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Moving On From Covid
In another conversation (Ekosj’s very interesting conversation on vaccination numbers vis a vis deaths) I saw this quote from The Hammer:
“Covid is over. Let’s move on. Half the country already has.”
I think half the country is exactly right. But it feels like the other half can’t move on, whether from fear, ignorance, or sheer stubbornness. My sister is my only sibling that still lives in our hometown, Portland, ME, where my 94-year-old mother still lives by herself. My sister tested positive for COVID and emailed us this the other day: “I wear two N95 masks and never go anywhere except to take Mom to the store and doctor appointments, so I don’t know where I got it.” My brother and I didn’t comment because nothing I could have said would have reduced her stress level. I’m pretty sure she won’t be moving on any time soon.
And as much as I’ve been happy with Texans’ response to COVID (at least after the initial few months), the differences between communities can be shocking. In the rural school district where I sit on the board, masks have been optional the entire school year. We offer in-person instruction only, and our attendance rate has remained at 95 percent except for a short drop to 93 percent in November. I read this in the San Antonio paper yesterday: “On Wednesday evening, South San Antonio ISD interim Superintendent Henry Yzaguirre made a plea to parents: bring your child to school every day. Attendance had dropped 5 percentage points in one week. Out of 7,824 total students, the district was missing 2,013 Tuesday — a 26 percent absentee rate. About 110 staff were out.”
The other half still seems terrified. I don’t know what it will take for them to ever move on.
Published in General
What it will take is permission.
permission from the talking heads in their television and other media sources. Permission from celebrities. Permission from their preferred politicians, which is then backed up and supported by the media sources. Permission from all the “experts” that they, the media and their preferred politicians have elevated to near deities.
that, or the next crisis.
I used to think that an all clear sign from President Brandon would do it. From what I’m hearing now from the left elites and the polls it looks like that won’t work anymore.
No, you’re right, the President can’t just end this. It’s gone beyond politics, Covid-paranoia is cultural. Some on the right have it, some on the left don’t. It’s effected by politics and it effects politics but it neither drives nor is driven by politics; as much as many wish it did.
Not going to happen until the evening news shows stop reporting “cases” and death numbers every night. And there is almost one segment every night on how many ICU beds are occupied. The fear mongering will not stop.
When the “number of cases” come up I sometimes ask, “But how many are serious enough to require hospitalization or resulted in death?” I didn’t need to at the men’s breakfast group this morning when one guy brought up the large number of “cases” in our county because another guy pointed out how that illustrates that soon everyone will have had it, so we will be beyond trying to avoid it.
Two observations:
1) Those who are true believers in all of this are trapped in a cult. They’ve turned off the rational portion of their mind and have submitted themselves to the cult. Now they will only do what the cult leaders tell them to.
2) The cult leaders are raking in cash and have no intention to stop. Every time someone takes a test they rake in the cash. Every time a school or hospital complies with the cult leaders demands they rake in the cash. Every time a pharmacy reorders injections they rake in the cash. Every time the hospital prescribes Remdesivir they rake in the cash.
How do we end this? Enough of us refuse to play the game so that the cult leaders are left sitting on a pile of unpurchased product. Start by never submitting to a Covid test again. Then refuse to wear a mask, anywhere, even at a doctor or hospital. You have that right. If your doctor required them, find another doctor.
We’ve got a once highly popular eye care center in our city that is losing patients left and right because they’ve become mask Karens. Another one across town is growing with the influx of their former patients. That’s how we move on, by making the masks look ridiculous on the fools who still wear them, like little party hats, and by calling the bluff of people who say swab or else.
The solution is on us but we need to stand together.
Do you think that the hard core believers even realize that vast swaths of the country are past it? I mean, except for doctor visits and EMS calls I haven’t put on a mask for a year. And we only put them on for EMS calls where they tell us the patient has tested positive. That’s our medical director’s protocol and without that I don’t think we would mask up.
No. They’re drip fed a continuous dose of fear via the tv and internet. Like I said, they’re not taking in reality and formulating rational conclusions about it. They’re in a cult. My mom is among them. She can see 70,000 fans at the Chiefs game unmasked and not social distanced in one of the least vaxxed states in the union (MO) and it doesn’t even register to them that maybe this pandemic thing is maybe…over. There is no talking to them about it.
I live in this area, and I think you’re worried unnecessarily. People tend to react when the case numbers rise and then go back to normal when they fall.
I think there are political cults attached to the pandemic, but the man- or woman-on-the-street is very calm about all of it. It’s really calm here.
The most concern I’ve seen is among people caring for older people. It’s really hard to be a caregiver in circumstances like this. Other than that, New Englanders have moved on, across the board. My husband and I are out and about all the time in public settings. New Englanders have absolutely moved on. We would know if they hadn’t.
A friend (schoolmates K-12) owns a bunch of restaurants in Portland and complains often and bitterly about the insane COVID edicts from the city council. I know that Portland has been trying hard to become like the other Portland for a long time. I’m not convinced that New England is monolithically over it. After all, as I was trying to point out in my original post, big Texas cities (almost uniformly blue) would be locked down if the Governor didn’t stop them.
It’s a blessing to the “news” media. Crisis means clicks on the sites and eyes on the channels. Why would they wish it to end, it’s a cash cow.
It’s bad in Minnesota cities. Outstate has moved on a long time ago. Of course this ENGRAGES some of the more committed urbanites. I know plenty of Minnesota urbanites that are over it too, but the committed neighbors have created a hostage situation.
Apologies. I didn’t mean to suggest that the local government people have moved on. :-) Everyone tries to avoid them. :-)
They are stuck in cement for sure.
But the businesses in the big Texas cities still impose their own requirements on customers. I have zero desire to drive into the Metroplex to do business (such as eat at a restaurant or attend a cultural, social, or business venue) from my semi-rural town, as the uncertainty about what requirements the Metroplex businesses will have are constantly up in the air, and the uncertainty about what I will be expected to do for compliance causes me unhealthy anxiety. So Metroplex businesses, if you weren’t already aware, until you move past Covid, you are alienating potential customers.
Half of my immediate family still lives in Maine, including my mom. Even though all but one are conservatively inclined, the region is rife with covid madness, and they’ve absorbed some of it. ):
RLM–Rural Lives Matter
I have a friend who lives in the Bronx, and she gets so sad and depressed.
She feels surrounded by nutcases, as so many people there are willing to comply with all the various mandates, including whatever mandate it is that requires healthy people to stand in line for hours in the wind, cold,rain and snow to get a test to prove they are healthy!
She doesn’t think COV will be allowed to go away until the MidTerm election results are in. She and her one Republican friend call COVID “the MidTerm flu.’
People don’t realize that it would be easy to pick it up in a store, especially a grocery store. Anything you touch potentially has the germ. And then we touch our faces. Even if we clean our hands, we don’t always do it well.
Actually, no. “Fomite”/contact transmission was ruled out as a significant player pretty early. The focus on hand sanitizer and extra surface cleanings carried on by inertia, and may have helped reduce flu cases. Covid is almost entirely aerosol. I recommend the MIT study on transmission published in April ’21.
I’m sorry–I forgot about that. Thanks for the correction, Phil.
I agree with your thinking in total, and especially like your mention of how people move away from restrictive businesses and support businesses that do not.
But is it not true that so many many trillions of dollars have been created to allow for hospitals to continue to ignore treating patients with inexpensive remedies that are effective, when they know they get get kickbacks for doing as they are asked to do – like using the injurious remdesivir – by Big Pharma?
So many people are out there feeding at the pig trough of big government monies and kickbacks from Pharma.
Plus school districts are made flush with monies for the school board so those members insist that the “health crisis” demands children be masked up and vaxxed. (And of course no local politicians would create slush funds or use a kick back system, right?)
Even the tiny school district of Altoona Illinois had a 5 million dollar “perk” when its school board members assured state and Fed officials they would toe the line on having mask and vaccine mandates.
Perhaps the only way to actually get this stuff on an overall level to stop once and for all is to demand audits of our elected officials, local hospital admins, etc. We need to demand audits.
I should have mentioned that stores are good places to catch it–but from the invisible clouds of aerosols all the patrons are breathing out (and going right through any cloth or loose mask). Avoid busy times if it matters to you–the aerosols are viable indoors for a few hours, and the viral load would be proportional to # of infected * time indoors. (Modulo AC/heat air movement.)
I have not worn a mask in a grocery store (except Costco) for months. I got the original shots in March 2021, and will never get a booster. Ray has not gotten the shot. I have not gotten Covid. I declared in March 2020 that I was not going to get Covid, and I have not. I have been working, without a mask, since July 2021, at a company which has had multiple employees out sick with Covid for much of January. I think Covid avoids me. I sure hope so!
I live in an area with 95% compliance with the mask mandate that has been statewide since July of 2021. People have gotten so used to wearing masks everywhere that they no longer even think about it anymore. I find that behavior disgusting.
I think the brain is a delicate thing, and once it’s broken, you can’t put it back together. There are people who will never recover from this, and I will write them out of my life.
This can also get stressful if you are a sane person. I live in New York, where mask mandates have been reinstated for no reason. I know that I’m surrounded by idiots most of the time, but when it’s visually explicit like this, and constantly shoved in your face, it can be very isolating. I have my good days and bad days. I just want to yell at these people, “take your damn mask off, you look like an idiot” or “can you stop telling me how my safety is your number one concern? I’m just here to buy socks.”
I have not put a mask on once since the mandates came back. Surprisingly, I get very little pushback. Some cashiers/employees have even gone out of their way to be nice to me. They probably know what’s up. But I’m also one of the only ones doing it and it would be nice to get some mass civil disobedience going so we can end this once and for all. I know a lot of people that talk big about “preparing for the civil war” and all of that, but then they’re afraid that they’ll get in trouble if they walk into a gas station without a mask.
It will take an end to all government mandates. People will only voluntarily inconvenience themselves in the name of fear for as long as that fear persists… that fear is being perpetuated by our governments (and the media). But as long as half the population is permitted to make their own choices, every day they continue to exist, they exist as examples slowly chipping away at the fear of those who are still hysterical. It may be as slow, but people will begin to worry less and less, until there is simply no longer any possible excuse for that level of anxiety. I thought this would happen much, much faster, and I was wrong about that. But I am still seeing it happen.
I am 69 and had a breakthrough Delta case in August after my two vaccines but before my booster. Not so bad. A price I am willing to pay to generally not wear a mask, other than if I am in a doctor’s/dentist’s office. As more and more folks come to that conclusion, masks will continue to fade away.
The exception is in the day before I go to see my 91 year old mother. I will test first, and then go visit her. But everyone else is on their own.
We don’t wear masks in my office, and we have taken down the sign asking people to mask up. The only exception recently was that we had a fairly wealthy potential client who asked us to wear masks. The moment she left the office, we took off our masks.
Are you prepared to hire people after they get fired for not wearing a mask at work? There’s no maskless places in the entire city I live in.
I’d move somewhere where they hold your health and your freedom as priorities. Everyone up here is hiring. I guarantee you it’s the same in many other states.
I bet it’s more, but people don’t want to speak out for fear of being cancelled . . .