I also hope we will continue to be more careful about germ control from here on out in myriad ways. I hope we do not blithely go back to "business as usual" in a way that fosters future pandemics as if we learned absolutely nothing here.
I have a genetic disorder that causes a compromised immune system, so germ control is my life. My life got better in some important ways with the entire rest of the world being less germy and disgusting.
About one of out every five people is officially labeled "handicapped" and at least one study suggests that up to three out of every five people may have more minor impairments that they mostly cover up and don't want to label as a "handicap" because it's stigmatizing. A great many people with various handicaps are immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable.
A lot of handicapped people saw some things improve for themselves while the entire world temporarily felt that germ control was super important. As one of those people, I am very concerned that "business as usual" will be a terrible thing for me.
I've tried to figure out how to write about what kinds of best practices I would like to see, but that never really gelled in part because I became very concerned it would make me a target for the fear and anger of a lot of people during a global crisis. I didn't want some sort of lynch mob to descend upon me while much of the world applauded their depravity because, hey, scapegoats rather than solutions seems to be a very popular pursuit in the world generally, even during "normal" times and folks seem to double down on that during crises.
Maybe I will still find a way to write about it and have some kind of influence on moving the needle gently but firmly in the right direction. And maybe not. I don't have much of an audience and like Rodney Dangerfield "I get no respect" and yadda.
But, I am definitely not returning to "normal" pre Covid behavior.
I got Covid early on. It was extremely rough. Should probably have been in the hospital, but frankly worried about that a lot given what was happening.
Made it through, as did my family.
Those experiences were why we played it very safe. Lots of negatives in doing that, but there were some positives, damn good takeaways:
We basically saw a no flu season. Haven't caught much more than a sneeze. That is awful nice.
Travel, work, life balance got reset. Turns out a whole lot more can be done without doing those things as much. Good for the planet, good for a lot of people, me, mine.
Health care in the US is broken, and so is our governance. This whole thing has made me see just how severe cost and risk exposure for way too many people really is!
Our response, information distribution, and I could go on for a long while here is frankly and completely unacceptable.
There is real work to do and we have been running balls out and basically ignoring it, marginalizing costs and risks and in general just do not have our national priorities in order.
Just know others hear you. We felt it too. Felt it differently, but I do not think that matters.
Stay safe. Bet your ass I am going to.
There are a lot of people who benefit from health care being broken so I’m very pessimistic if we will see single payer in our lifetime. We all need to keep fighting for it but to be realistic it might not happen in the next thirty years.
I agree with you. However, I will also no longer be quiet about it. My own costs and risks have been insane. Future impacted in the negative multiple times now.
Would not have been most other parts of the world.
Frankly, the cost and risk exposure will hit a point where people move in mass, or it won't and we trundle along for a decade or two.
Nobody knows.
What I do know is I have reached a point where I will act in solidarity with others on this matter and will make very aggressive trade offs too. It is now a priority.
Ironically, the best resource for navigating the various intricacies of various countries' health systems, globally, with respect to living a long life, is the IMHE group. You know, the group that was famous for the coronavirus projections at the beginning of the pandemic in the USA. All of their peer-reviewed publications are open access, too.
This is probably the most important research article to consult and study (although there are several others): Forecasting life expectancy, years of life lost, and all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 250 causes of death: reference and alternative scenarios for 2016–40 for 195 countries and territories using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016: http://www.healthdata.org/research-article/forecasting-life-...
This is an easy, but startling read: How healthy will we be in 2040?: http://www.healthdata.org/news-release/how-healthy-will-we-b...
Anyways, feel free to shoot me an email, if you want advice on this sort of stuff. I will be glad to help. I have studied this for hundreds of hours.
Hvala
You are very welcome! :-)
It's a real mess.
What would this look like, in practice? Of course on a macro scale we'll see changes like increasing adoption and acceptance of remote work/meetings, but in terms of individual behavior what can or should change?
I assume 10 years from now (barring another pandemic) we won't all be wearing masks and gloves all the time or strictly maintaining a six-foot distance from all other people, but offhand I see myself maintaining a few habits to varying degrees of strictness:
* Consistently washing my hands after touching mail or packages
* Letting packages sit by the front door for a day or two before bringing them further inside and opening them
* Pressing crosswalk buttons with my elbow
* Flushing non-automatic public toilets/urinals with my foot and opening/closing restroom doors with my foot, my elbow, or my hand and a paper towel
* Immediately showering and changing after being in public
* Wiping down groceries before putting them away
* If I need to go out in public while sick for whatever reason, wearing an N95/equivalent mask (not that I had a habit of going out while sick to begin with / I can't specifically recall having ever done so, but if I had ever needed to it certainly wouldn't have occurred to me or struck me as socially acceptable to put on a mask)
* When I return to the gym, consistently wearing gloves (I bought a bunch of full-fingered workout gloves and did this for a week or two last year just before everything shut down, and resumed the habit at home after a sliver of metal broke off of one of my dumbbell handles and got stuck in my finger)
* Maybe continuing to wear gloves while in public in general, or even just semi-regularly using hand sanitizer
I would much rather die than force someone else to suddenly be required to base their free agency around what happens to work best for me, especially because I am 100% going to die no matter what.
