Looking at the recent discourse has made me really upset.
Covid is still a massive problem that is killing people, and almost no one is taking it seriously
It so so hard to do anything when you're worried about dying, and not in an anxiety disorder way. edit: stop speculating about what medical conditions I have, thank you kindly
I've accepted that there is basically nothing I can justify doing during bad weather that involves people outside my 3 person bubble (it used to be larger, but folks have decided to be less cautious without communicating about it) both in a moral obligation and a personal safety sense, and that's despair inducing because the way things are going this is a "live with it the rest of your life" sort of thing
I want to go out, I really do. I miss hanging with friends. I miss going to concerts and parties and drag and commie shit. But I can't, and not in a "something is wrong with me" sort of way. I've tried to find new social circles who take the pandemic seriously. It's been an exercise in having my boundaries pushed and my (these next two words are the one part of this post I encourage you to make fun of) evidence based perspective on the pandemic pathologized.
And I know this will be alleviated when the weather outside is suitable for outdoor masked stuff, but god, I haven't been able to see people besides my partners since the holidays, and there is still months and months left until I can hang out with friends again.
I'm so fucking tired. I can't keep going on like this without my mental health deteriorating and I can't stop acting like this without being reckless with my body and abdicating my responsibility to others
Honestly I think working construction the entire pandemic and therefore never getting to work from home or stay home with pay or anything really jaded me. Being the only one wearing a mask and the only one to refuse to work in crowded areas with unmasked workers got to be a serious depression vector.
I'll still be the only one wearing a mask in the grocery store but it feels so pointless when I'm basically forced daily to expose myself to possible infection. I was afraid to get boosted because everyone was saying how it knocked them on their ass and I couldn't afford to miss a day's pay.
So basically I've had to choose between feeding my family or protecting them from COVID for the past couple years and it's stressful.
Seriously, I see no reason to live your personal life safer than what your economic life is forced to be. My wife and I did the shut-in thing before getting covid 3 times just from work and the grocery store. Covid tests exist and are suppose to be a good indication of virality. Everyone I know is triple vaxxed and masks outside. But I'm forced to interact with 300+ people a day that corporate doesnt force to mask, IE none of them (but me) wear one.
I have long covid. This pandemic will probably kill me. Im not gonna die locked in my house telling my friends I'll see them Never.
The people talking about staying locked in their apartments and acting like getting covid is a personal moral failing have a whole different kind of privilege than the ppl "going out"
Seriously, I see no reason to live your personal life safer than what your economic life is forced to be.
to avoid exposing others you fucking jackass
consideration for other human beings?? on my leftist website???
fucking disgusting, report to the wall at once
The people talking about staying locked in their apartments and acting like getting covid is a personal moral failing have a whole different kind of privilege than the ppl “going out”
this has always rubbed me the wrong way. I know there are some people who have to be isolated for health reasons. But for those who don’t have to, to have all their needs tended to by gig slave workers while they do their 2-hours-of-actual-work-a-day bullshit WFH job, to then look down on the rest of society who doesn’t have that insane privilege just feels wrong.
If you work around hundreds of unmasked consoomers (once again i work in the busiest street and commercial district in my city) and think it's a "masking around three friends" skill gap and not luck, you're either delusional or finding ways to feel better than other people
Honestly? I think we've been beaten, and nobody wants to admit it outright. So we couch it behind mental health and vaccines or paxlovid or whatever, when there's no reason it has to be this bad. A year or more ago you absolutely wouldn't have this response, it would have been "wear a fucking mask."
But now that the death drive has spoken the tune is different. I say that as someone who rarely masks anymore because I simply cannot deal with the social pressure, expense, etc. I stopped looking at the numbers knowing that they would never be acceptable.
I know it's a semi shitty answer, but have you tried nature? Something you can do alone, but not accessible to everyone of course.
have you tried nature?
Winter hiking, yee. Unfortunately hard to socialize while you're huffing and puffing
I agree with you about the cope
I wasn't trying to be shitty, sorry. There's absolutely something to be said about reconnecting with nature even alone. I've also had my personal fill of it for the time, and trust you to make your own judgement there. Apologies if I came across otherwise.
I didn't interpret it that way, it is a good suggestion, it just plays out different than you'd think
Where I live, I haven't seen a mask in months. No one wears them anymore. It's just a free for all. Unless I plan to go full protocol, which includes wearing an n95 type mask in an airtight manner (which involves shaving, no adjustment of the mask when outside, no touching the mask) there's no point in masking up with a basic cloth mask or poorly/unsealed mask when leaving home, when literally no one else is doing it. And I have to leave home, to go to work, to buy food, to do all these things necessary to live. I can't just live in my room forever, it's impossible.
