- I know.

I've figured out what I'm trying to say. It feels like we're in year 2 of a 10-15 year pandemic and we don't even have the social infrastructure to acknowledge this en masse.

MadJackal posted:

It's not like NYC is majority N95 or elastomeric wearers. Dicknosing above cloth masks or flat out non-masking on even the subway is happening with a good ~1 in 4 people I see. Even with the city's "vaccine mandate" for indoor dining, none of the places I went to last weekend checked for proof. So what is going on in Florida that makes it special? Did COVID just finally breach into the most vulnerable areas and is taking its inevitable toll?

feedmegin posted:

I mean. Florida is incredibly famous for being stuffed full of old people, isn't it? You'd probably want to compare demographics to see how much that's affecting things, on top of everything else.

mediaphage posted:

<Spanish Flu information>

covidforever posted:

covidforever posted:

You have many options in life. But if this is year 2 of a 15 year pandemic, and you are in your 30s, you are more likely to die than live in a pandemic free world afterwards. So why would you be limiting yourself now when the people you hate and despise and are causing the pandemic won't? Your single action is not going to stop the pandemic nor be enough to significantly impact spread whether you like it or not. You are not a God. You are not that important. We will all die. Some sooner than others. After 30 your life is all downhill and you are hurtling towards death the only question is when. So why live the rest of your very short and unimportant existence in constant anguish and fear of something you truly have zero control over? You have been vaccinated. You wear a mask. Try to buy life insurance. Try to stay safe. But don't the actions of others dictate your own decisions with the little life you have left. We don't have 15 years left of comfortable existence left on this earth in the first place given global warming.

I was hospitalized with COVID last year and I nearly died. I have lived in fear and not going out and being afraid of meeting with people for more than a year. I don't know if that is something I can do for 13 more years.