outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

smoke weed every day

https://news.ohsu.edu/2022/01/13/study-shows-hemp-compounds-prevent-coronavirus-from-entering-human-cells

https://i.imgur.com/cawTD5I.jpeg

I feel the same way

holy shit

Some with recent Covid diagnoses are finding that contracting the illness they worked so hard to dodge for so long has brought them an unexpected reprieve from anxiety — instead of compounding it further. https://t.co/zjs7ppIO7J

— NBC News (@NBCNews) January 17, 2022

Not unfamiliar! A couple friends down for the holidays, in part facetiously, were like PLEASE GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY.

They have no children and are not immunocompromised.

Knowing myself, I would also probably vacillate from disappointment to the mildest of relief.

blundering straight into the path of the ratio is praxis

Some soldiers are surprised to find they experience a sense of relief when, during a battle in which others around them were killed or wounded, they receive a minor wound and are able to leave the front line for a while.

When I did a rapid test at my sister's on Christmas Eve day, I absolutely had mixed feelings: I wanted a negative, simply so I could stay, but--knowing how relatively mild my symptoms had been the past week--part of me wanted a positive.

The twitter reaction as usual has been weird -- no one quoted "sought out" the virus. The people I know who've gotten omicron after three vaccinations aren't going to bars or restaurants and fucking hated missing Noche Buena and/or NYE. But this sense of ugh can co-exist with "Well, this anxiety's over for a while."

Not unfamiliar! A couple friends down for the holidays, in part facetiously, were like PLEASE GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY.

we absolutely thought this during the holidays, and i suspect a lot of parents did. getting it now would would be much much more disruptive and upsetting for all of us.

Yeah I don't think that sounds weird at all, I'm sure I'd feel some relief too and I'm not even sure why one would consider this "unexpected." Doesn't mean I'd seek it out.

i assume milo's point is that feeling this way is a privilege, which yes.

yes

-- bachelorhood

-- no children or dependents

-- flexible job

-- a tolerance for three-hour cinema should the need arise

I know a couple of families (double vaxxed kids/boosted adults) where one member got it and everyone hoped the rest would just get it right away as it would decrease the overall impact by serving their isolation periods concurrently instead of consecutively. In the end it was only the one person who got it anyway.

I don't think it's hard to understand those kinds of feelings. I was kind of freaked out why kids tested positive last spring, but they were both fine — one with mild symptoms, one none at all — and I was able to relax a lot more after that about them doing various social things. Now they're both vaxxed, boosted AND prior infected, which makes me even more relaxed. I would never have deliberately tried to get them infected, but knowing that they were and were fine has made the succeeding months that much less stressful.

Sorry, was freaked out when my kids tested positive ...

i assume milo's point is that feeling this way is a privilege, which yes.

Less about people feeling one way or the other more about the media taking this tack as Omicron rages and we’re essentially being abandoned by the government.

-- bachelorhood
-- no children or dependents
-- flexible job

Ditto--plus the timing of the positive, Dec. 24, would not have impacted my availability to work at all.

It just comes down to spending almost two years fearing this thing (which has, I realize, mutated more than once), thinking I had contracted the latest variant, and wanting to be able to say "Okay, that wasn't that bad, and maybe my immune system is such that any future infections will be comparable."

So, even though I believe I tested right at the very end of an Omicron infection, I was negative, so I still don't know for sure.

I think I mentioned it on this or probably another thread, but I have a good friend who was absolutely relieved when he and his whole family got it, despite their (relative) precautions. After so many months/years of literal fear for their lives, once faced with the most mild of symptoms they were thankful for the vaccine and for the chance to just (at least this time) get through it all unscathed.

At the booster clinic I worked over the weekend, we (staff and fellow volunteers) were discussing our own personal experiences, and how we'd all been fortunate that everyone we knew who caught it had mild or next to no symptoms. Then another volunteer offered that she had just gone to a funeral. For covid? we asked. She shook her head yes. Were they vaccinated? She frowned and shook her head no.

to paraphrase dorothy parker, i hate suffering through a contagious disease but I love the presumed resistance to reinfection

Hmm:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/17/all-covid-restrictions-in-england-could-end-in-march-under-no-10-plans

Don't see why not.

Attn. US posters: https://special.usps.com/testkits

Thanks, now I'll see if it works.

It puts you on an FBI watchlist

I'm glad it wasn't worse (Russians draining my bank accounts).

The FBI is now owned by Russian gangsters so...

At my place of employ, the key stats are now:

Total Number of Positive Patients: 65

Unvaccinated: 19
Primary vaccine series (2 doses): 33
Boosted: 13
COVID-positive but not admitted for COVID: 16
ICU: 10

The authorities have suggested that the first Omicron case in Beijing may have come from a package in Canada. They have since called on people across China to use caution when opening mail from overseas. In Beijing, mail is being subjected to at least four rounds of disinfection, even though experts say the risk of contracting the virus from surfaces, especially paper or cardboard, is very low.

