The biggest COVID wave since Omicron
January 5, 2024 12:06 PM Subscribe

"By wastewater levels, JN.1 is now associated with the second-biggest wave of infections in the United States in the pandemic, after Omicron. We have lost the ability to track the actual number of infections since most people either test at home or don’t even test at all, but the very high wastewater levels of the virus indicate about 2 million Americans are getting infected each day. In several countries in Europe, wastewater levels reached unprecedented levels, exceeding Omicron. ... There is, however, some good news about this big wave of infections. It has not resulted in the surge of hospital admissions seen with Omicron." The U.S. is facing the biggest COVID wave since Omicron. Why are we still playing make-believe? (Eric Topol, LA Times, 4 Jan 2024)
posted by Gerald Bostock (228 comments total) 47 users marked this as a favorite

I've been back to masking in public for a couple of months now. And I don't see any reason to stop. This whole situation is ridiculous.
posted by hippybear at 12:08 PM on January 5 [25 favorites]

I went back to masking in public, but someone in my bubble got it, and I finally had my first noticeable case of covid. I thought paxlovid was gonna fix it, but the rebound hit pretty hard.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:15 PM on January 5 [6 favorites]

It isn’t being taken as seriously because most people have had Covid at least once and the experience wasn’t that bad and of those who were really knocked on their asses the drugs worked pretty well. People are in denial/ignorant about the risks of long Covid and they don’t consider the impacts on the disabled, those on immunosuppressants, etc. Very few people in America even have the basic decency to even wear a mask when they are showing symptoms of any illness.
posted by interogative mood at 12:17 PM on January 5 [46 favorites]

This is from last week. It's long, but there is a transcript available. I hadn't listened to this Osterholm guy before, but I think I'll be listening more. Lots of really interesting information in this. Ep 147 Osterholm Update: JN.1, Hospital Capacity, & Vaccine Uptake [1h]
posted by hippybear at 12:18 PM on January 5 [3 favorites]

The arcgis site that tracked Travis county hospitalizations went offline over a year ago so locally I've been flying blind until someone showed me this:

CDC covid map

Even if you're otherwise interested in keeping abreast of covid waves the resources available haven't been reliable.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 12:23 PM on January 5 [13 favorites]

In my neck of the woods--Eastern Canada--we are seeing a huge uptick in COVID cases that are more numerous than during 2020/2021. Coupled with RSV and the usual flu season, our hospitals are struggling, but hey, at least the Freedom Convoy got what they wanted, eh? No one cares if anyone dies!
posted by Kitteh at 12:30 PM on January 5 [16 favorites]

The CDC wastewater chart seems to show us at similar levels to last year, but hospitalizations are a little lower. I don't remember people generally claiming that Covid will turn into the common cold, but that it would turn into another flu. That seems likely, but the thing is that pre-Covid, the flu killed 25-50,000 Americans each winter. For both, we should improve vaccinations (including takeup), treatments, and prevention (like improved ventilation and masking).
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:32 PM on January 5 [15 favorites]

That seems likely, but the thing is that pre-Covid, the flu killed 25-50,000 Americans each winter.

This is very much how I think of it now - it’s probably not drastically worse on an individual level than previously endemic respiratory viruses at this point but those are actually very bad in aggregate and we should make a stronger effort to reduce the spread of any of them.
posted by atoxyl at 12:38 PM on January 5 [37 favorites]

Nate Bear wrote another great piece about this too a few days ago: Four Years Later, Two Million Infections A Day

In so many ways, I'm glad I'm still isolating and masking. Even if it has been hard to isolate for the two years since Omicron when Aotearoa NZ's 'team of 5 million' essentially gave up supporting each other, to support the further accumulation of wealth of the richest elite instead.

It looks like things are now so bad that it's being talked about again in more media. I imagine the ongoing deaths and disablement must now be affecting profits?
posted by many-things at 12:38 PM on January 5 [11 favorites]

Never not masking over here. I am lucky to work in a place with at least a few other folks who do as well and a workplace culture that doesn't make me feel crazy for doing it. (To my face, anyway.)
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:42 PM on January 5 [15 favorites]

Hospitals strained in Italy, a headline we saw a few years ago also.
posted by clew at 12:43 PM on January 5 [3 favorites]

Just got back from a week in Paris, and noooooo one is masking there.

We wore masks on the planes, in the airports, and on the Metro (though sometimes I forgot). The audible coughing was everywhere, and those people sounded very unwell. My Parisian friend said she got it recently, and a tour guide said that she had just had it a month ago, and it seemed to be everywhere there, among residents and out-of-towners.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:46 PM on January 5 [7 favorites]

Btw for people who have had unpleasant reactions to the mRNA vaccines I can now concur with the fairly common anecdotal experience that the updated Novavax was a milder experience. I got it at Costco. There was still a period the night of where I felt pretty flu-ish, but I didn’t get the terrible headache that I got with the others and the whole thing was over in probably half the time. Except for the sore arm - this one is comparatively harsh at the injection site for some reason.
posted by atoxyl at 12:50 PM on January 5 [17 favorites]

From the LA Times piece: "What is the exit strategy that could get us to “return to normal”?"

This is the exit strategy. People have decided to a large degree that this is the level they find sustainable and so they've returned to normal.
posted by Galvanic at 12:53 PM on January 5 [23 favorites]

Longtime lurker here. Finally registered just to say thanks for making this post. (Hi, y'all!)

Even as an academic in the life sciences, the magnitude of this wave caught me by surprise. I just got through my third infection. I can't say enough good things about Paxlovid. You may have to pester your provider a bit, but it should be low-cost for many.

Stay safe out there.
posted by Synaptic at 12:56 PM on January 5 [62 favorites]

Just a few minutes ago I had a visit from our elderly neighbor who was bringing us some holiday cookies. She and her husband have had COVID multiple times. I answered the door in an N95. She assured me that they were healthy now, so I won't get sick.

So there's some good news I guess.
posted by tigrrrlily at 1:00 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

Also, the FDA maintains a central list of authorized at-home tests and their extended expiry dates.

Most have been extended. The second column of the table links directly to PDFs with the lot numbers and corresponding expiry dates, for each brand.
posted by Synaptic at 1:06 PM on January 5 [7 favorites]

CDC covid map

Data from the CDC would be more helpful to me personally if I had more of an insight into what kind of outcome they're trying to engineer. In the absence of that, the maps and graphs they put out are just noise.

It's like with the extended expiry dates. Does that mean that the tests remain reliable, or does that mean that the FDA wants people to keep using them even though they skew in a certain direction?

I swear I didn't used to be a conspiracy theorist. Then I was lied to, and I'm waiting for them to at least pinky promise that they have stopped.
posted by tigrrrlily at 1:07 PM on January 5 [28 favorites]

My pod of 3 people living separately had dodged it successfully until a couple weeks ago. It only got one of us, and not severely, but it was discouraging because it looks like they got it at the office, and we've all been diligent about masking in public at KN94/N95 standard or better. We'd been lucky as well as cautious, but luck is running out.
posted by EvaDestruction at 1:15 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

I can't get that worked up about Covid anymore, I had it October 2022, it wasn't that bad, haven't had it since. I'm sure I'll get it again but hey. I wear a mask when I feel like ventilation could be better and I always get the latest vaccination.

What I do find funny is how aggressively everyone has memory-holed the very existence of Covid, to the point everyone that's sick is like "yeah I had some bad flu" or "I have a cold" but never "Yeah I've got some cold or Covid thing". I'm always like... you know Covid still exists, right? Just because no one is talking about it anymore doesn't mean it's disappeared. "It's cold and flu season!" No, it's cold, flu, and Covid season, now until the end of time.
posted by rhymedirective at 1:22 PM on January 5 [43 favorites]

Well rhinovirus and flu do tend to let up over the outdoorsy months.

So does COVID, of course, just not enough to matter.
posted by tigrrrlily at 1:26 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

I had my second infection in December, 19 months after my first infection. It was lousy; I got a cold just as I was recovering from COVID, which was insult to injury. We also had to cancel a family trip for Christmas, because I didn't want to spread my illness to anyone else. But now, I've recovered.

I'll continue to get my boosters, when available. I'll continue to mask in public if I'm sick and need to go out. I'll follow the CDC recommendations if/when I get infected.

In other words, I'm living my life normally—because this is the new normal.

I'm willing to accept getting COVID sometimes. It sucks, but I'll get through it.

I'm not willing to sacrifice seeing people, traveling, large events, concerts—you know, the things that make life worth living.
posted by vitout at 1:36 PM on January 5 [27 favorites]

Covid is extremely (though not perfectly) seasonal. The wastewater levels this summer were roughly 1/10 of the current level.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:36 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

RSV and Covid both can be aquired by virions landing on your eyes. Which is how I got Covid in 2020 and how my partner got RSV a couple weeks ago. Masking for the sick is much more important than masking for the healthy. Of course the fuckers who get sick probably got it by not wearing a mask so why would they wear one when they already have it, right? (My partner's RSV was acquired while they were masked in a business meeting with their boss who was unmasked and obnoxiously shedding. Half the people in that meeting got it. I am still mad about it.)

Just saying. Masks for yourself aren't enough. You also have to stay the hell away from people who aren't masking themselves.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:40 PM on January 5 [23 favorites]

From the LA Times piece: "What is the exit strategy that could get us to “return to normal”?"

For me (still masking everywhere, and incredibly lucky to work from home so have really reduced exposure anyway), I think it will be a vaccine with the effectiveness of measles or mumps vaccines - vaccines so effective that the odds of getting infected, even while blithely wandering around unmasked in public, are extremely, extremely small.

Prior to covid, I was perfectly happy to walk around unmasked, unafraid of getting measles or whooping cough, because I was well vaccinated with a really powerful vaccine. If we can get to that level with covid vaccines, I will be happy, at that point, to leave my mask at home, and start going to concerts and plays again.

I am a fan of Eric Topol, and this is a good article. Thanks for posting it, Gerald Bostock!
posted by kristi at 1:41 PM on January 5 [15 favorites]

Also fuck RSV. I've never before had a respiratory infection that made my abdominal muscles hurt so much from coughing I was in tears. There's a vaccine for it now an in three years I'll qualify for it at age 60. If you're 60 or over, get the RSV vaccine right now.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:41 PM on January 5 [16 favorites]

The relatively doable exit strategy would have been installing improved ventilation in places where people gather indoors, plus the selective use of UV. Combined with a little masking, that would get us most of the way there. But it would require money, planning and the desire to benefit non-rich people, so it will not happen in this age of the world.
posted by Frowner at 1:50 PM on January 5 [44 favorites]

As a measure of how unconcerned people are, just 19% of people in the US got the newest covid vaccine as of the end of December. That's less than half the number who got the flu vaccine in that time, so it isn't just simple anti-vaccine sentiment. Even high risk people have very low covid vaccination numbers this time around. (Numbers plucked from this article.)

What is the exit strategy that could get us to “return to normal”?

He asks the question, but then doesn't answer it, unfortunately. Frankly, I think it is the wrong question -- what we have now is basically our new "normal." The horse has left the barn and isn't returning -- it's not going to go back to 2019 no matter how frustrating that is. There is lots that can be improved (like ventilation in public spaces, equitable access to medications and sick leave, etc.), but the basic parameter that we now have a new, somewhat seasonal illness in the mix is not going to change barring some new, crazily-effective vaccine that enough people decide to take.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:57 PM on January 5 [12 favorites]

There is no exit strategy unless sterilizing vaccines happen. Period.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:00 PM on January 5 [7 favorites]

I think for a lot of people who have gotten Covid recently, it's been on par with getting the flu in the past (i.e. although it remains pretty deadly, for most people it's mediocre-to-bad but survivable), and so people feel okay treating it like we did the flu in the past (i.e. maybe getting the yearly vaccine with some vague hope that it might help this year).

It is a bit annoying to get reasonable comparative numbers for flu vs covid hospitalization, but I finally found the right CDC dashboards (flu, Covid). It looks like so far this season the recorded hospitalizations for Covid are about 3x that of seasonal flu, so things aren't quite equal yet.

I think access is still a problem for Covid vaccine uptake. Doctors were offering flu shots if you went to their office (and didn't already have a fever from some other illness), but you had to actively seek out Covid vaccines. My husband and I made appointments at CVS for the vaccine on the same day, but they cancelled his appointment even though I was able to get my vaccines earlier in the day. He never bothered to try again. If Covid vaccines were offered via walk-in clinics like the flu vaccine (preferably at the same time), I think more people would get them. I think there's also a feeling of "well it's too late now" when the access is limited at the beginning of the season.
posted by that girl at 2:02 PM on January 5 [9 favorites]

When the pandemic began, I really thought we’d go in the opposite direction: I thought we’d all figure out that it’s relatively straightforward to avoid infections, and it would become normal in the long term to wear masks in certain settings. During flu season, for instance. Or at conferences. I thought we’d all figure out that it’s not inevitable to go home at the end of the week with the conference cold. A cold is not a big deal, but why be miserable if you don’t have to be?

I’m disappointed in the whole world now.
posted by Well I never at 2:04 PM on January 5 [57 favorites]

what we have now is basically our new "normal."

And we don’t yet know what this new normal is, because *some* novel viral diseases have quite significant long term effects and some don’t.
posted by clew at 2:10 PM on January 5 [13 favorites]

For those who (like me) are eager to see a news piece rather than an opinion piece, this report from NPR came out yesterday.

tl;dr: wastewater levels are very high, hospitalizations are not.
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:11 PM on January 5 [14 favorites]

Another covid wave hits U.S. as JN.1 becomes dominant variant [WaPo]

World Health Organization says COVID-19 pandemic is not over [CBS]

Covid-19 variant JN.1 is now the leading cause of infections in the US. Here’s what you need to know [CNN]
posted by AlSweigart at 2:12 PM on January 5 [3 favorites]

Just a few minutes ago I had a visit from our elderly neighbor who was bringing us some holiday cookies. She and her husband have had COVID multiple times. I answered the door in an N95. She assured me that they were healthy now, so I won't get sick.
So there's some good news I guess. - tigrrlily

In Fort Worth, I have got surprisingly little pushback on my wearing a mask (as opposed to requiring masks in my classroom, which I did as long as my institution allowed, which was actually surprisingly long). The first time was some random passerby in late 2021. The second was in late 2023, when a plumber took great affront to my wearing a mask, asking me, "Don't you know that COVID is over?" To him I just said "no" and refused to discuss it further, but I did pass the news on to two colleagues who had COVID at the time, telling them that I was sure that they'd be relieved to know that they didn't.

I have masked, starting with N95s when Omicron hit, consistently since this whole thing began, and see no real endgame other than doing so for the indefinite future. I've been a lifelong asthmatic and environmental conditions have just made it worse with recent years, and the prospect of my breathing getting still worse from complications of COVID mean that I'm not willing to take any more risk than I have to in that direction.
posted by It is regrettable that at 2:16 PM on January 5 [15 favorites]

RSV and Covid both can be aquired by virions landing on your eyes.

Ugh not what I wanted to hear after I walked into the subway yesterday and someone started coughing right as I was passing them. Going to have a few days of stress until I'm past a potential incubation period.
posted by thecaddy at 2:29 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

I also want to say that I appreciate the article that many-things linked.

One 'good' effect of COVID for me has been forcing me to confront directly how much our society marginalizes … well, everyone whom it would be inconvenient to try to incorporate into the mainstream. I am a cishet white male, with the effects that I don't need to describe to anyone here. Now suddenly I'm in a different position, and it becomes clear to me that society doesn't give a fig for me once I'm out, even just ever so slightly out, of the default-advantaged category—and I'm embarrassed that it's only now that I realize, with my outrage at being left behind, how much that's been the case all along for people who aren't in my position, and how I haven't ever had to see, let alone deal with, that institutionalized callousness and neglect.

I don't quite know what to do with that feeling, though Metafilter has helped me a lot in understanding more about it, but at least it puts an immediacy behind the importance of support for policies, governance, and simple human kindness that I had previously at times appreciated mostly abstractly.
posted by It is regrettable that at 2:30 PM on January 5 [25 favorites]

(I was masked; I've been masking on transit again since I got covid in September, after what could not have been more than a month of not masking on my commute.)
posted by thecaddy at 2:36 PM on January 5 [1 favorite]

I worked with vulnerable populations through the pandemic and diligently masked up while working in person the entire time and in my personal time. Isolating was not an option. I vaccinated multiple times, usually before the majority of the population had access. Then I had covid and even though I have some risk factors it was basically just as bad as the vaccine side effects. Now I mask when it feels right or when I’m asked. I’ve also been asked to take the mask off at large family gatherings and in stores/venues. I understand where the majority in this thread are coming from but… I just don’t think it is a realistic expectation. Kind of like voting, I guess, which I always intend to do and sometimes don’t because it is such an abstract priority. I think the pandemic and ongoing Covid are just so overwhelming for individuals who are not naturally inclined to dig into the data that it has become easier to move on and deal with how it affects you and your family group directly. I know the worst ways the pandemic impacted me had nothing to do with whether I was sick. It was the major disruptions to life and normal routines. Friction between close friends and family with wildly different attitudes. I’m still picking up pieces and figuring out what to do with my life after becoming incredibly dissatisfied with how the pandemic re-shaped both work and friendships, how awfully I responded to some of these stressors etc. It is just so much when life is already pretty stressful.

