Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

If anything I have seen the worst case scenario being propagated. It's all about the underpromising.

Our high school, which just implemented very limited hybrid, announced that all faculty and staff will start getting vaccinated next week. That implies sourcing must be getting better.

if J&J gets approved for tertiary usage, that can also help as even though it comes with a lower efficacy, it is largely effective (supposedly) in reducing severity of the disease, and some protection better than none.

it's gonna be rough for a lot longer tho obv.

Yeah, it's going to be awhile. I think that's the heart of my annoyance right now because I'm seeing a lot of folks talking about a "more normal" summer or fall, but I've effectively written off 2021 completely and I'm just hoping we can have a "somewhat more normal" summer of 2022.

My parents, both just over 65, won’t get theirs before fuck knows when because lol Quebec, whereas all of their friends back in Romania are already vaccinated.

The US is going to be supply constrained to something like 1.3-1.5m/day for a couple of months. It supposedly goes up to 2m/day after that (factories come on line in spring). But the big thing that will get us up to double that rate and herd immunity much faster is approval for the single dose J&J (this year some time) or the easy/cheap AZ (lol maybe never).

x-posts

I might have said before, I quite like the idea of "writing off 2021" but not in an absolutely negative way.

More, I find the idea of "It'll be over in 12 weeks", "We'll be fine by Summer", "Christmas? Everything will be smashing!" a bit draining.

I sort of need to find a way of being "This is what we've got - Find a way of staying okay."

That said, I don't mean that to sound passive or as if I don't want Boris Johnson and pals to be held to fucking account.

Which vaccine are they using in Romania?

So far, Pfizer-BioNTech. Moderna doses will also be administered very soon.

I think a lot of my despair atm is coming from the cognitive dissonance of seeing how far out we are with the vaccine hitting any meaningful landmarks at the same time as restrictions are being lifted left and right. Schools are opening back up! Indoor dining is a-ok again!

Could we just order the mRNA from our local oligonucleotide suppliers and then eat it?

I think opening schools more may be somewhat defensible, but there have been multiple data points just in the last week showing that indoor dining even with distancing restrictions is just a bad idea

Yeah, I know schools are a much thornier proposition right now, so maybe that wasn't the best example. The indoor dining thing absolutely kills me though.

whenever i see re-opening announcements i get so angry

it just makes me despair, like it’s been this long & we are nowhere bc nothing stays closed for more than a few weeks

I'm sympathetic to these concerns, obviously but....one thing I want to reiterate is that until there's a stimulus better than a one time $1400 payment, it's the only way some people can survive.

if we issue the 2k a month like Bernie suggests, doors can be closed and employees can not feel utterly pressured to go in.

my brother right now has to work at Universal because under the current enhanced unemployment rules, he would be deemed 'ineligible' for unemployment in FL if he was able to go to work but refused to due to COVID fears, and even if he did qualify for it, the $300 a week on top of the paltry amount FL caps their unemp at ($275/month, which he would only qualify for a small fraction of due to the ridiculous way it's calculated) would be a big paycut.

but he'd stop working if he just...got 2k a month and they closed his park so he wouldn't have to worry about losing the career he's fought for , for over a decade. so I hope Bernie keeps hammering this idea of his.

so do i, but it isn't going to do anything.

remember, politicians don't consider their constituents at all.

So far, Pfizer-BioNTech. Moderna doses will also be administered very soon.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, February 3, 2021 3:06 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

thx. guess that makes sense inside the EU. i was interested to see serbia is getting sinopharm. i wonder if sputnikv is in use outside the former USSR.

some extremely 2021 pics here https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2021/02/photos-vaccine-centers-cathedrals-stadiums-and-parking-lots/617915/

p.s. i read every single one of these stories about people using up vaccine after refrigeration systems break or whatever. i find them weirdly uplifting.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/NYTCUzk_VJMm8-E-QSOYo8Ga62E=/900x600/media/img/photo/2021/02/vaccination/a21_AP21030002938283/original.jpg

The Josephine County Sheriff's deputy, Nicole Letona, receives a COVID-19 vaccine administered by Dr. David Candelaria and Leah Swanson, a Josephine County emergency-preparedness coordinator, on Highway 199 near Hayes Hill, Oregon on January 28, 2021. Oregon health workers who got stuck in a snowstorm on their way back from a COVID-19 vaccination event went car to car injecting stranded drivers before several of the doses expired. #

thx. guess that makes sense inside the EU. i was interested to see serbia is getting sinopharm. i wonder if sputnikv is in use outside the former USSR.

