I had coincidentally purchased a big pack of Clorox wipes from Costco not too long before lockdown. I quickly turned into the Silas Marner of disposable cleaning products.
Same I bought my yearly Costco TP and paper towels like 2 weeks before. I was like the Mother Teresa of poop paper in my building for my elderly neighbors.
Someone stole them and you adopted a blonde kid?
What do you mean 2020 - isn't this the year 2020 part 5!? :-P
I don't really get how things are supposed to work now. Covid still exists, and the vaccine offers incomplete protection. But apparently things are back to normal for most people? Even I don't wear my N95 all day while I'm in the office, but when I wear it in crowded places I'm one of very few people doing that.
Covid is now endemic and no longer an epidemic/pandemic, so the need to contain cases is less immediately important. I, too, still like to wear masks in super crowded places or if I'm not feeling well but it is rare.
Just tacking on, Covid has changed. It’s, by and large, more infectious and less deadly than it was in 2020 on top of being well studied. Panicking about a potential 10% mortality rate from an unknown rapidly spreading virus was reasonable. Panicking about a known low mortality rate virus is unnecessary.
That said, n95 has been a game changer for me. Between allergies and reducing my time with the flu, Covid, and colds, it’s been amazing. Feel free to prove how incredible your immune system is, insecure folks. I’ll be over here enjoying my clear sinuses.
Taking precautions against a novel deadly virus with unknown transmission vectors is not panic. One can certainly panic while doing so.
Once more was learned, our precaution protocols became more focused.
You made some good points, but just to say death is not the only outcome to worry about. Long covid is devastating lives.
It’s an interesting and difficult question to answer.
My personal take: we collectively went through a really difficult time. The virus killed a lot of people; over 7 million globally according to the WHO. The vaccines were instrumental in slowing the spread and keeping people safer than they would’ve been without them.
The vaccines and science bought us time. We learned how to treat people, and we also gathered data on what the virus does to people. Basically, we now ‘know’ how most people will react to an infection. And since corona is here to stay, most of us will have gone through an infection once or twice by now.
So today, corona is less scary than when it started. We’ve lived through it, we understand it, we have measures to protect the weakest from it. It’s now a part of life much like the flu.
We’ll never be back to a world without corona. But we’ve learned to live with the virus for now.
Humanity has always been dealing coronaviruses by the way, just to a lesser extent than a global pandemic. There's a reason it was called SARS-CoV-2. Hopefully if there's a SARS-CoV-3 we'll deal with it a bit better... hopefully.
The virus has weakened considerably. For most people, it really is just another flu. I live with my sister, she just got it this past week. Neither me nor her boyfriend got sick, and I'm totally negative. She's mostly recovered now after a week. Also, I was a few months out of date with the booster. She was totally out of date.
2020 part 5
Well done for not falling victim to an "off by one" error!
~~I counted it off on my fingers to triple-check my sources~~ oh ah, I mean, thank you!:-)
The calendar is zero indexed.
Is it? I thought we went straight from 1 BCE to 1 CE.
I guess I should have specified that centuries are zero indexed. Like we're in the 21st century, but the year is 2024. The 1900's were the 20th century, etc..
Maybe I've misunderstood what "zero indexed" means, but I didn't think centuries were either. Didn't we go from the 1st century BCE straight to the 1st century CE? I don't think there was a zeroth century, or else we would not have the mismatch of the 1900s being the 20th century, etc.
Yes, but first century is 001-099, not 100-199. 100 is 2nd century. Zero index!
If I understand correctly, years 100 BCE to 1 BCE were the "first century BCE", and years 1 CE to 100 CE were the "first century". If there was no "zeroth" century, how can the centuries be zero indexed?
I mean it's not like it's official or anything, I was just making an observation. But the reason is because the years in the first century don't have a 1 in front of them. A century ends at 99. The 21st century started in 2000. The 20th century started in 1900. The 1st century started in 001. Maybe the first century is an exception and didn't end until 100, idk. But they would still leave 99 years without a hundreds character.
Half Life 2 Episode 2 Part 2 Act 2
People actually did this?
Absolutely, yes. Back when it first started in early 2020, there were still a lot of unknowns. People were suddenly dying, there were no vaccines yet, a lot was unknown and every government and business was basically trying to invent protocols to stay safe.
How long could a virus survive on a particular surface or object? Most people didn’t know. So they panicked and pretty much did what felt most appropriate: disinfect the ever living fuck out of everything that might’ve been touched by someone, somewhere.
