The "Covid is over" propaganda. Covid is not over. It is still killing people, still disabling people, still giving people lifelong autoimmune conditions and other long-term health problems. "Covid is over" Is code for "Go back to work so the capitalist class can reap the rewards of your labor, no matter how dead or disabled you become in the process."
I've been struggling with long COVID since I got it a second time in April. It's destroyed my body.
I don't really know what to make of it to be honest. I always knew it would be "over" before all of the circumstances that made it an emergency were over. Actually I was very surprised it continued to be taken seriously for as long as it did at least here in Australia because I assumed political and economic interests would kick in after only a very short while I guess because of my usual cynicism.
However, part of the trouble with the whole thing is that there's no agreement on what over would really mean and no acceptable set of preconditions that could reasonably be set to define it. It's very unlikely we'll ever eradicate the virus, so we need to become endemic, but it's also very contagious and frequently mutates. We can set the threshold of the point at which health services can keep on top of cases but that's dependent on different contexts in different countries and regions and also politics. We can help that along tremendously with vaccines but that has to keep going and be taken by whopping majorities of people forever. Take up was good, but helped in large part by being an emergency and if it needs to be an emergency to achieve that then it will never be "over". It's also difficult because while critics and conspiracy theorists kept pointing out how the mortality rate was comparatively low against other infections diseases, the comparatively heavy (albeit with a shaky start) public measures to combat the disease could be justified by both the numbers of people vulnerable to it making the total number of deaths high and the fact that we posessed means we previously didn't to respond to such a pandemic scenario which made us ethically obliged to do so. That's all entirely reasonable justification for being in a state of varying forms of "emergency" which allowed for temporary and extraordinary measures but it begins to wear away with time as the consequences of the measures begin to manifest their own harms and ironically as our measures begin to see some success.
It's a hell of a problem because diseases just don't fit with the way we go about solving problems which is more like a project with an end date and a budget and a tally of easily identified harms and benefits. Unfortunately it means COVID will inevitably be "over" because we say it is before it ever actually can truly be and it kind of puts us on track for more waves of it and also for forgetting about and leaving behind people still contracting or suffering lasting consequences from it.
But I don't really see a solution. It really does have to be over at some point. People genuinely can't be expected to be worrying about this forever and eventually will tire of caution and tire of restrictions and as well they should since we'd consider it madness to still be in a state of health emergency with temporary restrictions to freedom of movement and business and mandatory medical procedures and constant news broadcasts with the latest case numbers for the Spanish Flu pandemic, it even the 2003 SARS virus.
There are better vaccines and antivirals coming out of the research pipeline. There are generics for Paxlovid coming on the market. In the short-term, mask and ventilate.
Well said. I see a considerable number of people online advocating going back to harsh restrictions, when in real life no one I know asks for that even when they are vulnerable. The reality is that there isn't the public will to go back to restrictions like at the beginning of the pandemic, and the situation is better than it was. It would be impossible to stamp it out anyway, we just need to learn to live with it.
That's probably the only real conclusion to draw from what I said, but I guess not quite what I said. I don't really advocate that nothing should be done but I just can't really see how it could given certain realities and I wonder to what end measures should be undertaken. That's very similar I guess to "we just need to learn to live with it" but there's an important acknowledgement there that I make which is that inaction, while perhaps inevitable, is going to lead consequences that we aren't going to like.
Covid is the third or fourth leading killer in the USA, right after heart disease and cancer, but liberals believe it no longer exists. They are literally killing themselves and everyone around them to keep the line up.
This is why I can't understand hexbear comments.
liberals believe it no longer exists
Who said Covid no longer exists? Except some deluded right-wingers who never believed it existed in the first place, everyone knows it still exists.
Are you wearing an n95 in every indoor public place? If not, your actions say that you no longer believe covid to be an issue. In your mind at least, because covid only affects the old and young and disabled and the poor, it might as well no longer exist.
Life is not black and white as you are trying to make it out to be.
In your mind at least, because covid only affects the old and young and disabled and the poor, it might as well no longer exist.
Not true. I know I could get it and suffer. But I no longer wear masks because the probability of that outcome is low, compared to the 100% probability of inconvenience with wearing a mask (fogging up my glasses, for example - I've never been able to stop that problem).
