This site is wearing me down this past week.
edit: I am more worn down. Shouldn't have posted this thread. Feeling awful about my future.
this might sound cliche, but people trying to persuade others about this sound like they're also trying to persuade themselves
Easiest way to avoid multiple viruses, never going to stop wearing a mask
yup before the pandemic i used to get sick much more frequently than the average person, i’m talking like I’d probably get sick for a week at a time 4-5 times a year but ever since masks have become a thing I just never get sick
100%. Now 3 years since having a viral illness. I wish I knew masks were this effective years ago
last times ive had covid its been pretty mild. ive heard the new variants are mild, but i also wear the mask becausse studies have shown it can weaken the virus if you do catch it, giving you better odds. so i'll never stop wearing the mask :shrug-outta-hecks: :bane:
And the people most likely to die from it are, y’know, dead now.
My understanding is that reducing the amount of virus particles you are exposed to means the virus takes longer to ramp up and gives your immune system more time to come online, but I don't know how true that is.
Also, immunity to Covid is very complicated. It has a lot of properties that directly attack or evade the immune system. Moreover, it is evolving rapidly and dramatically, with new strains emerging every few months that are distinct enough from the old strains that infection with the old strain does not confer significant immunity to the new strain.
That's the spirit. Reducing the number of infections is important to your long term health.
Yeah I honestly had no idea a significant number of our users became straight up covid deniers over the last year. literally just hearing them parrot all the chud bullshit 3 years late. :agony-4horsemen:
I did notice that some of them have new accounts. So maybe there's bullshit afloat.
I would not be that surprised if we are being brigaded. Tbh Hexbear, while not perfect, is probably one of the best non-COVID specific digital spaces I encountered online when it comes to this virus. Like with the exception for the past few days it has honestly been better than like a lot of other leftist spaces I know.
I think younger people in general are "over it". From what I've seen in communities I used to be part of, especially when there is eating, drinking, music, dancing involved. I think once people get past the "oh I went to a huge music festival and didn't immediately die, I guess this is okay", then all bets are off it seems.
I do sorta feel for young people. In my teens and twenties, I took enough drugs and went to enough clubs to kill a large family. Now that I'm in my early 40s, I'm just over all that stuff.
My opinion is: you're welcome (albeit not advised) to go to a music festival, just please mask when you're in front of me as I didn't ask for the risk.
This is where I’m at. I do really stupid shit sometimes like going to clubs and bars without a mask in sight. But when I’m in the grocery store I wear my fucking mask because the people in the store didn’t sign up to go to a club, and it’s one extra chance to catch it I can cut out.
Honestly, thank you sincerely. This is exactly how I'd like people to act, and it's better than 99% of people now.
Also wearing it in places like the grocery store is so easy. All day at work is annoying. At a club is impossible. But the well air conditioned grocery store where I’ll only be for like 15 minutes? Easy.
At a club is impossible
Generations of cybergoths did not collapse on the dance floor so you could dishonor their memory like this.
Yeah I guess, but when I see pictures of people I used to run with in a mosh pit in the middle of winter it kind of sucks. It's also silly to see the few people wearing masks in said mosh pit.
plague rats gotta plague rat.
maybe inside they know they're doing the wrong thing but feel better about themselves if "everybody is doing it" and they get mad at us for making them face the cognitive dissonance
Because they're soulless assholes who want as much mass death as their dark gods can take. :shrug-outta-hecks:
I have bad asthma pls just wear a mask suffocating isn't fun. Masks are also sexy let's be honest
Showing a basic amount of empathy in a society full of selfish psychopaths is becoming more attractive every day
It really is a giant flare that says "I am willing to take the most minimal steps to protect myself and others from harm".
Whom amongst us doesn't want a hot ambiguously gendered latex gas mask kink buddy (NSFW I guess but there's nothing overtly sexual about it it's just someone in a latex bodysuit and gasmask. Not explicit).
Have 2 dead friends under 40 from this shit and one close one with long COVID.
I just saw a post about a longitudinal study of people who suffered from SARS infections and survived but had lingeirng complications. Of the 40 people studies none of them ever recovered sufficiently to return to work. Not full time, not part time, not part time with accommodations.
Idk how relevant that is to Covid since they're related but not at all the same, but it does provide a good example that you're not necessarily going to ever get better.
Dunno if this has been brought up yet but: if you're still masking and other people see that, you can make them deeply uncomfortable with themselves because they know that they should be doing it too. Sure, some people are well adjusted enough to accept that they're not a perfect person, but others are going to cope as hard as they can by aggressively insisting that you are the one whose wrong, not them. Whether that's by going full COVID denial or pretending that people still aren't dying from it or any of the other things people do, and you can bet they're going to resolve the cognitive dissonance in part by taking it out on you, the person who caused them to feel it.