I held out with masking as long as I could, and it was disappointing to see people drop them so fast. Looking at the numbers, because my country failed so much with containing the virus that it seems we hit some kind of "herd immunity", excess deaths are within normal levels in every province. For people under 60 it is at completely normal levels, and people over 60, it is within upper bounds of normal. So it's not the same risk as peak COVID times. I guess this is what the government found acceptable for a full reopening. But tonnes of people are dealing with long COVID.
Over a year ago, me and another family member both got COVID. We both only had one vaccine dose at the time, due to poor rollout of the vaccines. I have pretty much recovered, but my family member developed damage in their lungs, and now has to live with this, taking meds daily.
I have health conditions that could easily compound the effect of COVID, I don't fancy getting it again. But like so many other people with similar conditions, we have to just carry on with life and risk an unknown chance of permanent damage just to go to work and buy food. Not every immunocompromised person can get a work from home job. They are the people stacking the shelves, the people delivering societies essentials.
The world has moved on without us/them (like it often does if you have any sort of health condition) and there's nothing anyone can do about it. I've just accepted it at this point, not because I want to, but because I have no other choice. Even China has opened up. As someone else said a lot of the people are just coping, and don't want to admit that this is how it is now.
As for socialising, I don't know honestly. I don't really go clubbing or to bars often, I mainly hang out with close friends and do stuff with them.
The flu this season was the H1N1 variant, or at least I'm assuming cause that was one of the ones in the vaccines. If H1N1 isn't familiar, it was the one in 2009 that freaked out the world a little, swine flu.
If H1N1 isn’t familiar, it was the one in 2009 that freaked out the world a little, swine flu.
And in 1918, the Spanish flu.
yeah it's kinda fucked. I'll admit to giving up on the responsibility to others at this point - I'm literally the only person I know who still gives a shit, so it's not like interacting with me is much of a meaningful vector for infection, especially because my maskless outings are usually once every couple weeks anyways. I still wear an n95 at work & on public transport, but that's largely for my own sake. I guess I do still test before seeing vulnerable people I know, too, but they also don't bother with masking whatsoever - got on a packed bus with my 70+ year old gran, I put one on, she didn't :covid-cool:
Going to the store with my 60 year old dad with serious health conditions and I’m the only one wearing a mask :joker-shopping:
I think it's false dichotomy to suggest that people either take the pandemic seriously and never go out, or don't take the pandemic seriously and go club all the time.
Like it's not really true that there are health risks to covid but not health risks to staying inside all the time and not having a healthy social life. They both are associated with serious negative health outcomes.
It is possible to mask up in most of your life, but also engage in moderate social gatherings to connect with human beings. Mental health is health too.
I think it’s false dichotomy to suggest that people either take the pandemic seriously and never go out, or don’t take the pandemic seriously and go club all the time.
I don't mean to be impolite but I think you're shadowboxing here. cw:sex metaphor
spoiler
I'm not preaching abstinence here, I'm preaching "use protection or get tested and keep your partners informed" except when it comes to covid, protection means outside and masking (or well ventilated indoors and both parties masking, but no one agrees to that), and the weather can be shitty for months on end
I'll schedule hanging out with a person, and the day of I'll check in, and they'll say "oh yeah I went out to a busy restaurant two days ago" cw sex metaphor (because this is absolutely how I conceptualize this shit)
spoiler
It's the equivalent of scheduling a hookup, going through the effort of getting tested, and then the day before they're like "oh yeah, I went to an orgy last night and had unprotected sex with 30 strangers"
And it's impossible to find people who are reasonable about this stuff! It keeps happening over and over again, if they're willing to be honest in the first place!
or don’t take the pandemic seriously and go club all the time.
i disagree with your analysis. the discourse was on a big party night during winter so the timely context of that is "go to an indoor gathering to eat and drink" which is pretty automatically going to spread covid.
You think there's no way to have an indoor gathering with friends that doesn't spread covid?
given how even alleged socialists won't take minor precautions to protect others, yeah, absolutely.
i think that average people will fuck it up at some morally unacceptable rate and i conjecture that the kind of people willing to go to an indoor gathering during winter are more likely to expose themselves ahead of said gatherings.