Not sure if this is helpful but wanted to throw an opinion as counterpoint to everyone who is shocked that people aren’t masking on the bus any more.
posted by kittensofthenight at 2:37 PM on January 5 [31 favorites]

Thanks for this post.

It's really difficult to read comments from people who feel comfortable with risking their own health and don't appear to be at all concerned about the health of anyone else.

Like at this point in the situation if you haven't picked up on the fact that your actions impact other people and that certain people (older people, babies and MANY others) are more vulnerable than you are then. I don't know what to say.

Complaining that you're just so done with missing out on what you consider to be the fun stuff in life because you feel okay about your risks sounds a lot like you are saying that this new normal is totally fine and that since people like you don't want to take precautions to help protect yourself and others that vulnerable people should be isolated and then I guess that means that their lives are not worth living? Feel free to correct me because I hate my interpretation but can't see it any other way.
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 2:40 PM on January 5 [38 favorites]

Like at this point in the situation if you haven't picked up on the fact that your actions impact other people and that certain people (older people, babies and MANY others) are more vulnerable than you are then. I don't know what to say.

That was true pre-pandemic. It is true in many areas not connected to COVID. This was always the world you lived in.
posted by Galvanic at 2:52 PM on January 5 [30 favorites]

I know that we have immunocompromised MeFites on here whose lives have truly been paused for nearly four years and counting because they either can't be vaccinated or for additional health stressors. They are the ones whose lives are considered expendable, but I tell you what: you will find out just how much society doesn't give a shit about you if or when you develop Long Covid after either one or repeated infections. When chronically ill/disabled/immunocompromised people tell you their lives matter and ask you to be part of the solution so they can have normal lives too, don't be a dick about it.
posted by Kitteh at 2:54 PM on January 5 [59 favorites]

I hope that my comment didn't come off that way. I was trying to be honest about my own experience. I think you are reading into my comment because of the snippy last sentence, so sorry for that.

Don't worry I normally delete comments after writing them so I'll check out now.
posted by kittensofthenight at 3:02 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

Where I work, we've had three people out with COVID. (Supermarket employee). So many customers hacking and coughing that it makes me wary and uncomfortable. I've been wearing a mask myself since getting a sinus infection turned upper respiratory infection. Because I'm the one who's sick, and I don't want it to spread. Even if they tell me it's not contagious, isn't it just the right thing to do, rather than outright coughing my way through the day?
posted by annieb at 3:20 PM on January 5 [9 favorites]

As a measure of how unconcerned people are, just 19% of people in the US got the newest covid vaccine as of the end of December. That's less than half the number who got the flu vaccine in that time

That's pretty surprising to me! I'll confess I never bothered with a flu shot until the pandemic - now I have an added motivation to get annual shot, and most pharmacies carry both (at least where I am). I would have assumed if anything, more people would be getting the COVID booster than the flu shot.
posted by coffeecat at 3:22 PM on January 5 [1 favorite]

I'm really kind of surprised by the number of comments here comparing COVID to flu without at least noting in passing that flu very seldom leaves one with severe, incapacitating, life-altering, potentially life-long sequelae. I would really like to not get COVID itself (and have avoided it thus far); I am fucking terrified of possibly getting long COVID and having some of the terrible consequences that some folks here on MeFi have described.
posted by Kat Allison at 3:33 PM on January 5 [49 favorites]

There was a time when we could make health care employees wear a mask if they chose to not get the latest flu shot.
😭
posted by tigrrrlily at 3:58 PM on January 5 [9 favorites]

To clarify: my comment wasn't directed at any one poster. It was a general disgust with the whole situation. As horrifying as it would be to hear and say, I would prefer folks just be honest that they don't care about the lives of the others instead of cloaking it in indifference or personal freedom. If it's about your personal freedom and you don't want to change or modify your actions despite Covid being part of our world forever, just say so.

I won't say my own actions are perfect but I try to be mindful that for some people, this is even worse for them than it is for the rest of us.

Edited to add, I do not want Long Covid. I do not want to be sick in a healthcare system that continues to be devalued and weakened (at least here in Canada).
posted by Kitteh at 4:02 PM on January 5 [16 favorites]

clew: And we don’t yet know what this new normal is, because *some* novel viral diseases have quite significant long term effects and some don’t.

From what I've been reading, COVID's on the former side of that equation. Cardiovascular damage (caveat: this study looked at Delta, not Omicron), brain injury, metabolic damage, probably some other kinds I don't immediately recall.

This stuff happens in people who don't seem to have Long COVID, and is at least partly independent of symptom severity -- that is, Bad Stuff happens to those with mild cases too. Worse than flu. And the more often one catches COVID, the more likely these non-obvious symptoms and syndromes become.

That's the bit I'm scared of, personally. I have enough family-medical-history whammies staring me in the face (and other body parts). Hard pass on any more. I'm just fine masking and getting shots and limiting indoor activities.
posted by humbug at 4:05 PM on January 5 [25 favorites]

I'm going to suggest the past few years of finger pointing and harsh naming and shaming of people about their public health behavior hasn't worked. And while the messaging might be what should be delivered, maybe discovering a different tack to winning people over other than "j'accuse" would be beneficial toward building a better participation overall.
posted by hippybear at 4:09 PM on January 5 [22 favorites]

The fingerpointing and harsh naming and shaming of people as you put it started with the anti-vaxxers. They put us here as did the respective governments with their tepid responses. I am just matching the energy they've been flinging at people who didn't want to get sick or die because of a virus.
posted by Kitteh at 4:14 PM on January 5 [23 favorites]

>I'm going to suggest the past few years of finger pointing and harsh naming and shaming of people about their public health behavior hasn't worked. And while the messaging might be what should be delivered, maybe discovering a different tack to winning people over other than "j'accuse" would be beneficial toward building a better participation overall.

Is there ever a point where we are permitted to stop focusing on the feelings of people making our lives worse, in the hope they will show the smallest bit of compassion?
posted by The Manwich Horror at 4:19 PM on January 5 [62 favorites]

My only input to this is I wish people would stop being giant assholes to healthcare workers; I have coworkers who have been infected over a half dozen times throughout the pandemic, and everyone seems to think we are deliberately slow rolling work when in reality we are constantly understaffed across the board.

Right? I left my hospital job six months after the initial lockdowns because it was getting impossible to staff the floors, and the floors were understaffed pre-pandemic. Then I went to work in family medicine and watched patients verbally abuse me, my co-workers, the doctors and nurses because we required masking. Three years after that, I burned out entirely on working in healthcare.
posted by Kitteh at 4:21 PM on January 5 [17 favorites]

Is there ever a point where we are permitted to stop focusing on the feelings of people making our lives worse, in the hope they will show the smallest bit of compassion?

Marketing ideas is still marketing. I think everyone who has tried to promote ideas ever has had to consider the state of mind of the audience into which they desire to deliver those ideas.

I don't know what to tell you. I hate what this world has become, and I agree with all the harshness. But I'd rather figure out how to win people over than just keep calling them names hoping they'll feel bad enough to change.
posted by hippybear at 4:24 PM on January 5 [12 favorites]

As an illiterate, shoeless simple country doctor that was appointed to run our 80 bed ICU during covid because all the real doctors (intensivists) quit, it's probably not wise in our current political environment to explicitly state how I actually feel about the people in charge, but I will quote an unrelated historical letter

I am a farmer.... Last spring I thought you really intended to do something for this country. Now I have given it all up. Henceforward I am swearing eternal vengeance on the financial barons and will do every single thing I can to bring about communism. -An Indiana farmer to Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 16, 1933
posted by hobo gitano de queretaro at 4:26 PM on January 5 [37 favorites]

>I don't know what to tell you. I hate what this world has become, and I agree with all the harshness. But I'd rather figure out how to win people over than just keep calling them names hoping they'll feel bad enough to change.

I suppose my issue is that this "naming and shaming" never seems to have happened in any meaningful way at the national level. The push from all of those in power has been to get back to work, start spending, and pretend things are normal. Masking went from mandate, to suggestion, to personal eccentricity with no response at all from our public health leaders, because they were too busy shortening quarantine times at the request of business leaders.

If there were some massive social movement to enforce masking and shame the people making life so much worse for us , and it had failed, I might have interpreted the comment otherwise. But that hasn't been the case.

So instead it is easy to read the comment as telling the people who are angry to moderate their tone. But the people expressing their pain and hurt here don't have the power to make any real change ourselves, whether we are vindictive or conciliatory. And the comment feels like telling us to shut up so we don't offend the people who have made it clear they don't care if we live or die. Or just because people are tired of hearing us.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 4:33 PM on January 5 [28 favorites]

Defund the tone police
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 4:39 PM on January 5 [26 favorites]

As per the link in OP's article, US Covid+ hospital admissions per 10,000 population are 1.50 per 10,000, which is significantly lower year on year versus last year Jan 2022 where it was 1.96 per 10,000.

I have a partner working in public health ICU and a sibling in primary care so the probability I will get multiple Covid infections approaches 100%. Right now, none of them seem particularly concerned.

Australia sees an even steeper drop compared to the US, with year-on-year Covid+ hospitalizations down 50% versus Jan 2022.

Also bear in mind that these hospitalization stats are predominantly patients hospitalized with Covid+, and not necessarily hospitalized because they need treatment for Covid.
posted by xdvesper at 4:39 PM on January 5 [9 favorites]

I'm sorry the comment feels like that to you, as it was not my intent. And I'm sorry you framed it that way because you've tried to trap me into an "I'm sorry you feel that way" apology which is not what I'm going to say.

What I'm going to say is I have spent literally years at this point fucking pissed off at the messaging of the Trump administration and how it fucked not only this country but probably the entire world as far as this pandemic goes. Because it's well known the world does look to the US for messaging about things, and the way Trump was actively working against the best advice of the smartest people in this country against this situation is shameful and I'm sorry it's not criminal.

I am NOT telling you to shut up. I'm telling you to figure out a way to adjust your messaging. Because right now, the battle has been lost. And you can rage into the storm all you want, but nobody will hear you and I guarantee there will be some who hear what you say and will harden their hearts against you because of how it is stated.

FIND A WAY TO WIN THE MESSAGING WAR. The direct anger and anguish is not working. I want to win the messaging war.

Please stop making me into the bad guy here, because I'm not. I'm literally saying "find a way to win people over because it matters that it works". I don't know what else to say.
posted by hippybear at 4:40 PM on January 5 [19 favorites]

I'm sorry. I read a callousness into your message that wasn't intended. I suppose I am hyper sensitive at this point. Still, that doesn't excuse any hurt I caused you. I am sincerely sorry I did that.

But to your larger message, at this point, howling into the storm is what I have left.

I have no means to even engage in the message war, much less win it. No tone adjustment will change that. I am poor, sick, and relatively isolated, I cannot make a difference. I can at least be angry.

Now I am going to go reread the post about the jaguars. :)
posted by The Manwich Horror at 4:46 PM on January 5 [16 favorites]

As per the link in OP's article, US Covid+ hospital admissions per 10,000 population are 1.50 per 10,000, which is significantly lower year on year versus last year Jan 2022 where it was 1.96 per 10,000.

That’s because since then most people have either gotten vaccinated, gotten COVID, recovered, and gotten some immunity from it, or died.
posted by bq at 4:49 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

I love in a European country, and I visit another one fairly frequently. I think I've seen one person in a mask in the last six months. You have to be significantly better at going against the grain than I am to wear a mask here.
posted by Braeburn at 4:54 PM on January 5 [11 favorites]

I'm really kind of surprised by the number of comments here comparing COVID to flu without at least noting in passing that flu very seldom leaves one with severe, incapacitating, life-altering, potentially life-long sequelae

“Very seldom” is possibly an overstatement and probably the wrong lesson to take from all of this.
posted by atoxyl at 5:01 PM on January 5 [9 favorites]

I am just matching the energy they've been flinging at people who didn't want to get sick or die because of a virus.

They're not here, so thanks for bringing their energy!
posted by Wood at 5:02 PM on January 5 [12 favorites]

I think if we’re talking about “shaming and blaming” as pandemic responses, we have to make some distinctions about who that blame and shame is directed at.

I’m part of a singing community that gathered only outdoors and masked through 2020, and started moving to outdoor only but mask optional and vaccine required once vaccines became widely available in 2021. After lots of inter-community discussion about risk thresholds, events started moving indoors in 2022, with testing requirements for almost all larger events.

At the same time as things started moving indoors, however, we also picked two people as designated Covid coordinators, and put forth a clear expectation that, should anyone test positive in the date following a singing, they alert one of the coordinators immediately. That coordinator then sends out a message to our various channels saying “hey, someone tested positive following x event, please isolate and test accordingly.”

There is absolutely no blame or social punishment for contacting the coordinator, and the vector is never named in any communication. Using this system, until this fall, we never once had a Covid outbreak from a local event.

As it happens, I’m home with Covid now following a spread from a news year’s eve event where someone was asymptomatic at the time but started feeling sick afterwards. For me it’s milder than either of my previous infections. But because my community has a strong ethos of disclosing Covid without assigning blame, I knew that someone else tested positive before I even had symptoms, and knew to test myself even when my later symptoms felt like “just” a cold and not like my Covid before.

The problem, as manwich horror identified above, is that all the national figures who really let this pandemic rage initially have not been properly held accountable. And one of the end results there is that communities who do care very much about reducing transmission end up finger-pointing inward about who doesn’t mask 100% appropriately or who’s still socializing without 100% optimal risk mitigation. We don’t need to do that to each other! We can create a culture of open disclosure and using the best protections we can within our own communities while still being mean and angry as hell at fascists and corporate overlords acting in bad faith.

“Don’t blame and shame” to me means extending some grace to the person who was completely asymptomatic at your gathering and only started feeling bad later, but had the decency to tell other people they were exposed. That person is only living with the consequences of a world where Trump et al let Covid run rampant. It does not mean letting Trump, or anti-vaxx grifters, or even your shitty boss who made you come to work sick, off the hook for anything.
posted by ActionPopulated at 5:02 PM on January 5 [28 favorites]

Fortunately there are areas in the US including here (San Francisco Bay Area) where mask wearing is such a normal occurrence that no one even notices anymore whether or not someone is using one.

I keep track of the Covid wastewater level websites, and watched the levels rising recently. Despite this and the lack of stigma in this area for wearing one, in my rush to get last minute shopping done, I didn't wear a mask, and now I have Covid. I have relatives who have it now too, but at least so far no one I contacted has caught it.

I have no excuse except stupid forgetfulness.

I'm hoping enough news organizations mention the new wave so at least the other stupidly forgetful will wake up and mask.

It probably won't do much for the ones who are being intentionally stupid about it though, but you do what you can.
posted by eye of newt at 5:18 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

I'm working on a play right now. We open in a week. We were rehearsing for the first 2 weeks of December, took 2 weeks off for Christmas, and just picked back up again this week. We had some general bad colds circulate through the cast and crew in December - including me getting pinkeye for the first time in my life ever - so people were already on tenterhooks.

Then - at some point during our 2-week holiday break, one of the producers got Covid.

Two days ago the director laid down a hardline policy that "unless you are in your home or in our rehearsal room, MASK UP, PERIOD." We have alcohol wipes and hand sanitizer prominently placed in the rehearsal rooms, the actors who have kissing scenes are miming them (save for the married couple who is PLAYING a married couple, because yeah), and some of us are even masking up in rehearsal. I got distracted and forgot my mask today and the VERY FIRST THING the director did when I walked in was to give me a hard stare and ask "where's your mask?" (I sheepishly confessed to forgetting it, and have been forgiven, but she made me take one of the spares she had; I had already told her I'd gotten my booster on the 28th and that softened the blow a bit.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:33 PM on January 5 [5 favorites]

I'm guessing the audience will be left to their own devices?
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:41 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

hippybear, I respect and adore you, but I'm afraid that blaming and shaming the people who are trying to blame and shame the anti-maskers isn't going to make much difference either.

The campaign to normalize Covid was a well-funded public relations masterpiece, rolled out by the wealthy and powerful to avoid damage to their bottom lines. Millions of dollars were involved, thousands of media outlets, it was a whole thing. I remember, because I was raging against it apoplectically at the time.

Asking people to watch their tone when talking about those who've written off the lives of the old, the immunocompromised, and the young is, I understand, your way of trying to help. But those people have proven time and again that their fun is more important than our lives, and they have an entire socioeconomic establishment that's screaming the same message in bold headline fonts on the daily. As you noted, we've lost this battle.

All we've got left is our anger. We know we can't make a difference anymore. We're not even trying. We're just pissed.

How pissed? Speaking for myself, I'm currently immunocompromised and isolated, hoping desperately not to catch any of the respiratory diseases out there because I have at least one really complex hernia that's causing immense pain, and I'm waiting for surgery. Imagine what I'll go through if I get sick with something that makes you cough violently. So imagine how I feel after my monthly trip to WarMart yesterday at 6am when an asshole in a hoveround saw me in a mask and decided to try to pursue me while fake-coughing loudly.

