I’m actually choosing not to read that article 
I wash my hands everytime I come back into the apartment, because I live in a building with elevators, a lot of people in my building are essential workers, and I press things like crossing buttons/gates/etc in a dense urban enviro. But I cross a line at wiping down groceries, I’m too lazy.
I laughed but also my sympathies.
I really can’t accurately wrap my head around how it felt like china was overreacting with the really intense wuhan quarantine, when we were still all arguing over masks here, but china has managed to reopen their economy and largely get back to mostly “normal life” with far less deaths recorded in the whole country than we have in single cities here (and I know there’s also skepticism about any stats coming out of china, but we would at least know something if things were really bad through wechat/family groups/foreign media).
Not to mention in other Asian countries that took precautions early because of their experience with SARS in the past and now have a relatively normal economy/life with very few deaths compared to what we’re seeing in the US.
Hindsight is 20/20.
As for sense of superiority- I think a year ago people really thought this was a coasts issue. It wouldn’t hit the midwest.
I’m also so tired of people who say their 'Freedom" has been taken away. No, it really hasn’t. The people in Wuhan who were completely locked up, theirs was. But you know what, their life is back to normal now. And with the way the virus is spreading here, there is way too many chances for mutations, so the vaccines probably won’t work for long. People are so selfish.
Did someone post this yet? I found it interesting as a person who doesn’t really understand much of the immune system science. Apparently because people with weaker immune systems can’t kick the virus quickly, essentially we are incubators for the virus to mutate - people with stronger immune systems are more likely to shed it quickly.
The argue recommends that immunocompromised people to be prioritized in viruses queues because of this. raises hands, I volunteer as tribute
I got a vaccine appointment. It is 90 minutes from me, so 3 hours of driving, but yay!
I got it because I was complaining on Reddit about how my husband has 6 hours of driving for his appt, and someone asked where I was and then said a Hyvee in (city I’ve heard of but never been to) had appts. Thanks Reddit.
I am happy to give it to Lily if she wants to show up in my place. Immunocompromised qualifies here.
I’m so happy you’re getting a vaccine!
Immunocompromised qualifies here, but only in a very small category: solid organ transplants and HIV.
Immunocompromised in OR does not include chemo, immunosuppressants like Remicade and Enbrel and Methatrexate, steroids like Prednisone, or primary immunodeficiency which seems…flawed.
@gardeningandgreen we crossed paths in posting, but essentially, see above ^^
Are imunocompromised people still not being prioritized there? They are here in both states I basically live in.
Iowa uses the “might increase risk” guidelines which includes “use of other immune weakening medicines”., as opposed to the “increased risk” (which is just solid organ transplants).
Solid organ transplant is such a weird line to draw. Like bone marrow- nah, you’re good.
Good choice! I wasn’t even looking for it. A nurse friend mentioned it when I was wondering out loud with her how the heck I had gotten the plague.
Facebook memories have been super interesting this month.
In continuing news from your resident Debbie Downer, here’s something awful.
The racist twist on top of a health pandemic is a real d*ck move.
Vaccine eligibility opening up to all Illinois residents April 12 - UNLESS you live in Chicago.
Sigh. Tired of being left out.
This is also going to cause a clusterfuck because many Chicago residents are currently going outside the city to get their vaccines and I guess we won’t be able to do that any more?
Also, Chicago is the only place in the state where being a smoker doesn’t qualify you.
Given the discussion of risk right now, I thought the most recent NYT daily email was very relevant. Covid section below, spoilered for length:
Good morning. Republicans tend to underestimate Covid risks — and Democrats tend to exaggerate them.
People with and without masks in Fredericksburg, Texas, after the lifting of the statewide mask mandate.Matthew Busch for The New York Times
Americans on the right half of the political spectrum have tended to underplay the risk of Covid-19. They have been less willing to wear masks or avoid indoor gatherings and have been more hesitant to get vaccinated.
These attitudes are part of a larger pattern in which American conservatives are often skeptical of public-health warnings from scientists — on climate change, air pollution, gun violence, school lunches and more. In the case of Covid, Republican politicians and media figures have encouraged risky behavior by making false statements about the virus.