It’s not nearly as bad as last year, stop pretending like it is when it’s clearly not.
wild that you talk about how the conditions in your location are different that i might expect and then immediately turn around and generalize about the rest of us, who probably live somewhere that cases are up year over year.
good job your country not fucking it up... assuming they're actually still collecting data in a way that's comparable to previous years unlike here where the reporting has gone to hell
good job your country not fucking it up
That's the thing tho, they absolutely did fuck it up, we had one of the worst death rates during the worst of it. And now it's "fine" in the sense that hospitals aren't overflooding. I can't imagine what conditions are different in the US that would create a huge wave. Looking at the official data it doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as this time last year.
oh well i take it back then, the bar is so low maybe the current conditions are unacceptable too, and only seem "fine" because of anchoring
Every Covid death past like February 2020 is too much, the world could have eliminated it entirely. However they didn't and it's here to stay now, what good will obsessing over it do for me and my community? It's not going away, we fucked up and we have to learn to deal with it and I don't think locking yourself up for the rest of your life is a good way to go.
your government fucking up doesn't absolve you of contributing to the spread. your neighbors being plague rats doesn't give you permission to be one too.
we could still lockdown for a couple months and be done with this but the capitalists simply wont.
learn to deal with it
immune compromized comrades will just die then. disabled comrades will get even worse. gtfo with this nazi shit, what the hell is wrong with you people
The other option is remain housebound for the rest of your life while the rest of the world moves on around you.
Or, just don't go to concerts, don't go to restaurants, learn to get comfortable asking people what they've been up to before taking off your mask, and still have a social life? Oh wait, everyone is going to concerts and restaurants and removing their masks in unsafe environments so you can't without risking dying. Fuck.
You're being remarkably tone deaf here, you are doing the behavior that makes it hard for people who are at risk to not be housebound, which is what I'm currently complaining about in this thread.
we joke about people on here being libs but that dude is full-on :LIB:
their failure isn't an excuse for you to give up. Do better.
they're either being pressured by international capital that they've let into their country for dengist reasons or under siege and materially unable to effectively maintain optimal covid safety measures, what is your excuse?
You’re not keeping anyone any safer
Except for everyone you interact with
if you can't take basic covid measures because "my actions aren't going to make a difference" why bother with the leftism? Why not just go back to brunch?
I’m not willing to forgoe the occasional night at a restaurant or bar.
this attitude gets people killed
healthier than getting covid, you disgusting fucking chud. not my fault monsters like you made it unsafe to go outside
It's literally how you survive an extinction event, dumb fuck. That's literally how our evolutionary ancestors survived the Permian. Lmao
Or for that matter, political organization. How is political organizing going to look like in a Covid world because not everyone's going to have the luxury of having open physical space to congregate. You're most likely going to have to hold meetings in closed rooms, many times with poor ventilation, where the odds of at least one person having Covid in that room being fairly high. Some of the rhetoric here seems dangerously close to being, "We shouldn't organize because organizing spreads Covid" even though political organizing is the only real solution out of this fucking mess. No one will say this explicitly because it's blatantly counterrevolutionary, but I have already seen rhetoric on Twitter where some people expressing what their vision of proper Covid precautions de facto preclude all forms of political organizing.
People who de facto preclude all forms of organizing are counterrevolutionary full stop. Not everyone has the labor aristocratic salary to have a working microphone with a stable Internet connection to hold Zoom meetings. Meetings need to be done in person. Immunocompromised people have a place in any org, but you also need boots on the ground, even if it means a higher risk of getting Covid. I guess every single union member needs to stay home and let the scabs cross the picket line because they might get Covid from the scabs, which is completely ridiculous.
Covid is a problem. People are still dying from it. It's not a cold or just the flu (the flu sucks btw people die from that too). It's going to have long-term effects on our society. There is no downplaying covid. It's serious.
Most literate Hexbear mod: This is downplaying covid!
I know better than most the dangers of the virus, but I've already had it and I'm triple-vaccinated. I never see anyone wearing masks anymore anyway except in medical environments. Not even on crowded trains and buses, which I get once per week. I suffered badly in 2020 during the lockdowns, and I'm not going back to that. So what do we do? It seems like the only answer is to give in and just get back to normal with the associated risks, or stay isolated. Unfortunately, COVID is here to stay.
I had to get an endoscopy recently and I was wearing a KF94 and most of the staff were wearing blue masks. And then they pull me into the procedure room, have me take off my mask, and the fucking anesthesiologist isn’t wearing a mask and gets all up in my face :angry-place:
So I've heard. I just read a study in the lancet which said that this is due to immune imprinting, where our immune systems have come to expect the ancestral variants they were exposed to in the community or by vaccines.
The new variants are able to bypass this immune response, so it looks like the bivalent vaccines have outlived their usefulness already. Not that I was ever eligible for a bivalent booster, even though they've been in my country since August :jokerfied:
I'm going to be a bit more vigilant now I think, and if nothing else this thread has reminded me that the pandemic is still happening.
I'm naturally introverted, so I don't go out much except for work and visiting family, and I've gotten sick twice. It feels inevitable at this point, I don't know anybody who has cared about stopping the spread in the past year, so I just try not to think about it too hard
Thank goodness for testing tho, I was recently able to isolate quickly enough that none of my roommates got sick
On top of the virus, I just don't know where to go or what to do. I have no friends to go out with, and I can't talk to people I don't know.