If you don't mask when you're out in public, I have nothing but contempt for you. I don't feel like hiding that anymore. I'm not doing it for PR purposes, I'm not trying to sculpt a message, I'm not trying to change the world. It's just how I feel, and just as people have given up masking because they don't feel like it, I don't feel like hiding my disgust with their behavior.
posted by MrVisible at 5:41 PM on January 5 [51 favorites]

You have to be significantly better at going against the grain than I am to wear a mask here.

One of the few upsides of getting older for me is slowly really not giving a fsck what other people think about my actions that don't impact them. Which is coming in handy now that I've gotten the label of "the mask wearing guy" because of the roughly 4500 people at my work camp at any particular time there are maybe a dozen of us masking.

Whatever. Something went around 4-5 weeks ago that laid people out for 3-5 days and I didn't get it. I gloat internally.
posted by Mitheral at 6:15 PM on January 5 [15 favorites]

Remember how when the pandemic was in its first winter and everyone was either isolating or masking and two strains of influenza might have gone extinct due to lack of transmission?

I still stand a bit in awe of the power of masking to have achieved that. Masking has a benefit beyond personal or even community, it can actually cure the globe of disease.
posted by hippybear at 6:18 PM on January 5 [26 favorites]

I gloat internally.

I would like to suggest that you consider doing so externally as well. YMMV, obvs.
posted by aramaic at 6:44 PM on January 5 [1 favorite]

It's like with the extended expiry dates. Does that mean that the tests remain reliable, or does that mean that the FDA wants people to keep using them even though they skew in a certain direction?

I had a bad box of "new" tests last year where the test line didn't work even though the expiration date was far away That, to me, proved it didn't work. I'm semi-inclined to just use an "expired" test at some point (note: I haven't so far) and see because if the line still works, isn't the test reliable? Do we actually know if the thing has stopped working entirely if it's past the extended deadline? I have yet to find a good answer beyond "you shouldn't use it."

Masks for yourself aren't enough. You also have to stay the hell away from people who aren't masking themselves.

That is literally impossible to do now.

Two days ago the director laid down a hardline policy that "unless you are in your home or in our rehearsal room, MASK UP, PERIOD."

I wish we'd mask at rehearsals now, but that horse has long since left the barn.

I'm guessing the audience will be left to their own devices?

You can't make anyone mask any more, period :(
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:06 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

The campaign to normalize Covid was a well-funded public relations masterpiece, rolled out by the wealthy and powerful to avoid damage to their bottom lines

No, it wasn't. It was perfectly ordinary people who decided they weren't going to stay locked down/wear a mask/etc. A large number of them did it before there was a vaccine or solid treatment. I think those people were horribly mistaken.

But now? Given the vaccines/immunity/medical treatment, I have much less of a problem with people deciding to get back to normal.
posted by Galvanic at 7:08 PM on January 5 [14 favorites]

Twitter opposition to face masks amplified by media, study finds

Media coverage, she said, magnified anti-mask rhetoric. The peak use of polarizing hashtags, the researchers found, was associated with headlines of stories that focused on anti-mask-wearing sentiments.

“We find that the media played a part in the polarization, magnifying the anti-mask rhetoric,” she said. “This led us to understand how the anti-mask minority can seem to be so powerful in the public’s perception.”

Are you actually telling me that you think the wealthy and powerful, who own media networks in order to influence public perception and their bottom lines, didn't use their wealth and power to influence the public into taking on more Covid risk so they didn't lose money? Because we all saw that happen. You remember the Republican stance on masks, right? You think that's what a grass-roots movement looks like?
posted by MrVisible at 7:25 PM on January 5 [17 favorites]

We were lucky that Covid wasn't more lethal than it was. I still have trouble accepting that many people blew off caring for and protecting others and it became a political issue. I fear that the next time many more people will die.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:33 PM on January 5 [8 favorites]

The thing is that Twitter was then and always has been a very very poor barometer of public sentiment because its uptake has never been that huge and was self-selecting from the beginning.

Twitter was good for breaking news stories like the Arab Spring and stuff like that but for US public opinion matters, it was vastly skewed from the outset and never overcame that.

And that's even before the algorithm pulled it even further toward its own perverse ends.

Twitter was good for certain things, and because it was good at those things it was regarded as being good at all things, but that was never going to be the case.

That the mass media, which was used to Twitter being useful for society for breaking quality news stories, took the COVID messaging coming out of Twitter and then amplified it... well, that's a fault of the traditional media not to follow actual generations-long established journalistic norms when Twitter was chirping in their faces. That's a transgression of professional integrity, and I hope they all recognize that.

Here's an article from Pew Research Center from back in 2013 Twitter Reaction to Events Often at Odds with Overall Public Opinion which should maybe have been seen as a bellwether about how that website relates to reality. But it was widely ignored, and it wasn't too long after that when Twitter trending topics would become major news stories despite most of anyone knowing nothing about it before it being a news story.
posted by hippybear at 7:42 PM on January 5 [6 favorites]

The wealthy and powerful now know how to profit from a pandemic.

They proved that they didn't mind if more people died as long as they didn't stop making money.

And they have biological weapons.

I can see why denial is appealing.
posted by MrVisible at 7:49 PM on January 5 [10 favorites]

I thought we’d all figure out that it’s not inevitable to go home at the end of the week with the conference cold. A cold is not a big deal, but why be miserable if you don’t have to be?

I think some people feel miserable in a mask physically and emotionally and so decided the risk of getting sick is something familiar and worth flipping the coin on.

Kittensofthenight, thank you for your perspective, I appreciated it, especially this:

I think the pandemic and ongoing Covid are just so overwhelming for individuals...I know the worst ways the pandemic impacted me had nothing to do with whether I was sick. It was the major disruptions to life and normal routines. Friction between close friends and family with wildly different attitudes. I’m still picking up pieces and figuring out what to do with my life after becoming incredibly dissatisfied with how the pandemic re-shaped both work and friendships, how awfully I responded to some of these stressors etc.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:58 PM on January 5 [12 favorites]

Also, can I point out how ridiculous it was that I had to carry out my own nuanced messaging campaign in this very thread to win support of a single person who, by being a co-member of this website, should be on my side, but who assumed bullshit animosity from me?

Like jeesus. I should NOT have to work this hard to have a friendly conversation amongst what should be assumed to be a friendly crowd.

If this is how life is being approached by people on this website, it's not surprising there is little to no progress being made insofar as to relating to people AS ACTUAL PEOPLE and maybe changing minds.

Holy fucking christ.
posted by hippybear at 8:38 PM on January 5 [14 favorites]

I am honestly not sure what I am supposed to do about Covid at this point. Where I am (Ontario), I am not eligible for PCR testing and free rapid test distribution is being discontinued. I guess I will have to buy some more when my stock runs out but I know most people will not. Stay home when sick? We have a young child at home who is sniffling or coughing more often than not. My partner and I caught Covid at the end of November, child never tested positive and remained healthy. According to local guidelines she was ok to go to school throughout, which makes no sense. We kept her home for several days and re-tested her before sending her back, which was more than required of us. Dropping our lives and staying home for 10 days every time someone is ill is simply not feasible for us. I mean, we could but we'd all be miserable shells of ourselves by March (partner and I are sick again with something that is not triggering the rapid tests). My partner and I mask and are up-to-date on our vaccinations, but with a kid in the mix it's clearly not enough. I lack the tools with which to make sensible decisions, the guidelines don't make sense to me, and I am tired of playing armchair epidemiologist. I'm tired and I'm genuinely sorry for not doing enough.
posted by Rora at 9:13 PM on January 5 [11 favorites]

If we ever do decide to abandon the attempt to run away from Covid, which is utterly futile because we are carrying it with us as we run, and face it, which we can only do by looking deep within our selves and into our very cells, and into the cells of bats as well, which is necessary because we need to understand how they cope with the virus so much better than we do, we will finally understand how to modify our own cells to be able to divide indefinitely without aging and without inevitably turning cancerous, because that seems to be how bats do it:

The Ageless Bat

Bats can live a long time, the longest of all mammals relative to their body size. That makes them unique models for understanding aging and the factors that contribute to a species’ life span. Telomeres, protective nucleotide repeats found on the ends of chromosomes but shorten with every cell division, are thought to play a role. For the first time, a new study examines telomere length relative to the lifespans of four bat species sampled in the wild. In the shorter-lived species, telomere length declined with age, but no such trend was observed in bats of the Myotis genus, the current age record holders. These little bats, upon genetic comparison with other mammals, have enriched expression of genes involved in telomere maintenance and DNA repair.

And unless we can overcome our tendency to divide ourselves into the few and the many at the same time, that would probably be a greater disaster for humanity than Covid ever could have been.
posted by jamjam at 9:15 PM on January 5 [3 favorites]

Holy fucking christ.

If I read both your first two comments in succession, I get a good picture of where you were coming from, hippybear, but I think it's not so terrible that someone got an unintended vibe from reading the second one and not connecting it to the first. (I mean, these are tough times, and this is an issue people genuinely disagree about on this very site, and there are people here who take the stance you were misread as taking, so it's probably best to just not take it personally.)

(I'm only typing this because the "Holy fucking christ" bit really raises the temperature even further, plus I'm sensitive to people taking what just a couple commenters have said counter to them and smearing that out into a general this-place-is-so-terrible proclamation. In the end, there was a bit of miscommunication between you and -- was it just two? -- other people, and it all worked out in the end!)

(Though I'll also add that I'm pretty sure you were misreading/misprojecting something when you wrote that someone was trying to "trap you into an 'I'm sorry you feel that way' apology." I think everything's cool and none of you are bad people!)
posted by nobody at 9:19 PM on January 5 [10 favorites]

I mean at the vet's there's a sign begging people to please be kind to those of us wearing masks...
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:27 PM on January 5 [4 favorites]

At least our lawmakers in Congress are doing something about this, right?

Like hauling Dr. Fauci in for two days of testimony next week so that they can rehash all of the "origin of COVID-19, coercive mandates, gain-of-function type research, scientific censorship, and more" pandering.

While picking up food at a restaurant this evening, a staff noted our masks and asked, "Are you two sick, or just being cautious?" "Just cautious," I said, as I'm still 0-for-9 lifetime on COVID tests showing a positive. I chuckle about seeing a "resurgence" of masking around here -- it's probably up to at least 5-10% of people again here in suburbia, enough that I can share a knowing nod with other masked people I see out in the world. It's been almost a month since we've been heckled for masking in public.

So there is at least some anecdotal awareness that it's back. What's not coming back is the public taking it seriously, unless a strain returns that has people dying left and right again -- and the problem there is that the virus playing the long game instead of causing rampant sudden deaths doesn't count for that.
posted by delfin at 9:37 PM on January 5 [9 favorites]

Note: I'm going to ask people to dial it down from the personal remarks toward each other and meta commentary about the site. It would be good to be able to talk about recent developments without it again devolving into angry sidebars and hurt feelings, so try to brace against the fact that no matter what there is going to be some variation in opinion and experience, and try to work around that.
posted by taz (staff) at 9:37 PM on January 5 [13 favorites]

As horrifying as it would be to hear and say, I would prefer folks just be honest that they don't care about the lives of the others instead of cloaking it in indifference or personal freedom. If it's about your personal freedom and you don't want to change or modify your actions despite Covid being part of our world forever, just say so.

This is a genuine question because I do care about others health and comfort, and I live in a city and am around many people who aren't choosing to be around me - what are the actions you want people to change or modify? I can't tell if it's that everyone mask everywhere all the time, or not do social things indoors out of solidarity, not go out while sick, or something else?
posted by sepviva at 9:43 PM on January 5 [3 favorites]

Mask when you're in a public space.

Keep up to date with vaccines.

That's it. That's the standard I hold people to. If you can do that, you've amply demonstrated that you care about your fellow human beings in my eyes. You'll have my gratitude and my respect.
posted by MrVisible at 9:55 PM on January 5 [21 favorites]

I think some people feel miserable in a mask physically and emotionally and so decided the risk of getting sick is something familiar and worth flipping the coin on.

I would be a lot more of a forever-masker if they'd ever bothered to make and distribute masks that don't make me feel sick to wear. That don't fog my glasses and make me short of breath and nauseous, cut into my skin, tangle with hair and glasses and key chains. I'll throw up a couple of hours into wearing a mask, usually. I wear them, but it's a thoroughly unpleasant experience that makes me just want to go home anyway.

Less importantly, the surgical masks that are still widespread even though I'm always told how useless they are, they made me look cute and I kinda liked wearing them. The N95s mean going out looking ugly, something I try and avoid for my own safety.

I really wish that the upgraded air filtration and UV or whatever path had been gone down. I don't think Covid isn't serious, but I hate masks with a passion.

I'm sure someone will respond that my ability to breathe freely and see clearly is at a greater risk long-term from Covid, and that makes sense, on the bus, unable to see my stop and retching, it's hard to feel that in the moment.
posted by Audreynachrome at 9:56 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

I've been reflecting on this a lot, as this new ~super wave~ has happened. I have a bunch of thoughts honestly, and haven't really figured out where to put them.

I've worked in nightlife for something like 17 years at this point. Sometimes i've had a day job, sometimes i've been all in on it. I'm also a producer, dj, and musician, having done the same with that.

This has a really unique and at times odd or absurd perspective to have on all of covid. There's been a lot of evolving "what you're doing is inherently wrong/bad/unhealthy" vs "this is my literal job" through it all. Most of my close friends/fellow travelers/compatriots were basically out of work for over a year. I didn't even get unemployment, because i had been fired just before covid. We got in catfights over people throwing parties pre vaccine, wrote lots of music, had little cute friend hangouts at eachothers houses...

Something i rarely see talked about here in the mask/precautions vs not battle is how many people have jobs where their bosses, coworkers, and the customers will all treat them negatively for wearing a mask. It isn't just some ~selfish~ personal choice, i've literally seen people get managed out, fired, their hours cut back, or just generally fucked over for Taking This Seriously especially as time has gone on. There's like, perverse incentives to not wear a mask or take it seriously in general. You see this even spread to places like hospitals/medical offices, or construction jobs where you literally would normally wear PPE pre covid.

We got completely, and utterly owned by the right going "masks are a political thing and are wokeness going too far". It is political, but it still feels like we somehow ceded that narrative to them everywhere. like, victory for fascism moment.

I got covid in 2022 at a club, seeing an old friend i hadn't seen in years play an amazing set after traveling to record an album with a friend. I got long covid, and it fucks with me to this day. I struggle day to day with whether to call myself "disabled", but like, i notice pretty much every day how it affected me. It's subtle, and yet not, and shitty. Earlier in the post-vaccine-things-are-open era when most people wore masks at public events i was in packed indoor clubs, full of people with masks, on, over and over both for work and because "well fuck it, if i'm gonna be here for work all the time, i might as well go out when i feel like it" and never got sick. No one i knew got sick in that era. Everyone got sick after.

And so now in 2024 i sit here, with an important surgery a few weeks out, essentially too paranoid to leave my house outside of work and get infected again because no one is wearing a mask, and most of my friends are pretty flippant about it... and the worst thing is i understand why. I don't even know if i can be mad at them, and i don't even really think it's healthy or productive to be mad at them. I see peoples anger and frustration interpersonally tearing them up, eating them alive, because they fucking won and made us direct it at each other instead of Them. If my sister who's taking care of me post surgery wore a mask at work, she would be the only one at a huge place. Every customer would comment on it. Her boss would probably say it was "making people uncomfortable".

And, i get it, it just sucks. We got owned. And a lot of people neurosis and long slow meltdowns over this are a result of that. We got owned. Like historically significantly fucked over.

I'm mad too.
posted by emptythought at 10:37 PM on January 5 [54 favorites]

I wish some of the "why aren't you masking" anger also got directed at "why do entire other countries not have access to home tests, N95 masks, vaccines, and paxlovid"

Even if all of you guys have been vaccinating and masking, you'd still be screwed because the rest of us don't even have that choice.
posted by Zumbador at 12:44 AM on January 6 [27 favorites]

Something i rarely see talked about here in the mask/precautions vs not battle is how many people have jobs where their bosses, coworkers, and the customers will all treat them negatively for wearing a mask.

This.

The only way to induce actual shame on any issue in a person with strong beliefs on it is via accusations that they don't hold those beliefs strongly enough. Calling out an anti-mask, anti-vax fuckwit for being an anti-mask, anti-vax fuckwit reinforces their commitment to anti-mask, anti-vax fuckwittery to at least the same extent that an anti-mask, anti-vax fuckwit's wheeling out of the tediously predictable "sheeple" tropes reinforces the determination of the well-informed to keep on behaving in prosocial ways.

So it's not really about the interpersonal blaming and shaming. What we need is for people in positions of power and influence to do the right thing instead of pandering to the Fox-addled and/or actively continuing to addle them and/or being them.

We got owned. And a lot of people neurosis and long slow meltdowns over this are a result of that. We got owned. Like historically significantly fucked over.

Yes we did. And there's fuck all that any of us can do about that except doing our damnedest to outlive those responsible.
posted by flabdablet at 12:52 AM on January 6 [7 favorites]

I work remotely, ever since 2020, but go into the office a few times a year for something or other. I mask consistently. Most people will not look me in the eye even when speaking to me. This was not a problem before Covid and it was not a problem during mask mandates. It is wrenching, honestly, but fuck if I’m going to give into it. Bonus: my office is in a hospital!
posted by eirias at 4:11 AM on January 6 [17 favorites]

I'm guessing the audience will be left to their own devices?