It just seems totally illogical to remove freedoms at scale to prevent something that is ultimately inevitable.
Basically seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water, what’s the point of having a society at all if people have to be micro-managed to the point of being enslaved to each other’s mortality? It just seems so obviously a mistake and a huge slippery slope.
What’s next, they tell us which people have to die so the rest of us don’t have to be burdened with them? That is essentially exactly what this type of government/healthcare overreach is doing.
Expecting random strangers to not touch me is not some huge invasive expectation. Quite the contrary: The people who think they are entitled to touch me are being invasive and making an imposition. People should not feel that because I'm poor or an attractive woman or whatever that touching me is appropriate behavior when we are total strangers.
That's just one example and I don't intend to discuss this further with you.
But for the rest, do you expect people to continiue to wear masks after this?
In general, are you aware, that the youth of this planet is pretty much on standby since a year? They are not really threatened by covid, yet they have to pay the highest toll in the restrictions - because their life is not established, they have to move around to set up their life. Which they cannot really do now. They could also say, fuck the old and weak, we won't sacrifice more for them - we got to live our lives now - but they are largely not doing it. So maybe it is not such a shitty egoistic world after all?
No, I don't expect people to wear masks as the new norm.
I haven't managed to write in earnest because I think people treat masks like plus two magic items in the game of Pandemic and I mostly hate them and this is not exactly a good place from which to gain an audience and yadda under current circumstances.
Sorry, I don't really want to get into it. That seems like a shit show waiting to happen and all downside.
It is an "US" problem. Frankly, we have a number of US problems brewing and we have them due to not having our priorities in order as a people, human beings.
A competently selfish person would realize that having compassion for their fellow human beings is one of the most selfish traits they could ever have.
Mother Nature has boundary issues.
I understand you hold that opinion. Also understand it is a minority opinion. And hey, I get it. Many people do not like to be told what they have to do.
Humans, this place we inhabit works the way it works. There will be tradeoffs.
Managing public health is one of them. There are many others.
Sincerely, I wish you had the option to live in a personal vacuum, "you do you" style, but that option is currently unavailable.
There are some options given you are willing to either forego many of the benefits that come with a well developed society, or accumulate wealth sufficient to isolate yourself.
Barring those, yeah. You are just another member of the public.
Some things take more thinking than others to figure out a good approach to them.
I keep hearing that but I don't really know where that idea comes from. I am skeptical of that idea.
I don't think things are simple at all. That's part of why my desire to write on the topic hasn't really gone anywhere.
Many people walk around untested, and demanding we act as if they’re ready and safe to have their health pushed to it’s limits is reckless.
Yes, a lot of the things we are doing are performative. Most people don't really know how to use masks effectively and a lot of how people interact with their masks makes things worse, not better.
I work really hard to just avoid being exposed to germs because of my situation. I try to not touch a lot of stuff in public and this is not the norm.
I hate it when people "helpfully" want to get me a cart. I can get it myself. Keep your hands off my cart.
I saw someone blow their nose under their mask just a few feet from me. I wish we would focus much more on messages like "Don't blow your nose in crowded public spaces" than on "Wear your mask." There have been so many incidents like that and I have been toying with the idea of starting an "incident report" file to talk about specific incidents and why this stuff makes me crazy.
I don't like people talking at me unnecessarily.
I don't like people laughing near me. That's almost as bad as people coughing at me.
I will shower as promptly as I can if someone does cough in my general direction or similar.
There's a whole lot of stuff I do to simply avoid germs without having to rely a lot on chemical disinfectants because I'm also chemically sensitive. And I am a lot healthier than I am supposed to be so I know this stuff works.
If anyone has ideas on how I can effectively start writing about this, I'm all ears. I don't know how to get, say, beta readers or some kind of early feedback. I know it's a touchy topic and feedback and some kind of traction would be enormously helpful in trying to write more about this. I can't seem to get that part, so it ends up being very incomplete, one-off comments on the internet, like this one.
I don't want the pandemic to persist, but I desperately hope that the end of the pandemic doesn't have such a negative impact on my life as an individual with a compromised immune system as to make me wish it would come back.
I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to hope for, though I'm aware I may well not get it. I long ago got the memo that it's a shitty world full of shitty people and, no, this shitty world doesn't give a damn at all about my welfare or what I want. The world has been not at all shy about letting me know that.
I think that it’s almost more terrifying than the thing itself that more people aren’t mostly incredibly disturbed by the insane violations of privacy and speech.
Literally you should not, in a free society, be able take such injurious actions based on something that the average person cannot even verify.
It should never be that a tiny group of experts just have to be trusted to make decisions for everyone while the vast majority of the people are completely incapable of actually even seeing the threat.
The vaccine thing too is absurd, amazing how quickly a public health crisis becomes an attempt at side stepping private health decisions.