To many liberals, Covid has become another example of the modern Republican Party’s hostility to facts and evidence. And that charge certainly has some truth to it. Yet the particular story with Covid is also more complicated — because conservatives aren’t the only ones misinterpreting scientific evidence in systematic ways. Americans on the left half of the political spectrum are doing it, too.
That’s a central finding from a survey of 35,000 Americans by Gallup and Franklin Templeton. It finds that both liberals and conservatives suffer from misperceptions about the pandemic — in opposite directions. “Republicans consistently underestimate risks, while Democrats consistently overestimate them,” Jonathan Rothwell, Gallup’s principal economist, and Sonal Desai, a Franklin Templeton executive, write.
More than one-third of Republican voters, for example, said that people without Covid symptoms could not spread the virus. Similar shares said that Covid was killing fewer people than either the seasonal flu or vehicle crashes. All of those beliefs are wrong, and badly so. Asymptomatic spread is a major source of transmission, and Covid has killed about 15 times more Americans than either the flu or vehicle crashes do in a typical year.
Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely to exaggerate the severity of Covid. When asked how often Covid patients had to be hospitalized, a very large share of Democratic voters said that at least 20 percent did. The actual hospitalization rate is about 1 percent.
By The New York Times Source: Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study
Democrats are also more likely to exaggerate Covid’s toll on young people and to believe that children account for a meaningful share of deaths. In reality, Americans under 18 account for only 0.04 percent of Covid deaths.
It’s true that some of these misperceptions reflect the fact that most people are not epidemiologists and that estimating medical statistics is difficult. Still, the errors do have a connection to real-world behavior, Rothwell told me.
Republicans’ underestimation of Covid risks helps explain their resistance to wearing a mask — even though doing so could save their own life or that of a family member. And Democrats’ overestimation of risks explains why so many have accepted school closures — despite the damage being done to children, in lost learning, lost social connections and, in the case of poorer children, missed meals.
The states with the highest share of closed schools are all blue states: California, Oregon, Maryland, New Mexico, Hawaii, Nevada, Massachusetts and New Jersey. “I think in many ways it’s based on the fact that these voters are misinformed about the risks to young people and they’re misinformed about the risks generally,” Rothwell said.
The reasons for these ideological biases aren’t completely clear, but they are not shocking. Conservatives tend to be more hostile to behavior restrictions and to scientific research. And liberals sometimes overreact to social problems. (A classic example was the overpopulation scare of the 1960s and ’70s, when people on the left wrongly predicted that the world would run out of food.)
Covid, of course, represents a real crisis, one that has already killed more than a half-million Americans and continues to kill more than 1,000 per day. As in the case of many crises, underreaction has been the bigger problem with Covid — but it has not been the only problem.
Perhaps the best news from the Gallup survey was that some people were willing to revisit their beliefs when given new information. Republicans took the pandemic more seriously after being told that the number of new cases was rising, and Democrats were more favorable to in-person schooling after hearing that the American Academy of Pediatrics supports it.
“That’s very encouraging,” Rothwell told me. “It’s discouraging that people didn’t already know it.”
I saw this story, it was very interesting!
It stresses me out that when we talk about Covid risks, death seems to be the only risk.
What about long term chronic side effects?
Even if covid killed only at the rate of the flu, which it doesn’t, how often does the flu leave people permanently debilitated?
I agree - I am terrified of long covid and I feel like not enough of our officials are taking it into account when flinging the doors wide open and removing restrictions.
And even for the people who go back to being normal now; are we going to have an incredible rash of lung disease among the (then) elderly in 20 years, 40 years? How much permanent damage does this virus do?
Obviously, we can’t know that yet.
Yep, part of why we’re being so paranoid about it is Kiddo did have a respiratory virus hit him when he was tiny and we were told that his lungs would be compromised for the next twelve months after that. This was a virus other kids get without even noticing anything’s amiss (98% of kids have had it by age 2). So we’re not really inclined to fuck around with long covid.
I know very little is known about long covid at this point so it’s hard for scientists to say anything with any certainty about it though. It makes it frustrating as hell with other relatives try to make it sound like we should just send him to school or whatever though.