Genuinely not sure what you mean by this, but - that is the house manager's policy to control, only when we open. And I don't know their policy because we are not even in the theater yet and are just in a rehearsal studio.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:12 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

Less importantly, the surgical masks that are still widespread even though I'm always told how useless they are, they made me look cute and I kinda liked wearing them. The N95s mean going out looking ugly, something I try and avoid for my own safety.

You might want to look into ‘origami style’ k95 masks, which are more comfortable (to me) and looks more like cloth masks but still fit closely.
posted by bq at 4:59 AM on January 6 [4 favorites]

If 99% of people aren’t masking in a public place, it’s not because they have all decided they don’t care about other people. It’s because they are taking their cue from their peers and from explicit national guidance that masking in public is no longer required. Feel free to hate the person who refused to wear a mask in September 2020 and make assumptions about their character. Those assumptions won’t be useful today.
posted by bq at 5:02 AM on January 6 [14 favorites]

Hey if you want to claim that most people are stupid and selfish I can’t even argue with that. I just don’t think it’s particularly useful.
posted by bq at 5:25 AM on January 6 [13 favorites]

Being immunocompromised, I have to make sure to surround myself only with people who have the generosity of spirit and the mental capacity to make sure that my life isn't endangered regularly. I find that making assumptions based on peoples' mask usage is a decent indicator of how considerate they will be in regards to my health.
posted by MrVisible at 5:29 AM on January 6 [9 favorites]

The masked think the unmasked are dumb and vice versa. I mask on planes sitting next to unmasked people who wipe down every surface. We are all suffering from cognitive dissonance.

The masked vs. unmasked divide also makes it awkward--do I want to tell everyone my medical status, why I am masking? People's patience with just being around masked seems to be weakening (in my area), or am I being overly sensitive?

(emptythought, my heart goes out)
posted by armacy at 6:04 AM on January 6 [2 favorites]

We have *never* had adequate guidance for any of the decisions we are asked to make about COVID, so it’s no wonder that lots of folks have defaulted to doing nothing.

There are five overarching questions that anyone might ask as they are trying to figure out what to do:
1. What should I, as an individual, do to minimize my risk of gettting COVID?
2. What is the current level of risk that I could get it?
3. What is the risk to my health, short and long term, if I do get it?
4. What should I do as an individual to keep from spreading it to others?
5. What should my institution (workplace, school, church, hobby group) do to minimize the spread of COVID and protect the community?

We have *never* had adequate answers to any of these questions.

Speaking from my role as the current lead for COVID mitigations at an elementary school, we were a lot more cautious than most, we ventilated our old building by keeping windows open and fans blasting outward, we masked religiously, we tested rigorously, we notified about exposure. And we never knew of what we were doing was enough or too much or the right thing to do. The state guidelines were vague and contradictory and often in conflict with science or common sense. And now they amount to basically, ventilate if you can and encourage folks to get vaccinated.

We are still ventilating and resting and masking in some circumstances and holding the line on isolation but some of the mitigations we used to do did have real harms or costs and it was hard to know when to adjust.
I stopped masking at work this year because nine year olds need to see my face to understand me and I did my best with a mask but I felt like I couldn’t do it forever. And I immediately got COVID, twice.

I am still not sure what I could be doing. When we get COVID now, our risk of death is lower. I don’t know much else for sure.

A lot of the people I know still being the most careful work remotely or in higher education and I do think it’s easier for some folks than others.
posted by mai at 6:21 AM on January 6 [15 favorites]

The fact of the matter is that pandemics by definition are a collective problem requiring collective solutions, and almost no one in power believes in those anymore.

The average person was never going to wear a mask whenever they go into public from now until the end of time, and continuing to expect that is counterproductive rage theater that distracts from working towards a real solution to the problem, which is mandating, by law, ventilation systems, in the same way society decided in the 19th Century that waterborne illness was a collective problem that had a collective solution: indoor plumbing and municipal water treatment.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:28 AM on January 6 [36 favorites]

I've developed a few questions for the minimizers:

If masks "don't work", will you go into an Ebola tent without one?

If covid risks are "rare like a car accident", but you could expect to get in one once or twice a year with a 1 in 10 shot of serious injury, would you change your life to avoid driving?

I've been pretty fortunate so far that I don't have children, my spouse is on the same page, and my students have all masked because I've asked them to (and provided masks). So I've been lucky to avoid the seemingly involuntary exposures.

I'm facing a few medical procedures soon, and I'll take any luck you have that I don't end up getting my first case of covid from them. The irony is ... deadly.
posted by Dashy at 6:48 AM on January 6 [14 favorites]

Less importantly, the surgical masks that are still widespread even though I'm always told how useless they are, they made me look cute and I kinda liked wearing them. The N95s mean going out looking ugly, something I try and avoid for my own safety.

Honestly, I'd say in that case to just wear a surgical mask. Get the best one you can tolerate. A surgical mask will make you a lot less infectious, may protect you somewhat and will at least reduce the dose of virus you get, which may mean a very mild case.

I myself wear 3M Auras, which look incredibly awful. I am not sure how I'd feel about wearing them if I had a public-facing job and was wearing them all the time. Feeling like you look weird, especially when no one else is masking, isn't that great.

The Kf94s from Korea are also fairly decent. I have a giant head so the regular adult patterned ones don't fit me, but I do have some of the pink and black ones ones from this maker for when I don't want to wear the Auras.

The sad thing is, I've hardly eaten indoors since the pandemic started - a few times in the summers - and then an old friend came to town and we had a regular restaurant meal and coffee (albeit at places chosen to be uncrowded) and it was such a boost. I felt so much happier afterward and realized how much of an impact it had to have been unable to have that kind of casual hangout for four years. If you're a depressive person like me, there really is a cost to being unable to do normal things and I can see why people don't want to give them up. Given the boost to my mood when I've been really, really dangerously down, I'm kind of thinking about doing a few more restaurant meals at off hours in carefully chosen large uncrowded places just for the mood boost.
posted by Frowner at 6:58 AM on January 6 [21 favorites]

(nb, Ebola is not known to be airborne, which is the trick behind the question)
posted by Dashy at 7:00 AM on January 6

The sad thing is, I've hardly eaten indoors since the pandemic started - a few times in the summers - and then an old friend came to town and we had a regular restaurant meal and coffee (albeit at places chosen to be uncrowded) and it was such a boost. I felt so much happier afterward and realized how much of an impact it had to have been unable to have that kind of casual hangout for four years. If you're a depressive person like me, there really is a cost to being unable to do normal things and I can see why people don't want to give them up. Given the boost to my mood when I've been really, really dangerously down, I'm kind of thinking about doing a few more restaurant meals at off hours in carefully chosen large uncrowded places just for the mood boost.

You say this really well. There is a large cost for a lot of people in every level of social isolation, along with the benefits they might get in terms of lowered disease risk. I think this is a big part of why people were so happy to stop mask-wearing and are reluctant to restart, because simply seeing people's faces and expressions is a way of feeling a connection. I was a rule follower and did the whole isolation/masking thing very carefully for as long as it was required and expected, but it was horrible for me from beginning to end.

I'm watching the second season of the show P-Valley right now, and unlike any other show I've seen, it leans into the pandemic. People are wearing masks (or are not wearing masks), there are episodes where you feel the claustrophobia of isolation, the club is shut down for social distancing and everyone loses income, and so on. It's not always easy watching, because it keeps making me relive some of those moments which really sucked, but it is very powerful television.

Asking people to go back to that level of isolation is just such a non-starter. I get feeling angry at how badly the pandemic was mishandled because I share that anger, and even more so about the disparity between countries that Zumbador highlighted just above. But if the solutions you are proposing are unlikely or impossible, then all you do is keep making yourself frustrated.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:12 AM on January 6 [15 favorites]

At least in Toronto I don't get the side eye for masking in public. And some service employees are still choosing to mask even if their co-workers do not. Like at IKEA, some staff masks, most do not. Or our favourite coffee shop, there's a couple counter staff who mask. I mean at least there's that. Small blessing. Some people are keeping the faith, and not getting a lot of shit for it. I am thankful for it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:27 AM on January 6 [15 favorites]

Fully vaccinated and boosted. The last two years has been a never ending stream of respiratory malades. That seems to be the unintended, but not unexpected, outcome of the long lockdown period.

It started in March 2022 with Covid
then viral bronchitis in June, which was horrendous
Covid (again) in July, which was awful due to the heatwave in Europe
RSV in November, which was also horrendous
the common cold in December
which developed into the worst case of Sinusitis I have ever had in my life, I didn't think the human body was capable of producing so much mucus in such short periods of time
followed by bronchitis again in January 2023.
Covid (milder) again in March 2023 after a trip to a short workshop
then something in August 2023 after three long haul flights that may have been Covid but not confirmed by a LFT.
then the mildest case of Covid again at the end of Nov 2023, my partner was quite ill but I managed to just have minor sniffles

We always isolate and work from home when we're ill, and we continue to wear masks the times we venture away from home. But we still keep getting stuff. We live on a mountain away from any large population areas and we *still* keep getting stuff.

Time and again I see people in the shops, on the planes, on the trains. Coughing their guts out with no masks on, not covering their mouths, spraying shite into the vicinity. I can only think "have we learned nothing from the past 3 years?", and "you utter utter cunts"
posted by lawrencium at 7:37 AM on January 6 [9 favorites]

I'm facing a few medical procedures soon, and I'll take any luck you have that I don't end up getting my first case of covid from them.

I hear you. About to go into hospital for surgery, with an overnight stay, for the first time ever; and it absolutely sucks that on top of all the inevitable fears that would always have accompanied that, I also get to be scared that I'm going to catch Covid.

... Or anything else, really. Other viruses also available, and none of them likely to aid recovery from major surgery. But I've spent nearly four years limiting my activities to avoid Covid in particular, so that's the one I'm particularly focused on.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 7:50 AM on January 6 [7 favorites]

(Ebola Reston was airborne)
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:57 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I avoided contracting COVID until mid 2023, and I literally became clinically depressed in Jan 2022 because of the strain of continuous isolation/precautions/masking.
posted by bq at 8:19 AM on January 6 [5 favorites]

People would literally rather die or get long covid than continue pandemic precautions any more.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:34 AM on January 6 [4 favorites]

That’s like saying people in New Hampshire would rather die in a car crash than buckle their seat belts. Of course that’s not what’s going on in their brains. What’s happening is a misestimation of risk, a mistaken sense of personal invulnerability, a leftover-from-middle-school desire to give a middle finger to authority, and a desire to show membership in a group of people they identify with who also don’t wear seatbelts.

Or if you’re just venting carry on, never mind.
posted by bq at 8:59 AM on January 6 [13 favorites]

People would literally rather die or get long covid than continue pandemic precautions any more.

More accurate would be to say that most people's personal cost/benefit consideration tells them that the costs of "pandemic precautions" outweighs the benefits. It's legitimate to challenge that calculation (particularly for the ~80 percent of people who don't even bother to get the updated vaccine), but that's what is underlying people worldwide not masking, not isolating in their houses, etc.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:02 AM on January 6 [7 favorites]

How about we all come to agreement on the shared observation that no matter what, the whole situation sucks dingo kidneys?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:09 AM on January 6 [6 favorites]

What’s happening is a misestimation of risk, a mistaken sense of personal invulnerability, a leftover-from-middle-school desire to give a middle finger to authority, and a desire to show membership in a group of people they identify with who also don’t wear seatbelts.

Even more important, I think, is the critical mass of authority figures (politicians, doctors, scientists, whatever) who are giving these people permission to do what they already want to do. Telling people what they want to hear is an extremely powerful force. It makes it super easy for laypeople to cherry-pick support and recast the issue into "reasonable people disagree, it's a choice, fuck you for taking away my freedom".

Note that this "critical mass" of incorrect and bad-faith leaders need not be a majority of politicians, scientists, etc. It may only be a few percent, or even just 1 person. For example, if the governor of your state is saying masking is stupid, that not only gives people a direct reason not to mask, but also defangs any local or private pushes for more masking.
posted by ryanrs at 9:18 AM on January 6 [15 favorites]

Yes it does Emperess...

But it is still a thing.

As an old, I too don't give a fuck what other people think. I still mask everywhere in public, and will continue to do so for a long time. Don't see a great reason not to...
posted by Windopaene at 9:19 AM on January 6 [5 favorites]

if the solutions you are proposing are unlikely or impossible, then all you do is keep making yourself frustrated.

(not replying just to Dip Flash) I truly feel that requiring masks on planes and in hospitals is obviously needed, and very possible ... and yet clearly impossible solely due to public sentiment.

We can't ask, let alone require, even the most basic anymore.
posted by Dashy at 9:21 AM on January 6 [14 favorites]

Another longtime lurker who finally joined. Just posting to name that we have all been through traumas, shared and individual, since 2020 (and of course all our past experiences). When I was a kid, I remember having the thought that 2020 was an impossible year - either the world would end before we got there, or I wouldn't live that long. When 2020 did happen, it was the most unbelievable year of my life. For all the things we collectively experienced together that year, lived in my own body and day-to-day.

When we got past the initial shocks, I noticed changes in behavior - my own and others' - that made me think we are not okay. Many of us are not processing the traumas. Many of us have ongoing traumas. And most of the traumas existed before COVID - the pandemic just brought them into stark relief. The resulting response (or lack thereof) has been demoralizing. This is a very hard time to be a person.

I feel better when I can do something that helps or supports something bigger than me, or someone else. Sometimes it feels like more than I can handle just to take care of me, in a country this hostile to our collective well-being. But that also makes it feel all the more like a win when I can do something meaningful beyond myself. Individual action can't solve collective problems, but this doesn't mean there is no benefit to individual actions.

Thanks for posting a COVID update. It's important to keep talking about it. It's important to notice and understand our feelings about it.
posted by TimidFooting at 9:23 AM on January 6 [29 favorites]

Yes it does Emperess...But it is still a thing.

I....didn't say it wasn't a thing though? Not sure why the "yes-but" there. I was trying to find a way we could all find common ground, and surely "this sucks" is a shared sentiment, no?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:36 AM on January 6 [2 favorites]

Came in here to bitterly mention that yesterday my company held an all hands to announce the update to our “hybrid” policy. We are a remote-first company of 150 employees.

All employees living within 60 miles of HQ (which is in NYC) are now MANDATED to work in the office every Wednesday plus another day.

I’m an immunocompromised remote employee in another state…we are now MANDATED to work from HQ at minimum 3 days per quarter and the Company picks the days, no exceptions. The rationale our thirtysomething CEO provided was “we need more serendipitous moments and hallway conversations”.

Yeah, COVID loves it some maskless serendipity…especially at the MANDATED evening mixers at rented out bars because it’s a tech company and apparently the party and capitalism don’t stop.
posted by floweredfish at 10:10 AM on January 6 [19 favorites]

The hospitals around here (Seattle) do sporadically require masking, although I have no idea what enforcement is like for them. A group of signed an open letter last year which called for continued masking in health care settings, and some but not all require their staff to be masked even during the periods when they don't extend that requirement to the public.

It's pretty common to see people masking downtown, but it's a pretty small percentage and I'm unsure how many of those people are tourists from Japan (or someplace else in Asia with a totally different mask culture). A sizable minority of Lyft drivers have a cloth mask they put on if they see that I'm wearing a mask when I'm getting into their car, which I appreciate but don't think it does very much to my personal risk profile. I did have the experience recently of a Lyft driver who cautiously commented positively on the masks my wife and I were wearing, and as he relaxed he started in about how he masks consistently because he knows that COVID is super dangerous and also was made in a lab and probably released on purpose. I'm glad he's masking, but it was unfortunate how much conspiracy theories seemed to have brought him to that decision.

I'm grateful to live somewhere where masking is still a thing in general circulation, unlike what people report from other parts of the world. But I've been making more exceptions then I used to. We've been occasionally eating in restaurants again, and I do feel like my mask stands out more there. I'll wear the mask up until I actually get my food, and put it back on when I'm done eating, and I think generally the people willing to eat in a restaurant are people who never mask - I've yet to see anyone else doing the same.

We just elected a new slate of city council members who are uniformly pretty conservative (in Seattle terms). The new council president is apparently very keen on requiring the council to meet in-person again. One more reason to think that she sucks.

I wish the vaccine mandates hadn't been squashed. 19% is such an abysmal uptake, and unfortunately the boosters do seem to be really important. I wish a lot of things, really.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:22 AM on January 6 [9 favorites]

Yeah, I avoided contracting COVID until mid 2023, and I literally became clinically depressed in Jan 2022 because of the strain of continuous isolation/precautions/masking.