No amount of “but people could die” can justify this, that’s an irrelevant point, because there never a time when it was proper to remove autonomy for such a reason! It’s a total invasion of privacy that the government should even know where most people are at most times, what they are wearing or eating, or that private individuals should be corralled like cattle for the sake of “all cattle”, I just wish people could see what a huge privacy violation it is when a government decides that the most important thing above all else is to try and keep everyone alive as long as possible at the expense of each other and at the expense of freedom to avoid such an arrangement, privacy for bringing you into it in the first place, and opportunity cost of when you end up with no choice due to violent demands of state.
For a closer analogy than "what people are wearing or eating", what about "what people drive and how fast in public areas".
The government introduced speed limits, regulations on vehicles, and driver licenses, all of which significantly limit who can drive what, and how fast. All of this is enforced by police.
Why is it fair for the government to do that? Because dangerous driving kills other people too, not just you. It's not a personal choice in a vacuum to drive drunk at 100mph, but a personal choice that kills others.
Covid is similar. Limits on gatherings, requirements to wear masks, etc are all because personal decisions also affect others at a larger scale. A pandemic, when it's not controlled, will spread exponentially and cause significant death and health problems.
I think there might be a reasonable discussion to be had about the role of the government in this, but that reasonable discussion does not start with claims that the government is treating us like cattle or that "but people could die" is not a valid justification for government action.
The chance of people dying is a valid justification. I think it was a valid justification for requiring a driver license, for making drunk driving illegal, and I think it's probably a valid justification for the current restrictions and regulations. You can apply this similarly to some of your other points: a tiny group of experts determine what standards make cars street-legal in the US and decide that drunk driving is dangerous, and their decisions impact everyone, etc.
There's absolutely no proof that quarantine or any of these Covid restrictions was effective.
There's a study that masks might prevent spread by around 2%. That doesn't seem enough to enforce massive restrictions to me. Sweden and had less deaths per capita then most of Europe and they had minimal restrictions.
Also the scale of the restrictions is different than speed limits. Quarantine and business shutdowns are massive changes to society and repressive restrictions on financial survival and affect just about every aspect of our lives versus just some targeted change like a speed limit.
What if a vaccine had never been developed?
Would you be okay enforcing these restrictions forever?
But it stands to reason that not slamming into the ground at terminal velocity is good for your health, and it stands to reason that preventing the spread of a deadly disease saves lives.
Countries that have prevented the spread of the disease (China, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and others) have orders of magnitude fewer deaths, as a proportion of their population.
Covid and everything about it is not.
For SARS-CoV-2, while there are still some uncertainties about precisely how important different modes of transmission are, it's clear that it's a respiratory disease. Quarantine works to stop transmission. Lockdowns like the one in Wuhan or those in Australia work, because they stop infected people from coming into close proximity with susceptible people. This much is understood, despite whatever other uncertainties there are.
You can't go to a birthday party by yourself. Even if you're fully vaccinated or don't believe that the virus exists. As long as the public perception was that people should stay home you would get essentially the same outcome, no matter what the government did.
You are suppose to be free to move around and assemble, period. The idea that the governor or the mayor can just destroy an entire industry for the sake of another industry is pretty fucking bad. They caused waaaay more harm than good, and in many ways we haven’t fully seen yet.
We're changing society for the people who can't think for themselves.
Would you be interested in allowing unregulated tobacco adverts and smoking in any public spaces again as well?
Walking around while infectious is also an active scenario.
> Getting sick is part of life, viruses and bacteria don’t have morals.
Part of death as well. Unless you're willing to get infected by anything and never seek healthcare, this stance is disingenuous.
Those are not good comparisons.
Exactly this. I find myself very lucky to have avoided authoritarian measures by living in Japan, but I feel very sorry for my home country which multiplied freedom violations after violations. I find it very scary that nobody complained about it, despite the fact the lockdowns and curfews were stronger than any measures taken under Nazi German occupation. If the disease was actually very deadly I would understand, but in the covid case once the data were out after a few months, it was clear that elderly and obese persons were the only real at risk group. It thus make no sense to destroy economy, social, work and education lives of millions of people for this. And again, lot of countries dealt with it without heavy liberty privations and did fine (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan come to mind).
This isn't your main point, but I'd just like to point out that that comparison is... wrong, to put it mildly. Under Nazi Germany occupation, large populations were put into an effective prison, severely underfed, forced into labor, and, sometimes, just killed outright.
Even the most "authoritarian" actions taken are nothing like Nazi occupation.
I assume they are angry and feel wronged. Do they know the comparison is flawed but just want to make a point? Do they have superficial knowledge of the Holocaust? Do they think it could not happen to them?
The children who suffered from this, and stand to continue suffering because of this even after the pandemic ends for most adults, will bear the cost for generations to come. Not only will they inherit a heavily indebted country, they will also be woefully unequipped for it because of the major hole this abdication of responsibility has blown in a critical period of their lives. Two years is a huge amount of time in a young child's life, and the callous indifference to their future shown by Democratic politicians (who draw the majority of their support from teachers unions, among other public employee unions) is just sickening.
I sincerely hope that parents will wake up to the insidious damage public employee unions are doing, and move en masse to private schools or direct student funding for schools that they can choose, as a result of all this. Teachers unions have shown themselves to be completely unaccountable to the public and deserve their comeuppance.