Anybody want a Corona?

[B]

Shit on her pillow.

[verb_to_trust]

Ask your sister if unvaccinated guests will be asked to wear masks. If no, say you won’t be attending.

Spike is our Fauci

[spike]

We’re all well aware you don’t give a shit about high risk individuals, tough guy.

[knee tunes]

Shit on her pillow.

B is our in-house pillow shitter

[Bammer]

If my kid has asthma I am not taking them to something like that

[knee tunes]

My ^19-yr old kid was in the ER today for the 5th time following his Covid episode 6 weeks Ago

His lungs are fucked with fluid , pneumonia, and clots.

Avoid yours getting it at all costs Chris.

[verb_to_trust]

We’re all well aware you don’t give a shit about high risk individuals, tough guy.

Okay doc

[dimejinky99]

Got my first jab today. Big relief. Second in four weeks.
Feels good to finally be kinda getting out from under this.

[96583UP]

My ^19-yr old kid was in the ER today for the 5th time following his Covid episode 6 weeks Ago

His lungs are fucked with fluid , pneumonia, and clots.

Avoid yours getting it at all costs Chris.

omg

i hope he gets better

[wease]

Got my first jab today. Big relief. Second in four weeks.
Feels good to finally be kinda getting out from under this.

Says the man who single handedly brought Covid to Ireland.

[Green Habit]

Anyway, I have lots of opinions on the terrible things that happened. Maybe I'll post a wall of text later if I feel like devoting the time.

Fuck it, here goes. I think it's important to put my cards on the table before I attempt to participate in this thread further.

Sigh, so many fails at so many steps of the process. The first one was massive defeatism, thinking that this thing was going to barrel over us no matter what, and our only hope was to flatten the curve--the early catchphrase of the pandemic--instead of perhaps looking at how past pandemics were handled, and getting ready to act on that.

The next immediate fail in that regard was not immediately implementing travel restrictions. The left really faceplanted on this because they were worried that Trump would use this as an excuse to further his racism and xenophobia. But then Trump, being the usual incompetent Trump, couldn't muster anything more, and completely fucked up the opportunity to actually do this.

But perhaps the biggest fail of them all was not recognizing just how overwhelmingly safe outdoor activity was, and as opposed to how overwhelmingly risky indoor activity was. Chalk this one up to being ridiculously stubborn to the now debunked droplet theory of respiratory disease, which itself was an overcorrection in debunking the old miasma theory of disease. We wasted a bunch of time and resources on surface hygiene theater, and even worse, in closing down outdoor public venues. That was disastrous, because without those spaces, it nudged people into far more dangerous indoor settings with nowhere else to go to interact. We pissed away a summer where we really could have leveraged those outdoor spaces for the better.

And perhaps most importantly, the outdoors were needed to fill the basic human needs of interaction. The super introverted, Very Online folks that were the biggest advocates of strict NPIs could handle what they were asking for, but most people aren't super introverted, and we badly needed an outlet where we could interact with a reasonably high level of safety.

Two other pieces of fail that arose were a complete lack of serious testing, tracing, and (comfortable!) quarantining. Now, there would have been some inherent limits as to what society could tolerate in this regard, but there just was no serious effort to even try. Here, I place blame on the American form of government in general, and Senate Republicans in particular. Normally, I think gridlock is a good thing in order to cool the passions of the mischiefs of faction. But this was a pretty blatant exception to that rule. We needed to appropriate the shit out of this in order to get a much better grasp on who was being infected, and where.

Next up, masks. Ugh. Other than, you know, the obvious of people dying and suffering, this was easily the worst part of the pandemic. And things like not being able to hear people clearly, not being able to pick up critical facial cues in interaction with others, and (presumably, at least!) not being able to eat and drink with others, really only scrape the surface. What made things so toxic is that masks (and this is an intended, dark pun) sucked up way too much of the oxygen in the discourse, when there were multiple other things that needed to be talked about much more as mentioned above. My hypothesis on why this happened is that masks are highly visible. You can't immediately tell whether people have been working from home, being outside as much as practical, getting tested and complying with contract tracing as appropriate, and so on, but boy can you easily look toward the most interactive parts of a human's body, and that was an easy portal to give people who enjoy grinding axes.