Not to pick on you, bq — but one thing that the vulnerable find really frustrating (or at least, I did when I was among them, and nobody can hold a grudge like I can) is that it’s not like this desperation somehow doesn’t touch the vulnerable. It absolutely does, just like some (I won’t say all but surely some) vegetarians miss burgers desperately, just like everyone in a union would probably rather not pay hundreds of dollars out of every paycheck for the privilege of continuing to work. They do these things anyway because they want the better world more. It would have been possible to get you what you needed without abandoning the vulnerable completely. We knew how. We chose the short-term pleasures of the healthy instead. I am no longer vulnerable and I could go to restaurants and chances are good (less than I’d like, but good) that I would be fine after a couple weeks. But I can’t unknow the things about everyone around me that this pandemic made me learn. I promise you, no matter how sad you were, this kind of loneliness is much, much worse.
posted by eirias at 10:41 AM on January 6 [9 favorites]

19% is such an abysmal uptake

Once the fed vaccine funding was reduced/changed, suddenly pharmacies had a wall of paperwork to go through. I saw many people walk out of my local Walgreens because the pharmacy staff was demanding $200 for a shot. So any hiccup with the insurance or coverage questions, and people were walking out.

I saw this was during the first week of the most recent vaccine release, in the SF Bay Area. The customers I observed in the store with appointments had to have been people who booked appointments as soon as they were available, and had already waited in line for ~2 hours. These people tried quite hard to get their COVID boosters, but failed.
posted by ryanrs at 10:48 AM on January 6 [13 favorites]

But I can’t unknow the things about everyone around me that this pandemic made me learn.

This feeling has done a great deal to mitigate the "loss" of being on airplanes, and even restaurants.

I don't miss other people all that much, to be honest.
posted by Dashy at 10:49 AM on January 6 [7 favorites]

Yeah, COVID loves it some maskless serendipity…especially at the MANDATED evening mixers at rented out bars

I would rather eat a flaming broom than work at a company that mandated regular after-hours socializing.
posted by delfin at 10:58 AM on January 6 [14 favorites]

Where I live (in the northwest US), our area's primary hospital has drastically reduced the number of beds it operates due to inability to staff them. I was in the hospital for a few days in early 2022 (during the Omicron surge) and all the nurses that took care of me were traveling nurses. We are not ready for a surge in respiratory illness. And there's no knowing what the next dominant strain is going to be like.
posted by neuron at 11:04 AM on January 6 [5 favorites]

Honestly, my hallways conversations usually just have nothing to do with work and end up being my hanging out with a rambling manager talking about non-work things. Fun for me to do for an hour because it's paid slacking, but....

I can't blame people's lack of enthusiasm for more shots since getting them still doesn't prevent you from getting covid, plus some people get sick off them every single time as is, plus how everything was made much more difficult to get them this round.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:07 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

And the band played on.
posted by neuron at 11:09 AM on January 6 [9 favorites]

Another thing about vaccine uptake is, after the initial series was presented as two shots + boosters, I’m not sure people realize that this year’s vax is entirely new and updated for current strains. The idea of “boosters” kinda stuck in people’s minds, they know that the strains the original vax protected against are basically gone…from there, it’s easy to see how people who are otherwise okay with vaccines might not bother.

I feel like just a series of basic-ass PR campaigns saying “you should now get an updated Covid vaccine annually just like the flu vaccine” might catch a lot of stragglers.
posted by ActionPopulated at 11:11 AM on January 6 [4 favorites]

But I can’t unknow the things about everyone around me that this pandemic made me learn. I promise you, no matter how sad you were, this kind of loneliness is much, much worse.

If you think I’m not also angry, bitter, and enraged, then you’re wrong, and it’s not really appropriate for you to make assumptions about how someone else’s sadness compares to your loneliness. I got to feel all the things and all the alienation too, plus, again, clinical depression. Everyone gets to feel angry and bitter and enraged and some of us also get long covid or broken relationships or dead relatives or clinical depression. The cost of COVID is terrible and the cost of what we did to mitigate COVID (which frankly above and beyond my depression includes completing derailing my life plans) also is terrible.

It’s all fucking terrible, I guess I’m going to vote with the Empress on this one.
posted by bq at 11:15 AM on January 6 [6 favorites]

The only thing I have to add to this conversation is that's it's wild to me that people compare COVID to the flu. Even if a mild case of COVID had as few risks as a mild case of the flu usually does, people (unless they are immunocompromised) generally do not get the flu more than once year. They don't even get it even once a year. Most people don't even get it once every two or three years. Yet people have just accepted that they will get COVID every year, possibly more than once. It's just not the same as flu.

As someone who had her first round with COVID in November and who had a very mild case and yet still hasn't recovered, it absolutely blows my mind that people walk around unmasked everywhere, living their lives exactly the same as they did before, with no concern for what they might be doing to their own bodies or how they might be spreading it to others (especially since asymptomatic cases are not uncommon). As for myself, I will continue to mask in public.

(and high-five to fellow Fort Worthian @It is regrettable that. I am likewise surprised at how little push-back I've had about my mask wearing)
posted by JR06 at 11:18 AM on January 6 [14 favorites]

Well, the good news is that with so few people masking up, the number of deaths due to rebreathing your own carbon dioxide should be very low this year. Call me an optimist, but I predict zero!
posted by Flunkie at 11:22 AM on January 6 [5 favorites]

How about we all come to agreement on the shared observation that no matter what, the whole situation sucks dingo kidneys?

I'm not happy with how things are at the moment re COVID, but I want to point out that on balance, the global response to the COVID pandemic - scope and magnitude, social and economic effects and attempts to mitigate those effects - was unprecedented, and we have to keep in mind that MILLIONS of lives were saved. Some countries could/should have done better... many could have done way worse.

So I do regard it as a net win (new vaccine technology and a working vaccine in 6 months? boom!), but the win is now marred by the fact that lessons have apparently not been learned, and COVID mitigation became, and remains, a political football.

A bigger problem is health care, period; it seems to be wobbling or crumbling just about everywhere, and the current poor efforts at COVID mitigation are also a symptom of that.

(We've got all shots offered, mask occasionally in public. I got a mild case of COVID in July 2021, still have lingering muscle aches but not debilitating)
posted by Artful Codger at 11:25 AM on January 6 [9 favorites]

You’re right, bq; I’m punching below the belt a little, and I’ll own it. But that diagnosis also graced my medical record during this pandemic and I don’t have hope that it’ll end until I end it. And the thing you did to save yourself hurt me and the people like me who had complicated lives during omicron, and the ones who still do.
posted by eirias at 11:33 AM on January 6 [1 favorite]

You’re making more assumptions about me and what I did.
posted by bq at 11:37 AM on January 6 [9 favorites]

I truly feel that requiring masks on planes and in hospitals is obviously needed, and very possible ... and yet clearly impossible solely due to public sentiment.

For airplanes, for all that masking in such close confinement can be justified, I can understand why flight attendants wouldn't want to go back to being in the position of mask police; I would honestly worry for their safety given how extreme some people are on this topic. I flew a number of times in the second half of 2023 and found it interesting how some airlines have incorporated mentions of masks in the safety presentation they do before takeoff, both in terms of "take your mask off before putting on the oxygen mask" and also requests to respect other passengers' and crew members' decisions to wear a mask. But I was never on a flight with more than about 5% of people in masks and usually far less.

For hospitals/doctors' offices/dentists, I was really surprised at how fast all of them dropped masking, and now that it is voluntary, how few staff I see with masks. In my ignorance, I had thought masking would permanently stay the norm at least in health care settings, if nowhere else.

We've been occasionally eating in restaurants again, and I do feel like my mask stands out more there. I'll wear the mask up until I actually get my food, and put it back on when I'm done eating, and I think generally the people willing to eat in a restaurant are people who never mask - I've yet to see anyone else doing the same.

We have a regular neighborhood restaurant we typically go to once or twice a week these days. What I see there every time we go are people masking up right before entering and then wearing the mask for the walk across the restaurant to get seated, where it comes off for the duration. Some will put it back on for the walk to the exit. More power to them, but I can't imagine it doing more than very marginal risk reduction.
posted by Dip Flash at 11:44 AM on January 6 [5 favorites]

If I may interject here, I think another reason why conversations about what the pandemic did and continues to do to people’s mental health are a sore spot is the fact that so many bad-faith actors weaponized “mental health” early on as a reason to reopen businesses and schools prematurely, or not to mask at all. Remember all the “think of how it will traumatize our children to not see people’s faces?”

It is possible to acknowledge that both Covid itself and the cultural changes that came with it have had devastating effects on the mental health of a large swath of the population, and do so in good faith. It is also entirely understandable that seeing that argument now might immediately raise your hackles, and I get it. It all goes back to my previous comment about directing blame and shame to the right places.

I think we can all agree that US Republicans have never sincerely cared about the pandemic’s mental health effects at all without immediately assuming bad faith of anybody else.
posted by ActionPopulated at 11:54 AM on January 6 [11 favorites]

I'm guessing the audience will be left to their own devices?

You functionally cannot throw a mask required event anymore. Literally everywhere, in the entire process, everyone would rise up like matrix agents to stop you. I can, 100% guarantee as someone who works in event planning that the venue would complain, other people organizing the event with you(and i'm talking, even if this is a *radical* organization, much less just a theater production or something), any outside staff including security, a massive number of people attending. You would be approached from all angles by people including those who would like to attend questioning whether you're tanking attendance for doing this.

It's the same thing you run into with venues doing nothing about ventilation. I can't entirely figure out what drives this as it's not just cheapassery, i keep wondering if theres some belief that by installing air filters/higher turnover hvac/uv filters/etc they're somehow admitting liability if anyone gets sick? It seems like it might even be something stupider, in the sense that they think reminding anyone covid exists is bad business, and that as long as no one else thinks about it we're all under social contract to pretend it doesn't exist.

But no, you basically cannot require masks for an event now. I honestly bet most venues would fight you if you tried to require them, even if you offered to pay more.

But I can’t unknow the things about everyone around me that this pandemic made me learn. I promise you, no matter how sad you were, this kind of loneliness is much, much worse.

Again sharing my perspective as a Nightlife Person, but at least around here indoor dining reopened in fucking like june and july of 2020. Masks were required, in a confusing bullshit way byzantine way, which meant people basically wore them half the time.

This is when "gatherings" were banned, and people were discouraged to go out and do anything. The stay at home order had JUST ended.

So you had a bunch of people who had to go out and deal with, historically, probably the worst customers in modern history. It genuinely felt like a lot of the people going out cared more about ordering servants around and feeling wealthy/powerful than just getting food, because everyone had been getting take out or cooking at home for half a year basically. Don't even get me started on what bars were like.

Meanwhile, the staff of these places is expected to go to work, get treated like shit, and go straight home and only associate with people who lived in their house. No after work drinks, no post work kickbacks at coworkers houses or you're morally repugnant. Everyone kind of went insane, a lot of accusations were thrown around by roommates who didn't have service/nightlife jobs, worse accusations were thrown around by people with much higher incomes who worked from home on a laptop. Everyone treated us like we were the problem.

I know a LOT of people in the industry, even in other cities. This was super widespread. A lot of the mental health toll of this was basically being told "be productive for capitalism but do nothing else or you're Bad". So you have to facilitate everyone elses socializing superspreader space, but you're a bad person if you socialize in a way that isn't making a business owner money.

What i'm saying here is that what was asked of a lot of people, "go to work and come home and don't do anything else" was unreasonable. I don't care if this makes me Politically Bad or whatever. The answer was "pay everyone to stay home", and when they weren't willing to do that, the game was over and it was not our fucking fault. Again, we got fucked. There's no rational, insanity preventing way to sell people "go spread/facilitate spreading covid for work then immediately go home and don't associate with anyone or it's Your Fault". That's a laboratory experiment at that point. People said no, and we're still living in the aftermath of that. They fucked us, we didn't fuck up.

I feel exactly the same way about how they could have changed building codes, city ordinances, state laws, etc to require things like better ventilation, UV filters, indefinite masking in medical offices. Remember how they didn't recommend air filters in schools until the day after biden ended the pandemic, so that they didn't have to pay for schools having them? i'm not gonna forget.
posted by emptythought at 12:10 PM on January 6 [44 favorites]

Oh, I don’t disagree at all, ActionPopulated. My point was not that it’s fake, but that all that same stuff touches us, too.
posted by eirias at 12:22 PM on January 6 [2 favorites]

Again sharing my perspective as a Nightlife Person, but at least around here indoor dining reopened in fucking like june and july of 2020. Masks were required, in a confusing bullshit way byzantine way, which meant people basically wore them half the time.

My area used to have a number of quality barbecue joints, but all of the best ones near me closed up in recent years. There was one about half an hour northwest that I had heard of that sounded promising, so I looked it up online.

The Yelp reviewers gave them glowing reviews, not just for their food but also for their "thoughtful mask policy," "allowing people to make their own choices about masking," "letting customers see the staff's pleasant smiles at all times," " standing up for our rights," and lots of other indicators that they reopened sans masks and required neither staff nor customers to even consider one onsite.

The reviews began right after the lockdown ended.

I haven't had barbecue in a long, long time. And I won't any time soon.
posted by delfin at 1:52 PM on January 6 [9 favorites]

The PDX Book Festival had a few events that required masks (presumably at the authors/panelists request), and they distributed masks at the door for those who didn't bring their own. A recent Palestine 101 event also required masks and handed out very cute masks at the entrance for everyone as well. I was happy to see that people seemed fine with wearing them. The audience demographic for both of the masks-required events I attended was younger and I assume, rather more sensitized to disability justice concerns in general.

So it is possible to have mask-required events!
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:41 PM on January 6 [10 favorites]

But PDX, (and SEA), are not most of america.

Sometime, like 2 years ago, I had to attend an event with my son in the Salt Lake City area. Olympic Development Water Polo tournament, (total scam, fuck the ODP people, but I digress). Inside a big bubble where Olympic events were likely held back whenever that was. Next to the speed skating rinks they used. Kind of the height of the pandemic. Many of our parents ended up getting COVID from that trip. Not me. But, I was going to pick up a pizza for my son, and went into the nearby pizza joint. I walked in wearing a mask. One of the two employees working, got the other employee to help me, with a line like, "these fucking mask rules, am I right?" as he didn't have one.

I was like, "Well, better than getting fucking COVID". He didn't seem to agree with that...

Seriously? I spent last year's December, 2022, 3 days in the ICU, on a ventilator, for non-covid reasons, and still have nerve damage in one half of my neck, and can't feel it from that. ICU ventilation vs. wearing a mask? I'm taking the mask.

Don't give in to the peer pressure. Stay safe friends.
posted by Windopaene at 3:11 PM on January 6 [25 favorites]

Vaccination Dramatically Lowers Long Covid Risk

Some good news...
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:14 PM on January 6 [15 favorites]

On the off-chance that this is helpful for anyone, my decision making process regarding whether to mask or not has been simple - I ask myself, if I got covid doing this without a mask, would I regret it? I recognize people face pressure not to mask in certain situations so I hope this doesn’t sound condescending but for me, most of the time, the answer is yes, so I mask. Would I regret it if I got covid because I was not wearing a mask wandering around at Target or watching a performance in a theater? Yes. The times I have gone mask-free were when I wanted to meet and connect with new people, like happy hour for parents at my kid’s new school.

I don’t feel like I’m missing out on life. I went to a sold out club on New Year’s Eve. I spent the week of Christmas visiting museums with family. And I recognize that everyone’s risk tolerance is different. But that’s where I’ve landed.
posted by kat518 at 3:18 PM on January 6 [5 favorites]

I work in a public school. My coworker recently tested positive for Covid-19 and we learned that there is no longer a quarantine requirement. Use time off (we're paras, so hourly) or work with a mask. And we have several medically fragile kids we're responsible for. It's upsetting.

Meanwhile, our state government is getting dinged for "reckless" spending on Covid by the asshole Nazis out east.
posted by Scattercat at 4:47 PM on January 6 [15 favorites]

What I see there every time we go are people masking up right before entering and then wearing the mask for the walk across the restaurant to get seated, where it comes off for the duration. Some will put it back on for the walk to the exit. More power to them, but I can't imagine it doing more than very marginal risk reduction.

Nobody EVER figured out the indoor eating/mask issue. You're not supposed to remove the mask at all, for any reason, while indoors. Not for a sip of water, nothing. Inherently, it becomes too damn cold to eat outdoors, or too hot, or people refuse to eat outside any more (even my most cautious friend was willing to give up on the idea yesterday due to cold, though we still sat outside), and then you have to deal with this. It's become easier to just give up. I've done the "mask on except for eating" thing and every time, I wonder if I'm just being an idiot. I still haven't gotten it yet, but fuck if I know how to protect myself any more.

I suspect one of my many issues at work is that on in-office days I (a) wear a mask, and (b) CLOSE THE DOOR IN MY OFFICE so I can remove said mask to eat and whatnot. They are NOT HAPPY ABOUT THAT DOOR BEING CLOSED and write me up for "closing the blinds" when I did not, but I'm not happy about having the mask on all day with the door open and the whole food/drink issue either. It's fine if other people close it, just not ME.

There's one theater I know of in this area that bought a heavy duty mega massive HEPA filter. I presume it's safe for theater attendees, but then someone pointed out to me that every show there has one week where everyone ends up out with covid and everything is canceled. Admittedly, I've seen their rehearsal space and it's basically underground-ish and does not appear to have the HEPA going on, but it makes you wonder, doesn't it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:55 PM on January 6 [4 favorites]

What i'm saying here is that what was asked of a lot of people, "go to work and come home and don't do anything else" was unreasonable.

Hi. I'm immunocompromised. This has been my life ever since Fall 2021 when the state of Georgia decided I would have to go back to work with unmasked, unvaccinated people because there was no longer such a thing as disability accommodations for immuncompromised people, while at the same time everybody decided to take masks off for every other part of daily life so that I can't, e.g., go to a movie or a museum or concert or other things that everybody else gets to do because I burn through every bit of risk I can possibly take just doing my job. Nobody cares if I think it's unreasonable, because nobody cares about immunocompromised people.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:59 PM on January 6 [24 favorites]

Nobody EVER figured out the indoor eating/mask issue.

At a certain point you have to accept that the idea is fundamentally stupid. I mean, c'mon.
posted by ryanrs at 6:00 PM on January 6 [7 favorites]

emptythought: “But no, you basically cannot require masks for an event now.”

A 500+ person event I am familiar with was vaccination required and masks recommended and the grousing was epic.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:12 PM on January 6 [1 favorite]

A 500+ person event I am familiar with was vaccination required and masks recommended and the grousing was epic.

There was a period where I needed to show proof of vaccination all the time, and had both a photo of the card and also a state department of health "pass" that could be stored in Apple Wallet. But it's been a long time since I've needed to show this proof, and I don't currently have a quick way to do so if I was out and about. The last vaccine I got, they weren't even filling out cards any more.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:21 PM on January 6 [5 favorites]

Full agreement there. I have my own and my wife's vaccine cards on my fridge, but when we got the latest booster in the fall, they didn't bother with filling out one.

And this is what drives me nuts.

Here in America, we had a situation that was at least reasonably cognizant of the seriousness of the disease. Even with the Trumpish half of society vehemently opting out of it, there was a system in place. Vaccines were free and reasonably effective. It was made relatively easy for anyone, insured or not, to get a vaccine or to find out if they had the disease. Those who chose vaccination could provide proof of it. Businesses could and did maintain voluntary mask requirements, even after the power of the state to enforce that was ripped away. It was still "look out for yourself" rather than any kind of shared burden, but it was at least there.

And now, we're regressing in every way. You have to jump through hoops to be sure of finding a vaccine that's in-network if you're insured or subsidized if you are not -- and that's if you feel compelled to get it at all. It's more of a novelty now than something that everyone outside of Trumpoid circles felt was a good idea. You can get occasional rapid tests in the mail, but beyond that they're $10 and up now. I don't even want to know what drive-up PCR tests would cost now. Paxlovid is a help but not a certainty that it will help, is contraindicated for many patients, and can be expensive. I can tell others that I'm vaccinated but I have no way to prove it.

The people around me are swimming in such a widespread sea of COVID and ambivalence to COVID that even when I'm always masking in public and I'm avoiding eating in restaurants and working from home and avoiding large public events, I know that I am lowering my risk but I don't have any feeling of security that I'm lowering it by enough.

My eyes have been watery and irritated lately, my nose has been a little runny at times, and I've been sneezing occasionally at intervals. No cough, no bad sore throat, no loss of taste or smell, no muscular aches, no fever or chills, no sensation of the symptoms growing in intensity. Even though the symptoms and their come-and-go nature seem to point more to allergies than to viral fun, I was concerned enough that I dug out one of the rapid tests from my hall closet and took it, which was negative. And I felt BAD about doing that. That it seemed wasteful. That a time will come when I or my wife have had more certain exposure and more alarming symptoms and I will NEED those COVID tests then, and not want to pay $50 for another handful.

This isn't me bitching that our society and my little world can't be made 100% safe, because I know that it can't. This is me bitching that I want to know if I am sick and if I am potentially putting others in danger, both family and strangers, and my ability just to know that has been sliding down a steady decline for some time now. The danger to others has not lessened, the impact I can have if I am careless has not lessened, but it is gradually becoming more and more difficult to avoid that impact.

That's not how this is supposed to work.
posted by delfin at 7:27 PM on January 6 [10 favorites]

Time and again I see people in the shops, on the planes, on the trains. Coughing their guts out with no masks on, not covering their mouths, spraying shite into the vicinity. I can only think "have we learned nothing from the past 3 years?", and "you utter utter cunts"
posted by lawrencium

At best reckless morons, at worst sadistic spreaders. There is no good position on that spectrum. It is shit from one end to the other.

The older I get the more I accept that the explanation for the Fermi paradox is that life is inherently self-destructive.

That's not how this is supposed to work.
posted by delfin

Yet here we are. :(
posted by Pouteria at 8:05 PM on January 6 [6 favorites]

The last vaccine I got, they weren't even filling out cards any more.

My pharmacist lost my card.
posted by Flunkie at 8:08 PM on January 6 [3 favorites]

Paxlovid is a help but not a certainty that it will help, is contraindicated for many patients, and can be expensive.

I recently learned that Paxlovid is (by at least one study) around half as effective in 2023 as it was in 2021. Still useful, still recommended, but not the magic bullet it once was. Hard to tell exactly why without more study, the cited work wasn't exactly apples to apples, but one guess is just that we're continuing to see new mutations and new variants all the time. In fact there's reason to believe that at least one COVID medication (molnupiravir) has itself been driving the evolution of new SARS-CoV-2 variants. (Turns out that mutating the virus inside the host is how molnupiravir is designed to work; the surprise was that in some cases those mutations are apparently both viable and spreadable beyond the host.)

So while we have some good core therapies for COVID now that will continue to save a lot of lives, the best treatments are going to continue to be a rapidly moving target. We already knew that, which is why periodic booster updates exist, but the problem there is that the creation of boosters takes 6+ months, and new variants are moving at least that fast.

For example: the Pfizer / Moderna / Novavax boosters available now were designed to target the XBB. 1.5 Omicron subvariant, which was first spotted in October 2022 and was peaking in January-February 2023. We've seen half a dozen notable subvariants since then and the vaccine efficacy varies a bit with each one. The currently-dominant subvariant, JN.1, accounts for around 60% of cases as of this month. Is the current vaccine still efficacious against JN.1? Sure, especially compared to not being vaccinated at all. Is it as efficacious against JN.1 as it was against XBB.1.5? Probably not, though if anyone has good data I haven't seen it yet. Will there be a new vaccine that's better targeted toward JN.1? Probably, and by the time we see it, we'll be another half-dozen variants or subvariants into the future. We'll always be playing catch-up with the current booster approach.

My concern is: the effort that got us from zero vaccines to multiple vaccines, and from zero approved antiviral therapies to a few -- that effort was spearheaded by intense concern and interest from governments, academia, industry, and the public. Operation Warp Speed, &c. And it worked! RNA vaccines are a modern miracle! But now the intense concern and interest from governments and the public has all but evaporated. In the US at least, all indications are that both the government and the public would like to pretend that COVID no longer exists. Tracking and reporting is gone, testing is passé, distancing is a distant memory, masking is controversial, nobody wants to spend the money on improving indoor ventilation in public spaces, and people who (should) know better are still talking about prophylactic hand washing (in 2024! for an airborne pathogen!) instead. Meanwhile nobody seems to care or at least want to talk about older folks, immunocompromised folks, or anyone else who's at higher risk, not to mention the millions currently dealing with long COVID. The pandemic is over! Fuck all that depressing stuff!

Academic and industry R&D is still advancing for now, and new boosters will probably continue to appear and new treatments and medications are still in the works (UMD is working on a promising nasal spray for example). But how long will that continue, and at what pace, now that the money and support are drying up?

In short it appears that COVID will be with us always, but the will and the money to keep advancing the research may not be, if the currently demonstrated denial/disinterest and the ongoing cuts in funding are any indication. And we need that research to continue to advance, not just to provide *better* vaccines and treatments, but just to keep the *current* vaccines and treatments viable in the face of an constantly evolving threat that's already beginning to outpace things like Paxlovid.

I hope we'll all be okay, and that no variants will appear that significantly outstrip current vaccine efficacy, and that meaningful new long COVID therapies will appear, and that we can actually someday soon put this in the minor-irritation category of public health threat that everyone seems to want to pretend that COVID currently is. But I do worry.
posted by Two unicycles and some duct tape at 9:04 PM on January 6 [16 favorites]

Okay. So here we are towards the end of the thread, and things are winding down. I'm waiting for various doctors to see me and make decisions so that I can get something, probably surgery, done to stop the awfulness I'm going through at the moment, the latest in a series of awfulnesses that began when a surgeon implanted a mesh which has now been recalled in my abdomen. And I'm terrified of going into the hospital because I'm immunocompromised and no-one, not even medical providers, is wearing masks. So I'm scared and I'm stoned and I'm lonely, and it's time to get doomy.

Doesn't this feel like the fall of civilization to you?

We battled Covid and we lost. We gave up. And it wasn't that our technology failed us, it wasn't that we didn't know how to fight this battle. It's that we didn't have the social cohesion to act as a united front against the disease. We lost because we couldn't get our shit together.

As a species we depend on our ability to work together to solve problems that are bigger than we can tackle individually. That's pretty much the definition of civilization. We've gradually developed the technologies we need to organize ourselves into larger and larger groups; language, writing, telegraphy, radio, and so on. And as we've gone from tribes to towns to empires, we've been solving bigger and bigger problems.

And now it seems like problems that we would have solved handily in the past, that we've solved time and time again, are starting to become unapproachable. In my lifetime homelessness has gone from something shocking and rare to something shockingly common. And it's happening pretty much globally; as a species, we're having trouble providing housing for ourselves. Regional conflicts which were stabilized have started unraveling. And now we had an outbreak of a deadly pandemic, and we fought for a while and then just kind of threw in the towel.

When civilizations fall, it rarely happens abruptly. Instead, it happens to the poorest, the weakest, the sickest first. It happens to the countries without resources, the lands at risk from the changing climate, the low-income neighborhoods being eaten by the sea. It happens as services to outlying areas get cut, and services that keep things running everywhere go underfunded.

And as all of these things keep happening, and no-one comes to the rescue, and society doesn't work the way people always expected it to, people are going to start to re-think the social contract. Why contribute to a society which will do nothing for you?

As the environment deteriorates, the burden of disease increases. The cost of medical care for an individual increases proportionately. That cost spread over entire societies is, I think, in combination with things like resource depletion and the increasing cost of growing food in a changing environment, putting a huge strain on society.

I'd say poor people were the canaries in the coal mine, but canaries were already there a while ago. We've stopped being able to take care of our poor, our sick, our mentally ill, our old, our incarcerated. Our standards for how we treat other human beings keep dropping.

Isn't that how things start falling apart?
posted by MrVisible at 9:32 PM on January 6 [21 favorites]

I work at a public university in one of those states with a gerrymandered, locked-in legislative Republican majority. Instructors and employees are banned from requiring students to mask, even if a bunch of students in a given classroom came down with Covid or some other illness that week. Meanwhile, the ventilation in many buildings is terrible. The state's position has been that as long as the HVACs meet (pre-Covid, very weak) state codes for air circulation, the universities cannot "waste" money upgrading them. At least in my office there was a window to open for ventilation. Until, friends, administrators approved riveting all of the windows in the building closed lest we waste heat or AC by opening a window for some fresh air.

There was a half-hour leaf fire near an air intake for the building, and the whole building had to be closed for three days before the HVAC fully cleared the smoke.

I lobbied and lobbied university administration to remove the rivets on the windows and to stand up and fight for students and faculty by demanding improved ventilation. But with the universities here being attacked on so many fronts, and budgets stripped year after year to bare bones, I got nowhere. University administrators were much more afraid of angering MAGA legislators or student parents than they were of Covid risks. The university would take no steps beyond those mandated by the CDC, and the CDC did not mandate any particular ventilation standards.

I have a health condition that puts me at risk, got very sick when I caught Covid in 2022, and now I have long Covid as the gift that keeps on giving. So believe me, I understand why so many people feel so angry and abandoned. In a way, everyone with health risks today feels that sense of being told to go work in a deathtrap of a building and stop fussing about the windows being riveted shut. And then subjected to the double torture of being made to resume stupid practices like attending group in-person mass meetings that would have worked more effectively in Zoom, because "this is important to maintaining morale." I bet most will empathize with the gnashing of my teeth on that. . .

But that doesn't mean that I don't find myself on the other side of the fence as well. My spouse is immunocompromised. She's also a visibly trans woman, and has had multiple very bad experiences with transphobic medical staff in our area. She adamantly wishes not to get Covid, isolates at home, gets out of the house mainly for late night walks, and wears an N95 if she must interact with strangers (even the surgical prep staff attending her this summer were unmasked, it's mindblowing). She was very uneasy about my returning to in-person work when everyone was required to mask. Then when the masks came off, she correctly foretold that a Covid infection was soon to follow. I got Covid a month into the semester. We are fortunate enough to live in a space with bedrooms upstairs and the living room and kitchen below, so we were able to isolate on separate floors, with her just coming up briefly to leave food outside my closed door, and me stuffing a towel in the gap between door and floor, and wearing an n95 to go to the bathroom. I had a fever for three weeks and was quite unwell for months, but my wife did not catch my Covid. The simple measures of isolation and masking really do a great deal!

24 hours after the three-week fever broke, though, I had to return to teaching in person. And my spouse had medical procedures coming up. So we stayed isolating--communicating by text, avoiding being on the same floor, masking if we were, and only speaking to one another unmasked outside and socially distanced. It was lonely, but we did what we had to. Her health was precarious. She had protracted and difficult recoveries, and needed not to add contagion on top of things. So we settled regretfully into a sort of long-distance relationship in the same home.

And there we eventually developed different assessments of risk. I went to events I was expected to attend--student award ceremonies, colloquia, meetings. I masked and tried to socially distance as much as possible, but I went. My spouse felt I wasn't arguing hard enough that a virtual option should be available or I would refuse to participate. I felt I'd tried my hardest, and had lost. Then this past summer I traveled by plane to a professional conference to be part of a special panel that had been in preparation since before Covid struck. I masked the whole time, but was surrounded by the array of unmasked people that we are all so familiar with in airports and hotels. And my wife was really angry at me when I returned. To much of the world, I appear an overcautious weirdo who clings unnecessarily to masks. To her, though, I had become too casual about risks that put my life and hers at risk. I wouldn't have gotten fired if I didn't go to the conference, so I shouldn't have done it.

The specifics of my situation may be unique, but I think the general issue is one a lot of people struggle with. Someone we love accepts risks we would not, or is more cautious than we are, and this can suddenly make them one of Them. Aligned with our political enemies. Bringing the culture wars into our homes and seeming to step on our moral values. Even someone like me, whom most Americans would consider extremely invested in public health, Covid-aware, and socially progressive, can also find myself viewed as standing on the other side of the fence at times. This is a perceived "us vs. them" problem that so often turns out to be us vs. us. It is painful. And it is so difficult to talk about, because feelings remain very raw, even if most Americans now deal with this by putting their fingers in their ears and going "la la la, everything's fine."

And that's why I think discussions like the one we are having here are both so important, and so heated. Hugs or fistbumps to those who want them.
posted by DrMew at 9:43 PM on January 6 [50 favorites]

There's an asymmetry to your riveted windows predicament that works in your favour.

A battery drill costs far less than the administration would have to pay for the contractors that proper procedure would require be the ones to undo five minutes of its use.

And it's just terrible the way those things go missing every time somebody leaves it behind in the staffroom. Some days, nobody can find it for minutes at a stretch.
posted by flabdablet at 10:14 PM on January 6 [5 favorites]

I was in Japan about 6 months ago and almost everyone I saw was wearing a sort of closely fitted pleated surgical mask with big plush cotton ear loops that seemed designed to be worn for hours every day.

I doubt they are as effective as an N95 but they seemed like a significant upgrade on regular surgical or cloth masks. I think if mask mandates were still around we'd be wearing that type of mask too.
posted by zymil at 1:55 AM on January 7 [5 favorites]

I am currently having my mind blown that vaccines or PCR tests or rapid tests or Paxolovid cost money in the US. I shouldn't be (it is my home country, after all).

While Canada ain't doing so great with vaccine uptake, at least in Ontario, all those things are free. You just have to go pick tests up from the pharmacy, or have a doctor/walk-in clinic call in your Paxolovid script if you need it, or just walk into a pharmacy to get your vaccine. I have an appointment on Friday to get my next round and it was pretty simple. To get one, even if you are not a resident, is to show your healthcard, but you wouldn't be turned away if you didn't have a healthcard. The policy is everyone gets access to those things if they need them. Availing yourself of those options is another matter, obviously.
posted by Kitteh at 5:40 AM on January 7 [5 favorites]

A friend of mine also reminded you can get rapid tests at the grocery store too. (Also free, just ask.)
posted by Kitteh at 7:42 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

While Canada ain't doing so great with vaccine uptake, at least in Ontario,

Wow, you aren't kidding. Granted that statistics are going to be calculated differently in different countries, so the numbers might not be exactly comparable, but those are lower reported numbers than in the US overall for the newest vaccine.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:58 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

MrVisible: We battled Covid and we lost.

I sympathize and agree with much of your thesis. 2024 doesn't look very promising. [list deleted; we all know what's on fire]

But I will mostly disagree about COVID. It is being beaten back (and/or evolving) to where it will soon be just another of the many circulating viruses that threaten us annually. It would be good if we kept up with some of our COVID precautions, because that would reduce the impact of most transmissible illnesses... but that's a collective decision to make. In the meantime, the vaccine work accelerated by COVID will hopefully lead to broadly effective vaccines against several viruses. Colour me somewhat optimistic here. If people (or their representatives) are too stupid to keep their guard up, or to take advantage of these benefits, not much to be done.

I guess the next few months will either support what I'm saying, or show me up as another naive fool. I do sympathize with those of you whose health challenges make COVID a greater threat. I don't know whether we can afford to go back to the broad restrictions we endured, or retrofit every old building, etc.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:40 AM on January 7 [6 favorites]

I am currently having my mind blown that vaccines or PCR tests or rapid tests or Paxolovid cost money in the US.

As with all things in the U.S., it depends. For me, with excellent employer-provided health insurance, all those things are available at no additional cost. I don't even have to have met the yearly deductible. That said, yes, it all should be free to everyone at all times but that's universal healthcare and until we have that here (LOL), not everyone has to pay for vaccines or rapid/PCR tests or Paxlovid.
posted by cooker girl at 8:52 AM on January 7

I guess the next few months will either support what I'm saying, or show me up as another naive fool.

I don't think that's true, actually. I don't think there's going to be non-spinnable evidence either for or against your claim.

There was an interesting interview with Michael Mina a few months ago in which he said basically (1) we will come to some kind of detente with this virus and people who are children now will mostly not live under the threat of long COVID when they are older, (2) we are not there yet, and (3) for those whose immune systems were already senescent when COVID arrived, normal is never coming back. I'm paraphrasing heavily now but the sense I got was that really, we're waiting around for everyone who was maybe 60+ at the start of this to die and be replaced. That's gonna be a bunch of the people reading this thread.
posted by eirias at 9:08 AM on January 7 [5 favorites]

Michael Mina the chef?? Oh wait, the epidemiologist. Unpaywalled interview from Oct 2023.

Good interview. He predicts a ramping down, but longer than I was imagining. And that warning for the 65+ and immunocompromised. gulp.

I don't think there's going to be non-spinnable evidence either for or against your claim.

Unless there's active suppression of data, it will be numbers that tell the story - whether COVID deaths and severe illness and long COVID spike up again enough to focus concern, or not.
posted by Artful Codger at 9:36 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

One of the good things about the number of studies that have been occurring is that there is starting to be research to tease apart broad categories (like "immune compromised") to see who within them is at extreme risk vs people who might have "only" somewhat elevated risk. (So like with rheumatoid arthritis, it looks like the people who take the drugs like mycophenolate (also used for people with organ transplants) that severely impact the immune system, or have associated symptoms like interstitial lung disease, have much higher risks, vs people on milder drugs and without some associated symptoms, where the vaccines are still highly protective.)

So it's good that this is starting to be better understood, but it's not being matched with any kind of meaningful commitment to better protect the vulnerable.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:47 AM on January 7 [3 favorites]

Unless there's active suppression of data, it will be numbers that tell the story - whether COVID deaths and severe illness and long COVID spike up again enough to focus concern, or not.

I dunno man. I’m a statistician and at this point I think the numbers are more or less a Rorschach test; with every turn, one camp says “surely this” and then it turns again. The problem I see (well, one problem) is that there’s no natural time to test any hypothesis like “the crisis is over” and so you have a multiple testing problem: in essence, you can just wait until the numbers seem to favor your view and write your op-ed then. (It’s amusing to think about how a clinical trialist might approach hypothesis testing for a study that doesn’t plan to end, but we’re a bit outside my expertise there.) At some point even excess deaths will stop being useful and that’s without any malfeasance — Covid deaths will become part of the baseline; that’s one way to operationally define the new normal. So I don’t track the numbers, and haven’t for a couple of years. I don’t track road deaths either, I just wear my seatbelt and exercise caution walking at skeevy intersections and at night.
posted by eirias at 10:06 AM on January 7 [9 favorites]

I’m a statistician and at this point I think the numbers are more or less a Rorschach test; with every turn, one camp says “surely this” and then it turns again. The problem I see (well, one problem) is that there’s no natural time to test any hypothesis like “the crisis is over”

I appreciate your observations. I guess for practical purposes "the crisis is over" when we look at the COVID numbers (hospital load, deaths, disability, workdays missed, frequency and severity of breakouts, etc) and decide that it's being managed effectively? (aka acceptance of the new normal).
posted by Artful Codger at 11:52 AM on January 7 [2 favorites]

Case in point.
posted by tigrrrlily at 11:54 AM on January 7 [1 favorite]

Kitteh: Ontario eliminated free test kits. In Toronto the libraries still offer them (TPH is paying), but supplies are inconsistent at best.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:59 AM on January 7

people who are children now will mostly not live under the threat of long COVID when they are older

That would be nice, but PANS and ‘long flu’ have always been possible consequences of influenza, we just mostly ignore them. Including long covid in that behavior seems the most likely outcome.
posted by bq at 12:06 PM on January 7 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I spoke too casually -- I don't think Mina meant that the risk would be gone, but reduced from today's estimated rates per infection. I would love for the relatively high prevalence of long COVID to mean we can muster the willingness to find a solution for this and similar postviral syndromes so that we're not merely waiting -- an old friend has had ME/CFS for over 20 years and it would be so gratifying if they could live to see a cure. We'll see, though.
posted by eirias at 12:13 PM on January 7 [3 favorites]

Hadn't realized but Toronto closed their city vax clinics.

As Toronto Public Health takes its final step in winding down its COVID-19 pandemic response, fixed-site vaccination clinics were permanently closed December 13.

On December 13, TPH will close its four fixed-site vaccination clinics at Metro Hall, Cloverdale Mall, North York Civic Centre and in Scarborough (near Scarborough Town Centre). This closure signifies a transition in Toronto’s pandemic response as provincial funding for emergency COVID-19 efforts concludes.

These vaccination clinics were initially established as a temporary measure in response to a global health crisis to ensure fast, equitable access to vaccines for Toronto residents. Leveraging these clinics, TPH provided a range of vaccines including routine vaccinations for children under the ISPA and SIP, influenza (flu), COVID-19, meningococcal and MPOX. These clinics played a significant role in supporting Toronto’s largest vaccination campaign and ensuring effective outbreak responses in the past three years.

A total of 8.8 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been given in Toronto since January 2021 by TPH, hospital partners, pharmacies and healthcare providers. TPH administered more than 2.2 million of these doses at fixed site and mobile clinics.
---
Well shit.
They also carried Novavax.
posted by yyz at 12:19 PM on January 7 [2 favorites]

DrMew, thank you very much for sharing your story and your perspective. I am in a position not too dissimilar to yours, except that somehow, even in a politically similar situation, my university's leadership has not made the same sort of consistently bad decisions that it sounds like yours has—probably because we are a private university, though that has not saved us from all political craziness. I am fortunate that my wife and I have roughly similar risk-assessment profiles (highly risk-averse, but accepting practical, and not just exigent, realities as leadership at all levels foists them upon us). We also did the mutual isolation when I first went back to the classroom, which was the first occasion where I got pushback—I forgot that I was still wearing a mask when I left the house, and a passersby thought it was somehow their business why I was wearing one.

Others have spoken eloquently of the loneliness and emotional isolation of physical isolation; it was only my wife who made the lockdown times not just managable, but, adjusted to circumstances, almost pleasant (much as I hate to say that, given how much I know others were hurt by them). I hope you and your wife are able to find your way to a balance that works for both of you.

Also, high five right back to JR06! Perhaps we have looked thankfully at one another in a grocery store—certainly I am always grateful to the few people I see masked, not just for the public-safety boost they provide, but also for helping to make me feel a little bit more normal.
posted by It is regrettable that at 4:06 PM on January 7 [3 favorites]

Right, because breaking your own office window would be a helpful move for ventilation and for being respected for your choices in your job!

like wut
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:31 PM on January 7 [4 favorites]

Eh, people just don't want to picture themselves in a position of helplessness. This kind of bad "advice" is really the most benign example.
posted by tigrrrlily at 4:40 PM on January 7

I'm tired of bravado and grandstanding about revolution when we know exactly how powerless ourselves and those around us really are. It almost feels like a taunt at this point, no shade to delfin
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:52 PM on January 7 [3 favorites]

Just to respond to the COVID numbers discourse: From what I understand (not a statistician or anything like - but I was responsible for an in-person team and I paid religious attention to my state and local COVID data when it was my job to make team-impacting decisions based on transmission), we never had great COVID transmission and deaths data, and it's even less reliable now. The wastewater numbers especially: Those are helpful if you live somewhere wastewater is being tested. But tons (millions?) of people don't. And how many people are even taking rapid tests when they're sick, let alone reporting results to their local health department, or even to their jobs or schools? Family Christmas was cancelled this year because the kids had been sick and my anti-vax sister didn't know how/wasn't willing to get rapid tests. This tells me that when her kids are sick (which is often), she's not testing them when she sends them back to school, and school either doesn't require it or doesn't confirm it. So how are we even supposed to know how things are going other than anecdotally?

The Death Panel podcast did a recent episode about COVID data, btw. Interesting discussions of determining cause of death, of CDC's public-facing data, of wastewater data, lots of stuff.
posted by TimidFooting at 6:08 PM on January 7 [4 favorites]

I'm tired of bravado and grandstanding about revolution when we know exactly how powerless ourselves and those around us really are. It almost feels like a taunt at this point, no shade to delfin

None taken. It wasn't so much grandstanding and bravado as it was gallows humor being both cost-effective to provide and most of what many of us have left
posted by delfin at 6:39 PM on January 7 [3 favorites]

I have one last point here i forgot to bring up, which really sucks

So there's essentially no PCR testing anymore. My hospital isn't even requiring it for fucking surgery, and my most recent surgery didn't either. None of the staff, or my surgeon, were wearing masks. There's no city/state PCR testing available, and i'm not actually 100% sure how i'd get one if i wanted one. Perhaps go to my clinics urgent care, and ask for one? Message my DR? I believe the lab at Huge Giant Hospital could do one, but i don't think it would be free, and i'm sure the entire time they'd be asking why i even wanted one, and treating me like a wingnut along the same lines they did when i wanted a cardiac stress test a few years back.

The reason i bring this up is, there seems to be this feedback loop among a lot of people who do actually care that we're getting hosed, which is essentially

I'm sick but i got a negative covid test>"oh you tested wrong/too soon">I did a cheek/throat swab and took several tests, they were all negative>"well the tests don't work"

And then you get that same group of people going "god everyone needs to stop pretending it isn't covid if they're sick", when it's not like my boss is going to let me stay home from work if i just "feel kinda sick" and have a negative covid test. There's this assumption that you're morally bankrupt if you... have to go to work sick? It feels like a deranged version of calling people plague rats a few years back when they'd go to huge parties without masks/go to work with covid but the difference was back then there were PCR tests everywhere and everyone i worked with/knew were taking them CONSTANTLY because they were free, and you could go to like 8 places around the city and get one in like 10 minutes.

A big question weighing on a lot of the people i know, and everyone i know who still cares about this... that i've been mulling over a lot with my surgery coming up is. How do you even handle testing anymore? Acting like anyone who feels sick at all should assume it's covid is just like, fundamentally incompatible with capitalism/the current society. So like... other than yelling at people, what do you even do here?

(even the surgical prep staff attending her this summer were unmasked, it's mindblowing)

They literally told me "oh, you don't need to wear that anymore" when i was sitting in the pre op room with a mask on... in washington. ugh.
posted by emptythought at 10:49 PM on January 7 [8 favorites]

I assume that anyone who's not wearing a mask in a public space in the middle of a pandemic that's killed millions of people and left even more millions dealing with awful disabilities is kind of dumb, and since their actions are endangering everyone around them, I assume they're kind of selfish too.

I feel completely comfortable making these assumptions, seeing as the only defense they ever come up with for their actions is 'everyone else is doing it.'

I really, really, really only want to hear this level of judgment and self-righteousness from people who wore a mask pre-pandemic (and always got their flu shots), because respiratory viruses, primarily flu, killed many people, mostly medically vulnerable people, every year prior to the pandemic and would continue to do so if COVID disappeared tomorrow. I expect there are a handful of such people on this thread, and you folks are at least being consistent. Everyone else needs to consider whether they are willing to level the same degree of contempt and disgust at themselves.

Of course the fuckers who get sick

I guess we've magically passed into the just world now. But thanks for calling my mom in her late 70s who's gotten every vaccine right away and wore a mask the whole time on the trip out here this Christmas yet still got it a fucker! Fortunately, she didn't die, though perhaps you would not have mourned her, as a fucker.
posted by praemunire at 10:54 AM on January 8 [19 favorites]

degree of contempt and disgust

I've been struggling with a huge amount of contempt and disgust (and anger) myself. It's definitely not the manifestation of my better self. It's not healthy.
posted by bq at 1:05 PM on January 8 [2 favorites]

First, not to minimize the importance of influenza, but: Even in this past year where COVID deaths are way lower than they were in prior years, they're still way higher than influenza deaths (at least in the US).

Second, and more importantly: When people's attention is called to a problem, and they're thereafter attentive to it, I don't think it's terribly helpful to dismiss them as judgmental and self-righteous simply because they weren't really aware that the problem existed (albeit to a lesser degree) before their attention was called to it.
posted by Flunkie at 1:55 PM on January 8 [4 favorites]

It was straight up illegal to wear a mask or face covering in many places pre covid. And even where it wasn't it sure would have garnered a lot of high stakes attention.

Even with my recent don't give a fsckatude I would have found it difficult to step.that far outside the norm. It would be like wearing a crash helmet while driving on the street. Not actually a bad idea (or even illegal) but holy hell does it attract the interest of cops.
posted by Mitheral at 2:36 PM on January 8 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I've been immunocompromised and isolating since 2016, and masks weren't anything like a viable option until the pandemic. Fortunately we've learned so much since then.

At least some of us have.

But let's not let this turn into a referendum on who gets to criticize mask usage and vaccination uptake. Obviously not using a mask at this point is kind of dumb and kind of selfish. Anyone can, and should, point this out. Talk about a no-brainer.
posted by MrVisible at 2:40 PM on January 8 [4 favorites]

A relative died in his mid 50s last month. He was in decent health until a year ago when he got Covid. He was sick but not sick enough to need hospitalization. But he just never really got over it. Then in the spring he came down with a weird-ass bacterial infection that couldn't be eradicated. He was in and out of the hospital--mostly in--for the last 8 months of his life. We know that Covid can really fuck up your immune system in ways that are not visible except in research labs. I (a physician) am sure that's what happened to my relative. Covid initiated a chain of events which killed him but isn't on his death certificate.

Per the CDC, the number of deaths in the US is still running about 10% more than expected from prepandemic trends ("excess deaths"), although only 3.6% of deaths are attributed to Covid. Deaths at +10% is a lot, if you ask me.
posted by neuron at 3:54 PM on January 8 [13 favorites]

From WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, April 14, 2020:

Prepare For The Ultimate Gaslighting

What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels. There will be an all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw.

The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were photoshopped. The hospitals weren’t really a war zone; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America. You didn’t see the leader of the free world push an unproven miracle drug like a late-night infomercial salesman. That was a crisis update. You didn’t see homeless people dead on the street. You didn’t see inequality. You didn’t see indifference. You didn’t see utter failure of leadership and systems.

But you did. You are not crazy, my friends.

Remember back when this was all predictable?
posted by MrVisible at 10:44 PM on January 8 [14 favorites]

I paid attention to the pandemic. I did everything they said to do when they said to do it. I didn't wear a mask when they said not to (giving away the box of N95s I happened to have), then I did when they said to, then I didn't when they said I didn't need to. I got every vaccine, including this fall. I didn't say anything as they fired people for not getting the vaccine, and I keep not saying anything as they pretend it never happened. As far as I can tell, according to all the tests I've taken, I've never had COVID.

There's always someone outraged about anything I do, and someone else would be outraged if I did something different. It's a wall of hate in all directions. I get why the vaccine uptake is so low: my friends aren't bothering with it anymore, and they were the first to get the original ones. I got the whole set and plan on keeping it up, but I wouldn't brag about it in general company.

The only way out is to ignore the topic. I'll go back to doing that now.
posted by netowl at 12:16 AM on January 9 [4 favorites]

Everyone else needs to consider whether they are willing to level the same degree of contempt and disgust at themselves.

My experience with the world tells me that very often the answer to this is yes -- feelings this intense poison the container. I'm not sure I'd want the lived experience of being an evangelical homophobe or an ethical vegan either, though I admit that I've sometimes looked at PeTA trucks and thought the better-adjusted of them could probably teach me a thing or two about how to survive this difference more successfully.

I'm sorry for your mom, praemunire, and glad she survived.
posted by eirias at 7:08 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]

I get why the vaccine uptake is so low

I don't, really. But I'm not going to judge people who didn't get it - the messaging around what the vaccines will and won't do has been ever-shifting, and whenever you point out that it has shifted, you're treated like an anti-science dullard. Threads like this are a reminder of why people stop listening - the undercurrent of doomerism is exhausting.

I really wish everyone got every vaccine and that the ARCGIS dashboards were still in place so we didn't have to use indicators with severe lag like wastewater to figure out whether or not we're in the middle of a huge wave. Most of the people I was supposed to see for Christmas had to cancel because they or someone they depended on got COVID. My mom, who was extremely cautious and managed to not get infected at a dinner where everyone else came down did, and who got every available booster, does virtual Yoga etc, and who is 79, managed to get it somehow. She's OK - it was something like a bad cold for her. When we got it back in September - having been denied an additional booster which we absolutely wanted - it was a day of fever and aches followed by days of up and down energy, followed by (for me) a lack of smell. It took 13 days to test negative. And right now it isn't clear how effective the most recent booster is against the new strain - as always, trying to get actual raw clinical information is next to impossible.

I understand why the immunocompromised are angry. We should, at this point, have amazing ventilation and air filtration in every public space. That seemed like it would be the inevitable outcome of such a catastrophic event! But it wasn't. We're more or less where we were before it happened, though my therapist does have an air filter in her office. And people who are exhibiting symptoms of illness should stay home or, if they absolutely have to go out, wear a mask. And not a surgical mask - a real N95 mask that creates a proper seal, which means that it is uncomfortable and, if you have facial hair, that you shave.

But to be mad that everyone isn't wearing a mask everywhere and always is a losing proposition. That will never become a reality again, at least not with COVID.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:20 AM on January 9 [5 favorites]

I'm seeing more COVID stories this month (example). If the world didn't already have so many front-burner crises, and coverage of TFG wasn't saturating US media, COVID would perhaps be more in the spotlight at this time. And might still get there if it continues to spike.

One numbers thing I feel very confident in is that it will burn itself out, just as the first wave of the Omicron variant did. Case counts aren't really comparable over time because of changes in testing and reporting behavior, it's not actually clear to me that wastewater numbers are even comparable over longer time ranges, but fundamentally, people who have recently had the disease reduce the population of susceptibles and ensure that for a time, once this wave crests, there'll be a crash in true infections regardless of what we can see. I mean I guess unless we were to get really unlucky and get another Omicron-like wildcard variant immediately with a million changes to spike, maybe then we wouldn't see a crash.
posted by eirias at 8:38 AM on January 9

New, highly mutated COVID variants ‘Pirola’ BA.2.86 and JN.1 may cause more severe disease, new studies suggest

As for what the studies might mean regarding the severity of JN.1 infection, the jury is still out. But the new findings—combined with expert speculation that JN.1 may be showing a preference for infecting the GI tract—warrant more study into the evolving nature of the virus, according to Liu.

From those wacky doomsters at Fortune.
posted by MrVisible at 9:35 AM on January 9 [4 favorites]

Fortune very specifically isn't being doomery - they go out of their way to couch the language in a way that indicates the headline is not a foregone conclusion. And truly, the biggest problem we have is the collapse of vaccine uptake, which leads to more breeding grounds for mutations.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:01 AM on January 9 [2 favorites]

I was in the ER yesterday (I’m fine) for 5 hours and I cannot get over the CONTEMPT some people had for wearing masks. I think they are all just fed up and exhausted. It was scary because there was a lot of coughing and hacking going on and I hope I’m fine. I was bundled up in a N95, two surgicals and a face shield, no messing around. The most anyone was wearing were the triage nurses who were wearing masks and shield glasses. Most (not all) healthcare workers were masked up but the patients were all over the freakin place. I’m worried that this Covid wave is going to be a doozy. This is just turning into an endless cycle of infection.
posted by floweredfish at 3:50 PM on January 9 [7 favorites]

It was straight up illegal to wear a mask or face covering in many places pre covid. And even where it wasn't it sure would have garnered a lot of high stakes attention.

this is already back. for worser or for worse.

This isn't even the only law/"recommendation"/ordinance i've heard of, and anecdotally i've heard of this kind of thing being much more widespread(I.E. security or even cops asking people to remove their masks when entering somewhere)
posted by emptythought at 9:49 PM on January 9 [5 favorites]

Saw this comment on Blue Sky and I think it's exactly right when people make their decisions (credit to Roxi Horror, the writer):

Part of why healthy people aren't afraid to get sick is- they think if they do develop long-term issues, they'll be able to go & get treated by doctors who will work day and night to fix them (as it was on House, M.D.) & don't realize there's a 99% chance they'll be told they just have anxiety
posted by Kitteh at 4:18 AM on January 10 [7 favorites]

It was straight up illegal to wear a mask or face covering in many places pre covid. And even where it wasn't it sure would have garnered a lot of high stakes attention.

Atlanta is also considering banning face coverings in public using an old anti-Klan law to go after Cop City protesters but also persecuting anyone wearing a mask or even a hood or hijab who the cops decide looks suspicious.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:43 AM on January 10 [4 favorites]

I recently learned that Paxlovid is (by at least one study) around half as effective in 2023 as it was in 2021. Still useful, still recommended, but not the magic bullet it once was. Hard to tell exactly why without more study, the cited work wasn't exactly apples to apples, but one guess is just that we're continuing to see new mutations and new variants all the time.

1. Paxlovid was still 84% effective at preventing death in that study.
2. In the original study most people had zero or very little immunity to Covid. In the more recent study, most people had had vaccines including boosters, prior infections, or both. There was also a study of Paxlovid effectiveness against hospitalization in majority vaccinated and/or previously infected people back in 2022 that measured the protectiveness at 51%, which is a lot closer to this number. I think the study population is therefore much more likely to explain the difference than viral mutation (especially because Paxlovid doesn’t bind to the spike protein; it’s a protease inhibitor).
posted by en forme de poire at 7:07 AM on January 10

One of the reasons that low vaccine uptake is so concerning is that recent studies seem to show a dose-response relationship between number of shots and Long Covid risk. In one study linked there, having had 3 shots was associated with a 70+ percent drop in risk. (Being “up to date” with boosters in the US typically means 5 shots, more if you have certain conditions or are in certain demographics.)

If you’re worried about side effects then it’s worth trying to find Novavax, which seems to offer equivalent protection with much less-intense side effects.
posted by en forme de poire at 7:18 AM on January 10 [5 favorites]

Atlanta is also considering banning face coverings in public using an old anti-Klan law to go after Cop City protesters but also persecuting anyone wearing a mask or even a hood or hijab who the cops decide looks suspicious.

I can see why this pressure would happen, along with the bodega example above. Almost two years ago, where I was living at the time, I came across a right wing protest (the usual mix of anti-vax, pro-Trump, etc signage) whose "security" was being provided by armed Proud Boys in their black and yellow. The Proud Boys all had facemasks on and yes, it definitely made them more threatening than if they had exposed faces, more like the old anti-Klan laws would have been meant to prevent. I don't know how you balance those concerns with the ADA-protected reality that some people need to mask even in the open air, though, and I'm guessing all of these will result in messy court cases to sort out boundaries.

Relatedly, walking around town, every so often I run into groups of young men trying to look tough, often with non-PPE face coverings (like a balaclava on a warm day). They've never been up to no good, it's just young guys being young guys, and the last set I ran into all gave me really positive fist bumps as we passed which put a big smile on my face, but I can see that leading to kneejerk fears and therefore bans on face coverings.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:21 AM on January 10 [1 favorite]

Seattle - I just went to meet a potential client. Walked into the crowded coffee shop and she, me, and one other customer were the only ones wearing masks including the staff. I was like, ha, this is going to be a good meeting! And it was. And of course we immediately took our masks off to eat and drink. ‘This Modern World’.

I travelled by air last week and masking was about 5%.
posted by bq at 2:47 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]

I've had covid-19 once (late 2022) and it took me 7 months to get back to a normal energy level. I also went from normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels (plus an empty medicine cabinet and running 15-25 miles per week at 54!) to being dangerously high on both and having to take medicine probably for the rest of my life. I am glad that when this happened to me when I happened to live in a time where these issues are controllable but I still don't think major heart disease correlates are a great thing to have.

So if you want to roll the dice on regular covid-19 reinfections you should know that greatly increased cardiovascular disease is a possible consequence. The risk of complications with each subsequent infection may be lower per infection but the cumulative risk accrues.

My bet is that is that in 20 years we find that there was a wave of heart disease that started in 2020 and the number of people living or dying with heart disease grew each year thereafter as people let themselves be continuously reinfected with a vascular disease.
posted by srboisvert at 5:23 PM on January 10 [5 favorites]

My bet is that is that in 20 years we find that there was a wave of heart disease...

And a bunch of other problems too.
posted by Pouteria at 7:28 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]

My bet is that is that in 20 years we find that there was a wave of heart disease...

It's probably on me, but whenever I see a comment like this (and I see it a lot on metafilter and mastodon) it comes across with a tone of grim satisfaction and "I told you so" which is horrible to read when you know that the vast majority of people (like me and my loved ones) got Covid multiple times because our work environment is unsafe, and there's nothing we can do about it.

I've started seeing people (not in this thread) use the fact haven't had Covid, as a proof of their rectitude and good behaviour.

Which is fucked up.

Most people in the world, especially poor people who aren't in the global north, can't avoid being infected.

Please remember that we exist.
posted by Zumbador at 8:20 PM on January 10 [10 favorites]

Burquitlam - going to the Cameron "Save-on-Foods" - about 10% of people were masked

All staff were masked. Some in N95s but not universally.
posted by porpoise at 12:55 AM on January 11

The Skytrain (popular light rail) has about the same 10% masking so fare as I've seen.
posted by porpoise at 12:58 AM on January 11

It's probably on me, but whenever I see a comment like this (and I see it a lot on metafilter and mastodon) it comes across with a tone of grim satisfaction and "I told you so" which is horrible to read when you know that the vast majority of people (like me and my loved ones) got Covid multiple times because our work environment is unsafe, and there's nothing we can do about it.

I hope I don't come across that way. No satisfaction here. Complete fucking horror. Every day I wake up in the middle of a global health crisis that no one is taking seriously. In much of the world, I understand that the resources do not exist to do anything about it. In the US, there's absolutely no excuse--we're just not taking it seriously, and we're definitely not helping the rest of the world. I don't know what else to do but keep pointing that out, not from a position of satisfaction, but horror.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:39 AM on January 11 [11 favorites]

My bet is that is that in 20 years we find that there was a wave of heart disease...

It's probably on me, but whenever I see a comment like this (and I see it a lot on metafilter and mastodon) it comes across with a tone of grim satisfaction and "I told you so" which is horrible to read when you know that the vast majority of people (like me and my loved ones) got Covid multiple times because our work environment is unsafe, and there's nothing we can do about it.

I got covid and now probably now have serious heart disease and you see it as me being grimly satisfied? If you have enough insight about it probably being "on you" then perhaps you should consider keeping it "in you" rather than planting another tone policing land mine.
posted by srboisvert at 4:44 AM on January 11 [4 favorites]

I think it's ok for everyone to share their feelings, and let's not tone police each other, which is what this last comment also does?
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:59 AM on January 11

Or I don't know about tone, but more plain old policing what people can say.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:01 AM on January 11

I was careful to phrase my comment as explaining how certain statements come across to me, instead of stating what people mean or what they are or aren't allowed to say.

Metafilter is absolutely dominated by people who are from America, Europe, the UK, and Canada, but the rest of the world exists and every now people like me from somewhere else say something too.
posted by Zumbador at 7:54 AM on January 11 [8 favorites]

You did say maybe keep it to yourself. I feel like that's going too far, other people's milage may vary but that's what I mean by policing.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:41 AM on January 11

Like, both of you should express your feelings, that I'm fine with, just not the, "maybe you shouldn't express your feelings" part
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:42 AM on January 11

Tiny frying pan I didn't say "maybe keep it to yourself". I was told to keep it to myself.

And, ironically, told that *I'm* the one who's tone policing and telling people what not to say.
posted by Zumbador at 8:53 AM on January 11

Like, I appreciate hydrophyche's response that clarified their take on things.
posted by Zumbador at 8:55 AM on January 11

Central Virginia - I worked on site Tuesday, in a library on the campus of a large urban public university. It's between semesters, so pretty empty, and the masking was minimal everywhere on or near campus. It has been quite low here overall for a while, such that I was mildly shocked when I was in Philadelphia in November and masking fluctuated between 10% and 20% on the street.

Inspired by this post, and a couple other things I've read, I am for a while back to masking in public enclosed spaces, esp. confined or low-ventilation. I am a bit out of practice, and it was the pits trying to remember everything. I'm temporarily using a cane at points due to a minor injury, and my empathy for those of you masking on top of chronic illnesses or disabilities is higher than ever, and it was pretty high to start with. As with stillsuit discipline more generally, mask discipline is hard.
posted by cupcakeninja at 9:32 AM on January 11 [5 favorites]

I just caught COVID, and I figured I'd do exactly what I tell my students in the syllabuses I've posted for the last 5 semesters to do, and gone to look at our institutional public-health protocols to figure out the answer to nuts-and-bolts questions like "how long should I isolate? what policies should I follow in taking an otherwise in-person class remote?". I discovered, to my chagrin, that I've been directing students for years to a site which, somewhere along the line, we decided to hide behind access controls (and having a university account doesn't help --- you can log in, but then it'll just tell you you're not privileged to view the content. The page informing you that you don't have access privileges directs you to this page to report the problem, and, well, that's not much more useful). There's not anything much more useful in my institution, either. The most recently updated parts of their FAQ were touched in August 2022, and most is older than that, and all the actually detailed information is sequestered behind links to that exact same page I can't access above.

I took my department chair's advice, which I'm pretty sure he just improvised, because I doubt he's getting more definite information than I am (his advice was: that sucks, remote your Friday class, Monday's a holiday, and only seek a longterm sub if you can't be back on Wednesday. Astute readers will note the absence of guidance on whether I should be back on Wednesday --- I'm venturing that's deliberate, because he doesn't know, any more than I do, what the official protocols are).

I sent our IT people a ticket, saying basically all the stuff in my first paragraph with a coda of "this is important information and we can not be hiding these resources like this". No reply yet. Meanwhile, testing brought us down to our last at-home test so I ordered the 8 free government tests my home address is apparently entitled to. Apparently Anthem isn't sending us free tests anymore (I looked, because that used to be an insurance perk).

My personal covid response under normal circumstances for the past year or so has been "mask in public" and haven't had cause, until just now, to bother to take a good look at what institutional responses are, but I'm looking at them now and they suck. Two years ago we developed infrastructure for testing and contact tracing and making it clear to the infected what they should do. Today, nothing. We just let all that stuff wither away or carefully buried it out of sight so that we didn't have to think about it any more even though we knew how important those resources are. And now, if it becomes a widespread need again, and it's looking like it might, we're going to end up building it all back up from scratch.
posted by jackbishop at 11:03 AM on January 11 [15 favorites]

And now, if it becomes a widespread need again, and it's looking like it might, we're going to end up building it all back up from scratch.

(Your mileage may vary depending on your location. But in an awful lot of places, people have put a great deal of time and effort into ensuring that it CAN'T be built all back up from scratch ever again.)
posted by delfin at 12:52 PM on January 11 [7 favorites]

As with stillsuit discipline more generally, mask discipline is hard.
posted by cupcakeninja

Once upon a time, a couple of lifetimes back, I had to do infection control for a job. First thing they taught us in Infection Control 101 was that it is very hard to do properly, especially long-term. Microbes are very unforgiving of lapses in procedure, and lapses are inevitable.

Still definitely worth doing though. One of the few effective means we have of controlling infectious agents to which they can't develop resistance.
posted by Pouteria at 3:17 PM on January 11 [4 favorites]

A few deleted. As a reminder arguing with users about their comments/participation is not something we allow. You can flag it and move on, or shoot us an email. Buckling down and arguing further is not ok and needs to stop.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 4:17 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]

Once upon a time, a couple of lifetimes back, I had to do infection control for a job. First thing they taught us in Infection Control 101 was that it is very hard to do properly, especially long-term. Microbes are very unforgiving of lapses in procedure, and lapses are inevitable.

This is one reason universal masking is a better idea than just masking by those of us considered more vulnerable. If there's only one person masking and their mask slips, they're now breathing in the exhales of everyone else. If everyone is masking and one person's mask slips, they're subject to much less risk of infection.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:41 PM on January 11 [6 favorites]

Another winter, another giant COVID wave, another seriously ill parent in another state 700 miles east. Sigh.

Zumbador, this may well be too little too late, but I bought a metric crapton of N95s when my dad was sick two years ago and I could mail you some if you want.
posted by eirias at 6:57 PM on January 11 [3 favorites]

❤️ Thanks eirias -
we're OK for the moment, thanks to mefite confluency, who identified a local source of N95-equivalent masks (Drager FFP2, in case that helps anyone). They're not that easy to get hold of but we bought ourselves a little stockpile 🙂

Hope your sick parent recovers well and soon. That sounds like a tough situation to deal with
posted by Zumbador at 8:30 PM on January 11 [3 favorites]

Tonight, PBS Newshour ran this piece on the current COVID situation, with an interview with Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute. He diesussed how significant the mutations are, and is concerned that there should be more action from government:

In the first year of the pandemic, we saw that Operation Warp Speed, and we took this virus as an existential threat and pulled out all the stops.

But, right now... we need oral or nasal vaccines to stop infections, to stop spread, to be variant-proof, whatever this virus mutates to in the times ahead.

And we have a small amount of funding towards that end, but not enough.

And the messaging has been poor....

We knew it was coming since September, October, and only in recent weeks have health systems started to get masking back as a policy.

We're just not doing enough to prepare or manage this big surge.

posted by Artful Codger at 8:25 PM on January 12 [6 favorites]

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