Same reason people get mad a vegans.
my favorite people are the ones who have given up, persuade others to give up, and use every ounce of their institutional power to pressure others to give up.
i've applied for new jobs over how absolutely deranged my work situation has become in the last months, all due to the bosses. have gone from fully remote, highly productive work to "back to normaling" in shitty offices with constant maintenance problem and now literally forcing overnight travel for in-person conferencing.
We expected people to hide their zombie bites. We did not expect people to proudly display their zombie bites and shame others who refuse to get bitten.
imo there's a massive difference between
COVID is still killing as fast as it ever was and the state is somehow failing us even harder than it was early pandemic, but not only is it painful to lose years of my life to never leaving my house, but it also has acute and chronic psychological effects to never interact with other humans in person. I still plan to mask, vaccinate, sanitize, keep distance, and through all that pick and choose carefully when to risk going out and when to stay in, but I recognize that risk profile is different for others and if there are things I need to do to accommodate those others, I will gladly take that responsibility
and
COVID is over and it was fake to begin with, open the schools, open all travel, burn the masks, and toss the rest of the vaccines and let's all have a big party about it
The first one is my opinion and it feels really painful to be lumped in with people of the second opinion by my comrades because they apparently can't tell the difference between the two. If 99% of people are in the second group, my actions as a member of the first group hardly matter anyways, but I still do them, because it sets a good example for my peers and strangers alike, and I can be that much more confident that at least it won't be me that spreads it to an immunocompromised person that will really suffer from it.
We all buy that capitalism's deliberate isolation of people can do harm, right? That seems like a pretty universal takeaway of the impact of late stage capitalism. It doesn't seem too far of a leap to then recognize that isolation is harmful no matter the cause. If the state and the majority of society have given up on an all-hands-on-deck one month isolation, then your individual isolation isn't going to have any more of an impact on community spread than your individual masking or distancing.
You're missing the third and by far most common argument:
COVID was real but it's over now, and the new variants are mild, and we have vaccines so now actually we should open all the schools open all travel and never wear masks again.
That first one is nuanced and agreeable and not related at all to what this thread is about
I got called a "plague rat" today for essentially having the first take.
Because in the end if you're telling people they're mentally ill if they don't go into indoor environments with people who don't mask, it doesn't matter what your internal monologue about it is.
People should be wearing masks more but yes I do believe a lot of people here are suffering from health anxiety, I'm not gonna back down from that.
Covid sucks but obsessing this much over it isn't helping anybody unless they are among the vulnerable demographics who should obviously be taking more precautions than the average person.
Okay well then you're just a straight up covid science denier. 'Vulnerable demographics' include people who have gotten covid before. Reinfections are common. Damage is cumulative. There is no 'safe' population that it's okay to give covid to.
And I'll add: you can't perfectly sequester the 'vulnerable' communities with a disease that's as contagious as smallpox. And either way you slice that objective reality: you're doing eugenics.
If that effect of Covid was that prevalent and as serious as you’re implying we’d be seeing a lot more dead this year.
Have you checked America's excess deaths for 2022?
Looks pretty in line with expectation considering the amount of Covid infections. I don't see anything that would indicate people's immune system's collapsing en masse.
So even after killing off all the most vulnerable people, it's managing to maintain that.
As much log is burning now as kindling when the fire started.
I'm guessing you think the surges of flu and RSV above any previous year was due to immunity debt, a thing that was made up entirely by covid deniers?
Yes, you're describing immunity debt, which has no basis in reality and was made up by covid deniers.
You're repeating misinformation. The evidence for what you're claiming is incredibly shaky.
We know covid weakens peoples immune systems not based on inference taken from how diseases propagate. We know it damages the immune system from counting T-cells in people with infections.
THERE IS WAY TOO MUCH SPECULATION GOING ON IN THIS THREAD
The science isn't whatever you want it to be. I encourage you to leave your mind palace and actually look, since it sounds like you haven't since the Omicron wave.
And yes, a lot more people did die.
What are you even disputing? Do you believe in herd immunity now as much as chuds did in 2020?
What are you even disputing?
I'm disputing the general sentiment here that a healthy person getting Covid (maybe even more than once) necessarily implies doom and gloom for that person for the rest of their lives.
Someone is either ignorant of or indifferent to the observed percentage of people who get long covid. It's high.
And you're performing extreme cope if rhetorically your open ended let 'er rip campaign ends for each individual the second time they get it.
Getting real "it's not going to happen to me" vibes from this conversation
I'm going to disengage now and I'd like you to know I stopped reading your comment when you led off with a personal anecdote wrapped in two tortillas of snark
"As long as I can find one industry paid scientist that says what I want to hear, the vast majority of science is just cherrypicking"
- Chuds circa 2002 RE: global warming
Look. I picked up a snowball. My personal experience is that you're wrong. Way more rational to believe what I can see, n'est pas?