I also know the next time I get into a car, I could be in a very serious life-altering or life-ending crash. But I still ride in cars. Because the odds of a serious crash like that happening are low, and the convenience of riding in a car far outweighs that probability.
Everyone has to gauge their own risk levels for events and decide for themselves what is appropriate.
But I still ride in cars.
Do you wear a seatbelt? The sooner you admit to yourself that you’re a eugenicist, the happier you’ll be.
Do you wear a seatbelt? The sooner you admit to yourself that you’re a eugenicist, the happier you’ll be.
Do you use cars? Isn't that being a eugenicist as well since you might kill someone doing it?
And here I thought I'd found the first hexbear I've seen who might argue things in good faith. Nope. I can't wait until we can block whole instances at a user level. You guys aren't adding anything useful to lemmy. Reading the things you post is like reading a "I'm 15 and I know everything" group.
Do you use cars?
Can you survive without a car (outside of like 2 major cities) in the USA? A better question would also be: can you survive without a mask while airborne AIDS is blowing around and turning people's brains into Swiss cheese? You have at least a 10% chance of getting long covid each time you're infected. And some of these people with long covid are bedridden. Like unable to even turn themselves over in bed. Imagine knowing that you had done that to someone, that you had hollowed out some kid's brain because you thought it was too hard to put on a mask, because it's too hard to conceptualize a world in which we work for each other and help each other rather than our bosses.
Actually, I would love to live in a car-free world. I would love to take trains, buses, and bicycles everywhere. But I can't because of piece of shit liberals like yourself licking the boot of the capitalists who run the fucking USA. Bullet trains might save the planet from climate change, but then how are the investors in oil companies and car companies supposed to pay for their endless vacations? It's such a hard choice! I, too, could be rich someday, even if the whole fucking planet is going to be incinerated long before that ever happens!
Reading the things you post is like reading a "I'm 15 and I know everything" group.
I'm 35, I have a spouse and kids, I've worked all kinds of jobs and lived for years in other countries. I'm telling you from my experience that you are placing yourself (and the people around you, including me) in incredible danger, all to help people like Biden and the Democrats who don't give a fuck about you, who are paid to lose, and who think it's weird that you'll do what they want without even being told. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Yeah. The propaganda machine has told them covid is not a problem anymore, and that's what they believe. People are being brainwashed.
The "Covid is over" propaganda. Covid is not over. It is still killing people, still disabling people, still giving people lifelong autoimmune conditions and other long-term health problems. "Covid is over" Is code for "Go back to work so the capitalist class can reap the rewards of your labor, no matter how dead or disabled you become in the process."
I've been struggling with long COVID since I got it a second time in April. It's destroyed my body.
That's really rough. I'm so sorry.
I don't really know what to make of it to be honest. I always knew it would be "over" before all of the circumstances that made it an emergency were over. Actually I was very surprised it continued to be taken seriously for as long as it did at least here in Australia because I assumed political and economic interests would kick in after only a very short while I guess because of my usual cynicism.
However, part of the trouble with the whole thing is that there's no agreement on what over would really mean and no acceptable set of preconditions that could reasonably be set to define it. It's very unlikely we'll ever eradicate the virus, so we need to become endemic, but it's also very contagious and frequently mutates. We can set the threshold of the point at which health services can keep on top of cases but that's dependent on different contexts in different countries and regions and also politics. We can help that along tremendously with vaccines but that has to keep going and be taken by whopping majorities of people forever. Take up was good, but helped in large part by being an emergency and if it needs to be an emergency to achieve that then it will never be "over". It's also difficult because while critics and conspiracy theorists kept pointing out how the mortality rate was comparatively low against other infections diseases, the comparatively heavy (albeit with a shaky start) public measures to combat the disease could be justified by both the numbers of people vulnerable to it making the total number of deaths high and the fact that we posessed means we previously didn't to respond to such a pandemic scenario which made us ethically obliged to do so. That's all entirely reasonable justification for being in a state of varying forms of "emergency" which allowed for temporary and extraordinary measures but it begins to wear away with time as the consequences of the measures begin to manifest their own harms and ironically as our measures begin to see some success.
It's a hell of a problem because diseases just don't fit with the way we go about solving problems which is more like a project with an end date and a budget and a tally of easily identified harms and benefits. Unfortunately it means COVID will inevitably be "over" because we say it is before it ever actually can truly be and it kind of puts us on track for more waves of it and also for forgetting about and leaving behind people still contracting or suffering lasting consequences from it.
But I don't really see a solution. It really does have to be over at some point. People genuinely can't be expected to be worrying about this forever and eventually will tire of caution and tire of restrictions and as well they should since we'd consider it madness to still be in a state of health emergency with temporary restrictions to freedom of movement and business and mandatory medical procedures and constant news broadcasts with the latest case numbers for the Spanish Flu pandemic, it even the 2003 SARS virus.
There are better vaccines and antivirals coming out of the research pipeline. There are generics for Paxlovid coming on the market. In the short-term, mask and ventilate.
Well said. I see a considerable number of people online advocating going back to harsh restrictions, when in real life no one I know asks for that even when they are vulnerable. The reality is that there isn't the public will to go back to restrictions like at the beginning of the pandemic, and the situation is better than it was. It would be impossible to stamp it out anyway, we just need to learn to live with it.
That's probably the only real conclusion to draw from what I said, but I guess not quite what I said. I don't really advocate that nothing should be done but I just can't really see how it could given certain realities and I wonder to what end measures should be undertaken. That's very similar I guess to "we just need to learn to live with it" but there's an important acknowledgement there that I make which is that inaction, while perhaps inevitable, is going to lead consequences that we aren't going to like.
Covid is the third or fourth leading killer in the USA, right after heart disease and cancer, but liberals believe it no longer exists. They are literally killing themselves and everyone around them to keep the line up.
This is why I can't understand hexbear comments.
Who said Covid no longer exists? Except some deluded right-wingers who never believed it existed in the first place, everyone knows it still exists.
Are you wearing an n95 in every indoor public place? If not, your actions say that you no longer believe covid to be an issue. In your mind at least, because covid only affects the old and young and disabled and the poor, it might as well no longer exist.
Life is not black and white as you are trying to make it out to be.
Not true. I know I could get it and suffer. But I no longer wear masks because the probability of that outcome is low, compared to the 100% probability of inconvenience with wearing a mask (fogging up my glasses, for example - I've never been able to stop that problem).
I also know the next time I get into a car, I could be in a very serious life-altering or life-ending crash. But I still ride in cars. Because the odds of a serious crash like that happening are low, and the convenience of riding in a car far outweighs that probability.
Everyone has to gauge their own risk levels for events and decide for themselves what is appropriate.
Do you wear a seatbelt? The sooner you admit to yourself that you’re a eugenicist, the happier you’ll be.
Do you use cars? Isn't that being a eugenicist as well since you might kill someone doing it?
And here I thought I'd found the first hexbear I've seen who might argue things in good faith. Nope. I can't wait until we can block whole instances at a user level. You guys aren't adding anything useful to lemmy. Reading the things you post is like reading a "I'm 15 and I know everything" group.
Can you survive without a car (outside of like 2 major cities) in the USA? A better question would also be: can you survive without a mask while airborne AIDS is blowing around and turning people's brains into Swiss cheese? You have at least a 10% chance of getting long covid each time you're infected. And some of these people with long covid are bedridden. Like unable to even turn themselves over in bed. Imagine knowing that you had done that to someone, that you had hollowed out some kid's brain because you thought it was too hard to put on a mask, because it's too hard to conceptualize a world in which we work for each other and help each other rather than our bosses.
Actually, I would love to live in a car-free world. I would love to take trains, buses, and bicycles everywhere. But I can't because of piece of shit liberals like yourself licking the boot of the capitalists who run the fucking USA. Bullet trains might save the planet from climate change, but then how are the investors in oil companies and car companies supposed to pay for their endless vacations? It's such a hard choice! I, too, could be rich someday, even if the whole fucking planet is going to be incinerated long before that ever happens!
I'm 35, I have a spouse and kids, I've worked all kinds of jobs and lived for years in other countries. I'm telling you from my experience that you are placing yourself (and the people around you, including me) in incredible danger, all to help people like Biden and the Democrats who don't give a fuck about you, who are paid to lose, and who think it's weird that you'll do what they want without even being told. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Yeah. The propaganda machine has told them covid is not a problem anymore, and that's what they believe. People are being brainwashed.