At this point pretty much every official organ has burned all it's credibility. The CDC was making blatantly political decisions to protect business profits. The UK's goal was to fill the morgues until Covid magically stopped spreading because of some herd immunity bullshit. China threw in the towel and told everyone they could spit in each other's mouths if they wanted to. Half the US believes COVID is made up. Professionals are saying all kinds of contradictory things.
The authorities that should be trustworthy but burned their trust are saying Covid is over, even though wastewater, the last real data source, says that nothing has really changed.
So that leaves mostly random non-authoritative sources. And I have no fucking idea how to tell which of those people are cranks, which are just plain wrong, and which are actually providing useful information.
Known. Known Unknowns. And Unknown Unknowns.
The Known Unknown is "Who is this person, what are their credentials, are they some kind of quack or crank, are they working with good information, and how the hell can I assess any of these questions?"
Another known unknown is which things coming out of the CDC, or any other official body, are useful information and which ones, like the "It's okay to go back to work after five days" thing that was total bullshit, is profit-serving sociopathic bullshit.
And then the unknown unknowns are new variants, surges (wastewater lags by 2 weeks where I am so I wouldn't know until it was well underway), and fuck knows what else.
I feel this, really pissed me off when COVID became a "personal choice", and then they immediately removed all the data I could possibly use to actually make a choice. At this point I just wear an N95 everywhere I go, don't go out unless necessary, and only see friends/family if they've taken a COVID test that day and haven't been potentially exposed in the past week (this fucks over poorer friends in the service industry more than others but 🤷).
Is that actually sustainable? How do you manage that?
Not sure exactly what you mean by sustainable, could you clarify? Wearing an N95 (I wear 3M Auras) all day at work isn't that bad tbh, the bigger issue is having to eat and drink outdoors; it's okay for now, but it gets bad in the fall/winter. On my days off I mostly just stay indoors anyway so no difficulty there. I was able to steal a bunch of N95s from work so I'm good there for at least a few more months, and I think they have more that they won't notice going missing at any rate.
Forcing people to get tests has gone fine so far with few objections. The bigger issue here is what happens if stores stop stocking boxes of tests, but that's something I'll deal with if/when it happens. I've also pointed out to everyone I meet with in person that if I ever get COVID I'm ceasing in-person all-together, so they take it relatively seriously.
To care about yourself and others despite mild inconvenience?! How can you manage such a thing? Remarkable!
It's not a criticism of caring about other people. The issue is that there's never going to be a state intervention at a scale that could actually contain covid. We lost and capital won. So, with that reality in mind, is it actually sustainable to maintain these social limits for the rest of your life? I have kids that go to school and with the nature of my job and my wife job my potential exposures are endless, so I said fuck it.
The "fuck it" alternative is just opening the gate to the endless risk of a serious outcome that could stem from you or any one of your family members catching covid, to say nothing of the compounding probability of long covid that comes with each successive infection. The reality that there will not be a state intervention that will contain covid at a societal scale is totally fucked but it doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile to personally endeavor to protect yourself and those around you whenever you possibly can.
Even here, people like you and me who actually take covid seriously are rare