I live in rural New England. I’m pretty sure the millennial landlord who lives next door has never worn a mask since the pandemic began. (His parents gave him a house to rent out.) As far as I can tell, no one in that family has gotten sick.

Around town, about four old people have either died or vanished within the last few months, not necessarily because of covid, although it’s definitely a possibility.

Another guy I know who lives a few streets over and who has considered coronavirus an overblown joke since the very beginning now finally has it. I’m pretty sure he’s a “moderate” Mormon. His wife is pretty cool though and has taken the pandemic almost as seriously as me. For awhile she would also complain about him every time we ran into each other. I would say hello and she would respond with something like: “I hate my husband.” That was how she said hello. They have two elementary-aged children.

Another neighbor, a white woman whose husband is a boomer lobsterman who can barely put a sentence together, has been coughing very loudly for weeks, like loudly enough for me to hear it from my house. A month or so ago I ran into her when she was unmasked at the post office along with several other unmasked neighbors.

At yesterday’s trip to the grocery store, a bunch of people were coughing. One white millennial worker was coughing and looked quite sick. None of these people were masked, of course.

    • space_comrade [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      What does this tell me exactly? I can't really read the graph beyond seeing that more infections is worse.

          • yellowparenti5 [none/use name]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            Chart on left. Hazard ratio. 3 would be 3 times more likely compared to baseline. Mean age is 60 here. American males. Study here https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1

            "Here we use the national health care databases of the US Department of Veterans Affairs to build a cohort of people with first infection (n = 257,427), reinfection (2 or more infections, n = 38,926), and a non-infected control group (n = 5,396,855) to estimate risks and 6-month burdens of all-cause mortality, hospitalization, and a set of pre-specified incident outcomes."

            the sample size is quite large. Info about the demographics is available in supplementary table 1

            • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              :jesus-christ:

              So basically over the next 10 to 15 years or so there's gonna be a massive wave of heart attacks and strokes in otherwise-healthy people.