So on one side, you had ostensibly hardcore pro-maskers who wanted to force people, under penalty of law, to wear them. I never thought that was appropriate. For starters, other than really obvious places like crowded indoor events where people are eating and drinking, the highest risk places were in private, indoor residences among trusted friends and family--some of the most cherished things about humanity. Effectively enforcing legal mask mandates--or other personal NPIs, for that matter--would have required very draconian intrusions that I doubt that most of the hardcore pro-maskers would have been willing to accept. And I think that showed through the sheer impracticality of such an ask. The eating and drinking issue is the biggest one (especially when indoor dining was being allowed!), and the consistency of mask wearing was a regular joke, as I'm sure we saw plenty of examples of floating around the internet. Putting so many chips on masks was never going to be sustainable.

And yet, all of this pales in comparison to the hardcore anti-maskers on the other side. Here, I'm going to be less wordy and more blunt: they were callous assholes. I really don't know what else there is to add there.

Finally, the vaccine. Let's start at the beginning, where the prioritization scheme was ridiculously too broad. I blame this on a combination of philosophy ethicists galaxy braining, and special interests working the political system to ensure that their cherished group was deemed more worthy and that they had to have first dibs. But the virus doesn't care about any of that. And I feared from the start that the more complicated you made this, the quicker you'd run into anti-vaxxers in your prioritization scheme. As it turned out, I was being too optimistic in thinking that at least front line health care workers would overwhelmingly get vaccinated. Perhaps the angriest I was when I sat on my ass politely "waiting my turn" while anti-vaxxers within the higher levels weren't taking their turn. I don't begrudge people like my sister who "became a substitute teacher" just to get the vaccine--and of course they didn't even ask her for verification.

The only priority should have been age. It's easy and consistent to check, and it's the highest risk factor from dying/suffering from covid. We should have started with, say, age 80+, then quickly open it up to 79+, 78+, and so on as supply increased and demand decreased.

And now, here we are, a great time, where anyone in America who needs a vaccine can get one with no delay. And yet so many won't do it. It really boggles my mind. I wrote this on here way back in 2015, and it stands out as easily my most authoritarian opinion:

I see Chris Christie is getting bashed a lot for this today, but unfortunately I think he's disturbingly closer to the mainstream politicians than we may want to admit. (See Obama and McCain in 2008, for example.) I can't think of many (if any) politicians that have the fortitude to advocate the optimal policy: that there should be no exemptions for vaccines at all.

Now, as I've noted above I think you'll run into limits of being draconian at some point, and I'm not entirely sure what the most productive policy would be. We're still experimenting to figure out what that will be. But I do know this: it blows my mind that there were so many attempts at pursuing, sometimes under penalty of law, absolutely miserable, dehumanizing restrictions like masking, physical distancing, and general deprivation of enjoyable activity for about a year, yet we can't come to the gumption of requiring one or two quick jabs that take about 15-20 minutes to administer. I've always had disdain for anti-vaxxers, and now my disdain is on the levels of "mushroom cloud laying motherfucker motherfucker, Superfly TNT, Guns of the Navarone".

I'll end this rant on a positive note: we should be quite gracious that we had the internet and video conferencing for this. It's something we should have leveraged more--the rule should have been if you can do your work remotely, that's where you'll do it--but I think if a pandemic of this level had struck 50 years ago, not only when this technology did not exist but when there was peak unrest in American society, it would have turned out far, far worse.

So there we go. I'm peaceing out for the rest of tonight, I'm sure that everyone will find at least one thing they disagree with in here, hence why I could never run for public office. If I get responses, I'll try to get to them over the weekend, but no guarantee.

[spike]

oh god, time to drum up all this again.

[dimejinky99]

Got my first jab today. Big relief. Second in four weeks.
Feels good to finally be kinda getting out from under this.

Says the man who single handedly brought Covid to Ireland.

Nah I reckon it was here undetected before that.

[simple schoolboy]

Brexit means vaccines, simple as

[wease]

Got my first jab today. Big relief. Second in four weeks.
Feels good to finally be kinda getting out from under this.

Says the man who single handedly brought Covid to Ireland.

Nah I reckon it was here undetected before that.

We told you not to go!!

[verb_to_trust]

Covid is over

[simple schoolboy]

Covid is over

Not in countries getting Sinovac or Sputnik. mRNA for great victory

[Bammer]

Hey GH can you summarize that into something I can read in about 8 seconds. Thanks.

[simple schoolboy]

Hey GH can you summarize that into something I can read in about 8 seconds. Thanks.

Anyone with a MPH should be put to the flame for their miserable performance over the last 18 months, and prioritizing vaccine distribution in the service of 'equity' was a stupid thing to do. I think that about sums it up.

[Bammer]

What is mph?