The contrast with the Republic of Moldova, most of which used to be part of Romania pre-WW2, is quite striking:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2021/jan/28/here-in-europes-poorest-country-we-have-no-vaccine-to-argue-over

Sputnik V was approved in Hungary btw.

i've been to moldova. took the night train from bucharest to chisinau. the bit where they lift the train cars of the axles (trucks??) and put them on new axles because the railway gague changes to stop stalin (or hitler?) invading was a very clear reminder we weren't in the EU any more.

as long as they keep upping the number of people being vaccinated daily, I'm happy... I might get one next week or three months from now, but life will resume when hospitalizations drop and almost everyone is vaccinated, which will take a few months no matter what my place in line ends up being

Just to lighten up the thread for a moment, I was watching the local news and heard a restaurant owner say (re: reopening of restaurants in NJ), "Just after the Great Depression, you got the Roaring Twenties"... so yeah, that's the level of people we're dealing with hereabouts.

one of my favorite shutdowns of platitudes like that was in Bad News Bears

"Come on guys, Rome wasn't built in a day!"
"Yeah, it took several hundred years"

lol for real though i did kind of think about how the levels of sheer unbridled hedonism that are going to erupt in 2022 might have had an antecedent in the roaring (19)20s which followed directly on from the spanish flu (tho i'm sure i'm quite late to the party in drawing this connection)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVjlEA2VBes

burning of Vader's corpse = COVID

https://i.imgur.com/sdWm4py.png

me and the boys after covid

sorry that's kind of dark

i've been to moldova. took the night train from bucharest to chisinau. the bit where they lift the train cars of the axles (trucks??) and put them on new axles because the railway gague changes to stop stalin (or hitler?) invading was a very clear reminder we weren't in the EU any more.

Y’all are mighty sure the vaccine is gonna make Covid go away, and that life will return to old normal.

? what is that in response to? what's your theory? that COVID is here forever and we're never leaving our houses again?

Under capitalism life never returns to any past set of economic conditions. Covid19 still has (just estimating here) about 7.5 billion people who have no immunity and no immediate prospect of vaccination. Then there are the new variants to contend with.

It isn't "going away" this year or the next, but in nations where mass vaccinations occur, it should ease off considerably, depending on just how ugly the variants get in the mid-term future.

Although the UK's just cut off its main source of cheap labour so will have to import replacements from vaccine-light nations, thus ensuring the virus circulates here for a while longer.

it’s called “taking back control” iirc

Theres a line somewhere between "back to how it was before" and "wonderful" that will probably be found, dep on yr values for wonderful

I just read this and immediately bought one, even though it looks suspiciously like advertorial for Fix The Mask

https://www.insider.com/ways-to-make-your-face-mask-more-effective-2021-2

I like that the company also offers you free instructions of how to make your own from a rubber sheet, but I can't be bothered with that.

Probably wouldn't have got it if it weren't for the prospect of it reducing fogging of glasses, tbh. I have a special cloth that helps somewhat but it seems to be quickly losing effectiveness.

Vax level 1 completed.

Just waiting for the nanobots to kick in.

'Grats on the cyberware!

Can we call you "onimo Vista" now?

Automonimo

🎉🎉

Nanobots running Windows 95

Big step up from 3.11 iyam

2.0 is the fun part.

woohoo, great news onimo!

agree with Ned - second one's the doozy, but the peace of mind of knowing you're protected is so amazing.

Yeah pretty sure I said it upthread somewhere but to repeat it -- basically go in knowing that the following day (or if you get it early morning later that same day, maybe) you'll be hit with a wave showing your immune system has kicked in, fatigue and body aches galore. But -- assuming you're not sick from anything else -- nothing else will be off or strange. No cold, no snuffles, etc, just massive antibody production. It lasted for about nine hours or so for me and then it literally ebbed away while I was watching something on TV for an hour or two.

But yes, peace of mind, no question. I'm not doing a single thing differently right now for obvious reasons when it comes to going out, etc., but I'm less immediately jumpy than I was, and you find yourself thinking of where things will go. At this point I'm keeping a close eye on city/county vaccination rates because the further and faster we go the better off we'll all be. As it stands I may -- may -- allow myself an outdoor dining stop next Saturday when I get my hair cut at a spot I like that's nearby, but I'll play it by ear and see how I feel, how the weather is, etc. (Though I am glad I got a haircut last in October, because if I hadn't then it would be almost fourteen months at this point!)

Ned, if you consider outdoor dining, may I recommend lunch instead of dinner? Much less crowded. That's generally what I've done without anxiety (Miami is full of late risers).

and this is MOST encouraging:

The rate of coronavirus vaccinations in the United States is accelerating, and the number of people who have received at least one shot is now higher than the number of reported U.S. infections — a hopeful milestone that comes amid a vaccine rollout at times marked by complexity and frustration.

The vaccination uptick — which comes as new U.S. coronavirus infections, deaths and hospitalizations have been falling in the last week — signals the situation may be improving. Seven weeks into the country’s immunization campaign, the states racing ahead on the rollout seem to be keeping it simple.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/04/coronavirus-covid-live-updates-us/

I slept for an hour immediately after my shot but my radiotherapy sometimes makes me sleepy anyway. No signs of anything else yet.

We're on the UK's 12 week mass vaccine experiment so looking at May before I'll consider myself protected.

Ned, if you consider outdoor dining, may I recommend lunch instead of dinner? Much less crowded.

That was definitely the plan. And again, I'll see how I feel when I'm there.

I suspect your city, like mine, is one of the few where outdoor dining is comfortable but not comfortable enough for customers who insist on heat, therefore stay home, so it's a best-case scenario.