People were doing contactless package delivery. Folks were disinfecting cardboard packages so as not to catch the ‘rona. Of course, that was all a bit of an overreaction - but pretty understandable considering how scary that time was for a lot of people. That, at least, was something they could do.
The scenes from New York, which seemed like they were pulled out of an over the top science fiction horror, was enough to justify cleaning the bar of soap with more soap before using it.
Yep. When you saw headlines about mass graves and refrigerated trucks full of bodies in New York, it’s understandable that people got a bit scared. And the situation elsewhere was much, much worse…
It is better to overreact and feel silly, than to under react and be dead.
That’s pretty much what I said back in 2020-2022. I followed all the government mandates, masked up, got the shots, social distanced, worked from home, etc. And because of it, I was about the last person in the country to get it back in late 2022.
Everyone in my family trusted the science and followed the rules. We never lost someone, even the people in fragile health made it through without an infection. The science works.
Our company also had people who didn’t do any of that. We had some plague monkeys that basically went around coughing on doorknobs and ignoring every bit of advice meant to keep people safe. So thank god I was able to work from home.
One of my buddies lost his best friend to covid really early in the pandemic, so we took precautions very seriously. Somehow I never got it, even though my wife did. We were sleeping in the same bed for the first 3 days she had it, since we didn't know that it was covid, and I still never got it. She isolated before the symptoms got really bad, but logic seems to indicate that I should have got it during those three days. Thankfully she didn't get it until 2022, and we were both double or triple vaccinated by that point. She was definitely sicker than I've ever seen her, but no long term side effects as far as we can tell.
Honestly, the long covid effects scared me more than actual death did. There’s people who now have a permanent lack of energy, brain fog, on permanent disability, etc. That was definitely my main concern in trying to avoid corona.
When I got it, it wasn’t bad - but it was definitely different than what the flu usually does. My symptoms were mostly muscle aches, things tasting off, and a mild cough. I didn’t get things like a sore throat or runny nose like the usual flu symptoms.
Yeah my wife said that it was different from the flu or a cold too. Her symptoms appeared to be a severe flu, but she said she knew immediately that it was covid when the symptoms became more serious since it was different than anything else she'd ever felt before.
I definitely did no such thing and still have never caught covid.
I feel like I was dumb not to at the time, and got lucky that it wasn't a transmission vector
I still do this if I don't have rubbing alcohol to soak things down in. But that's not because of COVID. It's because I have contamination OCD caused by my toxic family and made significantly worse by living and working in places with cockroach infestations as soon as I escaped from them. Now I'm unemployed and living with my parents again.
I hate my existence.
So sorry, that sounds incredibly hard. Wishing you strength.
I've written and deleted many posts about it. Safe to say, it is.
But thank you. They aren't bad entirely bad people, just....not always good.
I did this since the 90s. A bunch of relatives got sick from some filthy cans. Then I worked in a liquor warehouse. In the unmopped piss floor bathroom where every guy stands farther back to not stand in the dribble, eventually the one guy that doesn't care stands in it, none of them wash their hands, then they even stand on the cans as they build their pallets higher. Not to mention the one top rack pallet that leaks down getting everything sticky and moldy, and the mouse and rat nests with their piss and shit all over the place both in the product and the fork pockets of pallets which get lifted above all the others and it trickles down. The mop tank roams around but it only cleans the lanes and not under the racks or anything. Piss and shit cans at best get taken to a bay with no truck and compressed air blasted, or maybe to the throwaway area and hosed down but it's just water until visually clean looking. Some days you can call in a bay with dirty product and the guy shows up to just dust it to the lane with canned air for the mop tank.
Even guys that work there just drink cans without washing, but some of them are piss drinkers that think the government doesn't want them to drink their own piss so they don't develop psychic powers. I've been told if you don't drink your piss your third eye crystallizes and atrophies. And everything is connected and we are all one, etc.
Basically I recommend washing the cans at least.
Tl:dr wash cans and drink piss
some of them are piss drinkers
think the government doesn't want them to drink their own piss so they don't develop psychic powers.
Yikes
Yeah lmao. Groceries delivered and then surfaces and packaging wiped down and washed before storing.
Yes, that was what the CDC initially told people to do, when they were claiming it was not airborne and masks were not necessary.
Were you born on 2021? Did you not live to see people wearing masks and double layered latex gloves to physically fight over the last can of beans at winco?
I just wiped everything down with alcohol.wipes meant for cleaning glasses (since getting actual hand wipes was impossible during that shit).
We mixed hydrogen peroxide with water and put it in a spray bottle. Everything that came into the house was sprayed down until we were able to get vaccinated.