Kinda hard to believe this is from January 2022 and not March 2020.

At that time though, we were really paranoid about the surface touching. Most agree now it was mostly a waste of time to disinfect everything compulsively (though washing hands probably still good)

I think that's jon's point

ohhh right

Yeah, Tracer's right. I just didn't realize people were still really even focusing on disinfecting mail, much less blaming it for transmission.

I don’t think “people” are

Don't see why not.

things like this prob

and this

https://news.yahoo.com/omicron-survives-longer-plastic-skin-184539113.html

ladies and gentlemen. . . . the new york times

Feast your peepers on this . . . this magisterial To-Be-Sure sequences pic.twitter.com/Qtn6Lx67Xc

— Jacob Bacharach (@jakebackpack) January 25, 2022

🤔

Consider me quad-boosted: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvn743/oral-cbd-prevented-covid-19-infection-in-real-world-patients-study-suggests

so what's up with variant BA2?

this is a very good (long) article about how this will all end:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/what-now-how-pandemics-end

I thought for a moment that the US was upper-middle income on that map, and I was googling the World Bank before I realized it's Mexico

I like fat Japan / UK and butterfly Australia too

Oh so it turns out natural immunity (after an infection) is better than vaccines after all:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-cost-of-disparaging-natural-immunity-to-covid-vaccine-mandates-protests-fire-rehire-employment-11643214336

Hopefully this means that we are nearing the end, but of course mutations could derail that.

i don't have a WSJ sub - can you post some more of that?

Psh, just playing into the hands of Big Natural Immunity.

just reading about the author of the WSJ op-ed - marty makary. not trying to pre-but whatever it says, but he is enough of an outlier on covid that a GOP governor, Glenn Youngkin, picked him as his lead adviser. to me that's a warning sign, but i'm one of those weirdos who thinks the GOP actually tries to kill people on purpose

Wen and Makary have often faced off over pandemic policy, including in a closed lecture to retired general Wesley Clark’s leadership institute in August and around the same time in dueling pieces in U.S. News, in which Makary said, “I’m pro-vaccine but blanket requirements outside of health care go too far.”

He said people who choose not to get vaccinated “are making a poor health decision at their own individual risk” but “pose no public health threat to those already immune,” and likened the decision to smoking or not wearing a helmet when cycling.

Yet Makary has been criticized for overstating the protection of previous infection and undervaluing masks, especially for children.

In a Post op-ed last fall, he interpreted several well-known studies to say that “emerging science suggests that natural immunity is as good as or better than vaccine-induced immunity,” expressing frustration with the Biden administration for arguing that vaccine-conferred immunity is preferable to “immunity caused by natural infection.” He has often said one dose of a two-dose RNA vaccine regimen made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna may be all that is necessary for children who have had the coronavirus.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention late last year found that immunity after infection and vaccination lasts for at least six months but that vaccines offer more consistent protection and a huge boost in antibodies for previously infected people, which is especially true with the omicron variant. Public health experts also say the coronavirus is just as contagious in children as in adults, if not more so, although kids as a whole have a lower chance of being hospitalized and a lower mortality rate.

Makary co-authored a commentary for the Wall Street Journal in August that detailed what the authors said were possible adverse affects on some children who wear masks long-term — from difficulty breathing and seeing to acne and increased levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. (The CDC has reported that pediatric cases of the coronavirus rose more sharply in places without school mask requirements.)

“Any child who wants to wear a mask should be free to do so. But forcing them to make personal, health and developmental sacrifices for the sake of adults who refuse to get immunized is abusive,” Makary and his co-author, H. Cody Meissner, wrote, adding that the mandatory vaccination of teachers would help.

In a recent appearance on Fox News, Makary said, “What we’ve tragically called a breakthrough infection” is actually the “normal virus landing in someone’s nasal system. You test positive, but you’re still protected with the vaccine.” He called the CDC-recommended N95 face masks “hard to wear” because they may leave an indent on some people’s faces, saying that they should be limited to nursing home staff. He also said he preferred rationing a limited supply of tests to blanket testing.

Virginia Democrats, through spokesman Jayce Genco, called the appointment “dangerous, irresponsible and deeply troubling” and proof that Youngkin will govern from the far right, which “will prolong the pandemic and cost Virginians their lives.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/15/youngkin-makary-covid-vaccines/

He said people who choose not to get vaccinated “are making a poor health decision at their own individual risk” but “pose no public health threat to those already immune,” and likened the decision to smoking

trying to figure out whether he doesn't know you're not allowed to smoke in school, or whether he thinks you should be allowed to smoke in school