How and if we can learn to live with COVID

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Indeed, perhaps all it means is that it's a place where there might be other people and that whoever is running it has chosen (or felt compelled) to have a mask policy. And I wouldn't put it past some bureaucratic clown to insist on masking up in a perfectly safe situation, and to hammer me regardless of common sense if I don't obey. But I'd expect some correlation with reality, even if it wasn't a strong correlation. Strange things happen, for example a person who hadn't been in contact with anybody for several weeks (and was therefore not infected) might get forced to wear a mask on their first visit to a place, in order to "protect others." Similarly, a negative lateral flow test can get you into places, even though lateral flow tests give a lot of false negatives.

I'm already used to the pandemic...I think if everything were to suddenly end, I would feel very uncomfortable going "back to normal".

I mean, not to mention, my Long Covid has been flaring back up with a vengeance lately, so I can't go out anyway.

Brain scans and autopsies.

My area is one of if not the hot spot for the exponential growth of omicron. Even though it is apparently “mild” it still is unnerving. Since this variant is new there is still a lot of uncertainty about which is difficult as an autistic person. With staff shortages there is a worry about treatment for any non COVID illness.

A few months ago I thought there was good hope not that COVID would go away but that it would become truly endemic. I never thought I would feel the need to mask up with other fully vaccinated, boosted people.

Omicron will wane but even then it is going to be hard to relax and think “now it is similar to other endemic illness I never had a problem with”.

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Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 27 Dec 2021, 10:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have a weird perspective on this, as I do with a lot of things it seems.

When I was in my 20s, my OCD gave me a lot of anxiety about giving other people germs, leading to excessive hand washing and so on. There was no pandemic at that time and nobody else I knew worried like that. It took me years to get over it. While obviously there's much more legitimate reason to be concerned about germs now, sometimes I feel like a portion of society has taken up the voice I had in my head at that time and I find that upsetting.

I don't have much desire to socialize. When the COVID "lockdown" started here, I would gladly have spent several months at home, if there was a system in place that meant I didn't have to worry about food or basic needs, or having a job when it was all over. However, I was an "essential" retail worker.

The instant politicization of the issue in the U.S. has hurt the credibility of both sides, as far as I'm concerned.

It even played out on my Disneyland discussion groups. You had the people who called Governor Newsom every imaginable name in the book for keeping theme parks closed during the pandemic. Then you had the people who, when anyone wondered when the parks would reopen, responded, "You want people to die, just so you can have your precious expensive playground!" (These were people who were on Disneyland fan groups themselves, shaming other people for missing Disneyland!)

I never had any problem with wearing a mask or social distancing and I don't really get the outrage over it. As QFT said,

As for "trusting science," it's one thing if you're a layman and you're arguing with the scientists about their findings without understanding how they arrived at them. But I feel like there's very little understanding of people's fear when it comes to actually injecting something into their bodies.

I also feel as if the Left has had moving goalposts, where initially, we were masking and social distancing so we could get to the point when the vulnerable could get vaccinated. That made sense to me. Now they make it sound more like the vulnerable will be vulnerable until every single American citizen is vaccinated, which I don't think will ever happen.

In theory I think we could be rid of Covid very simply - everybody on the planet isolates for about 3 weeks, no exceptions. With no new victims to spread into, the virus will become extinct. Of course it'll never happen because the human race is nowhere near that co-operative.

People wouldn't have anything to fear if it wasn't for groups like Q intentionally spreading misinformation.

Yeah I was thinking that too ever since COVID started.

And by the way this option is MUCH better than the vaccine. Unlike the vaccine, it is fully reversible.

What is "Q"? I never heard of it.

You've never heard of QAnon??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

This is kind of what I'm talking about. There's an assumption that anyone who's afraid of taking the vaccine believes in QAnon conspiracies, is an anti-vaxxer, a Trump supporter, etc.

In the past, if people were expected to do something and they were afraid, the response of "suck it up and do your duty" is something I would have associated more with the Right. I would have expected the Left to have more understanding and compassion for their feelings. But in this case, the Left associates fear of taking the vaccine with THE ENEMY and responds to it that way.

Someone can be afraid of flying and you can show them all the proof that it's the safest way to travel and they can even acknowledge it's true and still be afraid of flying.

Officially speaking, its neither of the two. Political spectrum has two dimensions: left right, and bottom up. So "more freedom" is bottom (libertarian) while less freedom is "up" (statist). As far as left/right it can go either way. Along one diagonal one has statist left vs libertarian right, along the other diagonal one has libertarian left vs statist right. In both cases whoever is libertarian is the one for more freedom.

But then personal perception is a different story. In this respect, each side on left/right tends to perceive themselves as advocating more freedom. So the fact that in the past you were assuming leftists want more freedom simply shows that you were a leftist yourself. And what happened now with the vaccine was a wake up call to show you that your perception was mistaken all along.

Everything is definitely more complex than I thought. I was never involved in politics, but I did have the perception of the Left as being more hippie/freedom/peace-and-love and the last few years on social media has pretty well killed that perception.

In this case though, I was talking more about how fear is viewed than freedom. In the past, I would have thought the Left would have more understanding of people being afraid while the Right would expect them to be "tough."

Well, in case of both gun control and free market, the right seems to favor freedom more.



Well, you can argue that in case of the wall, "the right" is afraid (they need a wall) while the left is "tough" (they can defend themselves without the wall).

As far as the vaccine issue its complicated. Afraid of WHAT? The left is afraid of covid more, the right is afraid of vaccine more.

By the way with other issues its the same thing. Who is what depends on what aspects of it you focus on.

Well there's a difference between having an irrational fear of medicine, and believing the conspiracy theories, and I'm sure the "irrational fear" group are in the vast minority.

Yes, those who are called "the Left" are quite a mixed bag, I think. Some of the so-called communist countries are certainly widely thought to be / have been very cruel, authoritarian regimes. Whether they really were all as cruel as some sources claim, and whether they were really left-wing regimes, it's hard to say. A lot of wealthy people seem to want us all to think that there's no palatable alternative to the free market. But I'm sure a lot of people on the left just want a fair, compassionate system instead of what we have, which is in some ways rather a dog-eat-dog system. Others are more ruthless. It's scary that after a century of socialism as an idea, that the right and centre-right still seem to be running things, and that peaceful, "democratic" means to implement a caring system have largely failed. It's long been a belief among a lot of left-wingers that socialism can't be achieved without violence, that the elite will never give in unless brute force is used against them. Me, I've no idea whether that's correct or not. I do think that things have been drifting to the right, towards more inequality and inhumanity for several decades.