Look. I picked up a snowball.
Except I know of about a 100 cases of Covid from friends family and acquaintances, and many more from second or third hand stories so again unless I'm living among genetically superior ubermen or just people that are very very extremely lucky I think I have a halfway decent sample. If it was THAT bad I think I'd be seeing it a bit more death and long term illness around me. I still heard stories of death and my friends that worked in hospitals told a bunch of horror stories and that's awful but it's also not the apocalypse you're making it out to be. It doesn't have to be either the common cold or the doomsday virus, it's somewhere in between.
The problem with anecdotal evidence is not the sample size. It is the sampling method.
Yes I must be mistaken, everybody around me is secretly suffering from long Covid without telling me anything about it.
I don’t think the idea that damage is cumulative is really settled science.
covid damages the immune system, making repeat infections more damaging. There might be confounding variables but covid damage being cumulative is absolutely settled science. Even ignoring that, if you keep rolling a d20 the chance of you rolling a 1 at some point approaches one the more you roll.
We know that covid is particularly damaging to the immune system though. Yes, all infections cause immune system damage, obviously.
Do you have evidence that the damage magically resets whenever you contract a new case?
It is obvious you don't know what you're talking about here, please do some research instead of relying on half remembered biology classes. Do you think the immune response erases the stress on your circulatory system from previous infections? Even mild infections damage circulation
I do believe a lot of people here are suffering from health anxiety
Don't pathologize people who are trying to avoid a deadly and debilitating disease
Covid sucks but obsessing this much over it isn’t helping anybody unless they are among the vulnerable demographics
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Everyone is to some extent vulnerable
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This is saying "fuck the vulnerable" which is just straight up eugenics
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It kinda felt like this was in response to the threads saying "you can socialize sometimes actually" that have been coming up lately
It's not, there's been people posting borderline COVID denial stuff in threads.
I believe you, but it's worth noting that even in this thread alone I'm not the only one with this read on the situation
I see a lot of people saying "you can socialize without taking proper precautions actually" and people interpreting that as "you can socialize sometimes actually"
Honestly I mask up all the time still. I actively work with covid positive patients near daily. My one exception is going out to eat every other week with my mother and grandmother because it’s a small social thing that helps my mental health and I’ve made strides to rebuild the relationship my chud grandmother ruined after I came out. I fully recognize the risks I am taking and understand that other people have different calculus to do for their risk profile. Working in healthcare though makes it obvious covid is going nowhere. My mother and grandmother already don’t mask in public so I’m being exposed either way so once every other week as a treat for my mental health I do something that I cannot mask fully for.
"Because masking is hard and everyone decided covid is over and the government isn't going to save us. Anyway, I'm totally dedicated to Socialism which totally doesn't face all the same hurdles. "
When they die or are seriously disabled by it, they'll stop being plague rats. It's a problem that solves itself and the only rebuttal to it is nominating them for their Herman Cain Award.
It was the first big psychic shift I had to take with the pandemic. There's the era before where we could be idealistic about humanism and the era after where the material conditions have shifted and we need to adapt. Not adapting isn't just not learning to use a computer when the information age dawned, but is actively killing everyone around them with the virus they either don't believe in or refuse to understand. It's as much social murder as the CDC commits when telling people not to mask. People who are fundamentally incapable of upholding some kind of social contract, who shit in the well we're all forced to drink from, will never get better because the things compelling them to shit in the well are stronger than the condemnation of those who drink. They won't be rationalised out of it because they're driven by irrational things. They won't stumble their way through the pandemic and emerge unscathed and without blood on their hands. If we ignore them we're complicit, if we take their side for any stupid reason we're no better, if we try to cuddle them out of their beliefs then it's guilt through cowardice rather than malice. Without them unlearning their core beliefs they were damned the moment the pandemic began and without shunning them out of society the rest of us choose to be damned by them. If not by COVID, by the next one they'll approach the same way. It's a violent conflict they chose to start for nonsensical reasons so fuck them to death.
The issue is that they're taking a shitload of innocent people down with them.
Certainly but that's what they live to do and is why they need to be written off. The only difference between a plague rat and a bioterrorist is that the latter coughs into a container first. Only overwhelming hostility confronts them and even then it's just a deterrent to others who are susceptible toward reactionary shit.
Masking is cool AND good. People trying to do a peer pressure to get others to not mask as absolutely NOT cool and good.
:this: im sure the most aggressive people abt this probably have lost or feel like they have lost any control they had over their exposure. theres bosses out there enforcing anti-mask policies & even more forcing people to clock in sick. i can't summon anger for people being forced to get covid trying to get some comfort & cope---just plz stay in when ur sick & wear masks :yes-honey-left:
