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shel
@shel

The thing about viruses is they are not visible to the naked eye. The thing about public health is that a lot of it just telling people how germ theory works and helping them see what’s invisible by providing information. In the US our government has just given up on public health as a general concept. It wouldn’t even be that hard to get a lot of people taking precautions again if information was actually available to people who aren’t actively seeking it out.

Last weekend someone I went out an outdoors date with asked me why I still mask and when I told them that long COVID affects 30% of people and cases are higher than they ever were in 2020, they were super shocked and immediately got out their phone and bulk bought KN95s off Amazon to wear to work.

Last night I was in a discord VC and someone mentioned being anxious because they have to go to a Christmas gathering with conservative family and mentioned how with 20 people present, at current levels there’s a 50% chance someone is infectious with COVID, and just read out the current case levels and compared them to 2020. Two people on the call immediately started scheduling appointments to get the new vaccine because they hadn’t done it yet. They were asking if getting it Friday was too late or if they should find an earlier appointment.

People don’t want to get COVID, they’re just under the false impression that it’s “over” and “not a big deal anymore” because our government has systemically dismantled our public health infrastructure in the name of keeping the economy going and being able to campaign on “ending the pandemic” despite things being about as bad as they’ve ever been, possibly even worse as the original COVID-19 has gone extinct and so the original vaccines aren’t particularly effective against the current variants circulating.

I feel like a paranoid conspiracy theorist whenever I share the most basic information about current COVID levels with people and only when they explicitly ask me why I still take precautions. But it’s literally not that they don’t care. It’s that they don’t even know. All of the testing infrastructure and easy public information trackers like the NYTimes charts and Johns Hopkins have been dismantled. They just don’t have access to wastewater data because it’s not where they know to see it.

Information is a powerful thing.


hellgnoll
@hellgnoll

In Canada the goverment fully disabled our exposure tracking app, a piece of software which worked on all major smartphones and used bluetooth and public keys to ping exposure data between folks. This entire application was operating on a federal system and as far as I could tell was disabled and shut down simply because they wanted to propogate the appearance of covid being over.

Hell, Apple literally updated their entire phone operating system to support exposure tracking applications in an integrated way. I travel between Chicago and Toronto routinely to visit my wife, and it was extremely useful to have both the Canada tracking app and the Illinois tracking app running at the same time.

[...] over the period of March to July 2021, the app had averted between 6,284 and 10,894 (or 0.44% and 0.76%) of total recorded infections and between 57 and 101 deaths (or 0.004% and 0.01% of COVID-induced fatalities) in the six provinces covered by the study. [...] The study also found that in provinces where there was more widespread adoption of the app, [...] the number of cases and deaths averted were higher than for Canada as a whole. For example, in Newfoundland and Labrador, the number of cases averted was more than 60% of total cases.

- Government evaluation of the app

It's so exhausting how so much time and energy was spent building all these really good tools for tracking pandemic spread, and just all of it is slowly being turned off now. These kind of systems are usually very robust and cost very little to keep going. But the politics of being in an extended pandemic are bad, so we're seeing a lot of willful ignorance from the government now.


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in reply to @shel's post:

i saw an article yesterday claiming 'gen z are germaphobes' for... washing their hands 10+ times a day.

on average we pee 6-7 times a day, eat 3 meals, and go to work or school meaning we touch public transport rails or shopping cart handles or whatnot then get in 2 times a day. that's already 10+. not counting any additional trip, cleaning a litterbox, food prep, any job where washing hands frequently is a health and safety requirement etc ...

i am immunocompromised. i continue to anxiously mask and wash hands and surfaces because i know a lot of people do not give a crap about basic hygiene. i haven't seen anyone in my town wear a mask in more than 2 years. if covid is ever brought up people just laugh about it and shrug it off like it isn't a big deal at all. people give me weird looks and pull their children away from me.

i am permanently disabled from getting the flu about a decade ago. it is so frustrating and sad seeing how nobody gives a damn about others sometimes, so it was very uplifting to hear you got through to people and it was only ignorance instead of carelessness.

I once mentioned to friends that I wash my hands first thing when I get home, and they acted like that was outrageously excessive and not basic fucking hygiene 101, and that was before covid. I don't get it. (I also don't get covid.)

(incredibly hygienic) handshake !

i moved countries years ago and i had such a culture shock. it's cold here so majority of homes are carpeted and by far the most popular seem to be cream and beige carpets. that's different, but of course not shocking. what truly shocked me was that people here do not take their shoes off when they enter a home ! so you can imagine these carpets are actually brown or dark grey, with cream just on the edges of the room ...

people grumble and roll their eyes so much when i ask them to remove their shoes when visiting because they don't want their socks to get dirty. i guess because they are used to grey socks from their own homes? they can do what they like but if you visit someone have a little respect TT i've given up telling them to wash hands, they look at me like i am unhinged, so i just disinfect every surface they touched after they leave

but then again every person i've houseshared with here puts the dishes covered in dirty dish soap foam directly in the drying rack because 'it drips off'...

am i insane? is this normal

Wearing shoes inside is fuckin' weird. Once you get the "shoes off at the door" bug there's no going back. One way trip to cleaner hosing.

I feel like growing up in the US things slowly shifted from shoes on being more common to shoes off being more common. But it's still a mix. I usually take my shoes off anyway.

i, a very covid-afraid person, literally don't even know where to find accurate numbers anymore. at this point i just rely on people vagueposting that numbers are "up" or "down", because i legitimately could not find useful websites from google searching any more. on that note, can you share a link(s) for useful websites for covid numbers

edit: scrolled down further and a post further down my timeline you shared linked https://biobot.io/data/

My mom recently got covid because my aunt revealed she had been exposed to covid the day before halfway through a dinner that she still went to, and then was somehow surprised when my mom and grandmother also got it.

Having a basic awareness of germ theory feels like I'm in on some secret, hidden knowledge, and not an extremely common fact we've known for ages. I went to the same public school as others - even less, since I did high school through a homeschooling program. Is it really that I read Outbreak as a teenager? Did a couple years of interest in medical thrillers unlock the secrets of the universe so I know not to cough into my goddamn hand?

i cannot believe how many people look stunned when you're like "you know that viruses don't take a time out while you're eating, right? like. that's. not how any of this works"

In the UK covid vaccines are restricted. However, one of the classes of people eligible for the autumn vaccine program is unpaid care workers. People who take care of people in an informal manner. It's not a position where you have formal proof of that's what you are or do, unlike being documented as immunocompromised or a healthcare worker or being over-60. And even if people are uncomfortable lying, many people I know take care of someone in some way where that can be exaggerated enough if people ask.

When I tell people how easy it is to bend the truth to get a vaccine in the uk, people end up getting vaccines. The medical staff are just happy more people are turning up to get jabbed.

ah yes, the "you are too young and healthy to get a vaccine" school of public health

like mfer what do you think vaccines are for? they're 1. so you stay healthy and 2. so people who are not young and healthy have an additional layer of protection from getting sick from young and healthy people

fucking penny pinching bureaucrats

(sorry for going off but this bothers me so much)