You walk by others while you are not at your table. What do you want to do? Hold your breath? Not to mention bathrooms and so forth. Presumably the tables are well spaced etc...
Which is why indoor dining rooms should still be closed. Pretending we aren't living through a pandemic that is respiratory in nature is fucking madness. Maybe if we had locked down harder for longer and treated this thing seriously in the beginning we wouldn't be almost two years into this with no end in sight.
> Which is why indoor dining rooms should still be closed. Pretending we aren't living through a pandemic that is respiratory in nature is fucking madness. Maybe if we had locked down harder for longer and treated this thing seriously in the beginning we wouldn't be almost two years into this with no end in sight.
We aren't living through a pandemic anymore, we are now living in an endemic. Omicron isn't going away anytime soon - and we can't lock down businesses forever. Omicron can't be stopped by lockdown anyway (see challenges of containing it within China).
Secondly, it is highly unlikely that we would have got rid of Covid-19 even harsher lockdown measures earlier (e.g. see Omicron which happened because the original virus jumped to mice and back to humans - just humans locking down wouldn't have stopped this variant, we would have had to lock down all the rodents too).
My personal view - we have to stop viewing life as nothing but a vector for disease, and stop re-architecting our entire society and culture to avoid Covid infections (at huge societal costs to education, standards of living etc).
If people want to use these words they should learn what these words mean in the context of infectious disease and public health and use them correctly.
We have no chance with current medical tech of eliminating a highly mutagenic coronavirus. Even if we did the cost/benefit of doing so would not be adequate.
Why are the only deaths we seem to care about those that are Covid related?
If we are worried about killing people worldwide, far more people die of hunger-related causes each day, but we aren't rebuilding our entire society to save those people. But I can't see a reason why deaths from Covid are more of a tragedy than those we left to starve.
Or take smoking for instance - more people die each year from smoking than have died from Covid, but we seem more willing to ban human contact than to ban cigarettes? Seems backwards to me (especially considering c10% of smoking related deaths are from secondhand smoke in the USA!).
I know these might seem like a silly point, but why are we so focused on one single cause of death right now? We lock down our entire society to 'protect unvaccinated people worldwide', but then have continually cut foreign aid?
IMO - I think we have totally lost the plot and lost sight of what is important, but that's just my view.
People are afraid to die, and some people will do anything to lower the risk (ironically, life is still 100% fatal). These people will get angry at you for something dangerous even if you don't endanger them!
If you rode motorcycles you'd encounter this safety fascism attitude quite a bit. Ive had ppl flip out on me just for mentioning I disagree with helmet laws, even though I ride with 100% safety equipment 100% of the time.
Smoking, at least where I live is heavily taxed and regulated. You can't smoke in any building open to the public or place of employment, you can't smoke within 25ft of any entrance to any of those buildings either. Cigarettes are taxed to hell and back as well.
I guess we could do that to the people unwilling to get vaxxinated. Tax them for their status and bar them from any building open to the public or place of employment.
So we bar them because they are making individual choices that don’t impact us and we want to control them because we are afraid/disagree with those choices?
> When I see people minimizing COVID, I wonder if they've somehow avoided seeing an excess death graph even once for the past year-and-a-half.
In the UK where I am from, I’m not entirely sure you would come to that conclusion - you would probably find that the first two waves caused significant excess deaths but the impact of the last wave has been much lower (probably from a combination of multiple factors).
Looking at the (fairly low) excess deaths only tells half the story though - you also have to look at quality of living, which is undoubtedly lower in my view.
They can take whatever measures they need to keep themselves safe. I assume they are not going into restaurants now since the mask situation is just theater.
Their unfortunate circumstances don’t mean they get to control others. If there was a concrete ask with end date that would be one thing but asking everyone else to live as if they are immunocompromised just because they are is not sustainable.
Im not willing to build society around a theoretical risk for a very small population that is alive only because of artificial means.
Writ large, its immoral failing Kant’s categorical imperative. Massive utilitarian fail (you got to count the lockdown suicides and others too!). Aesthetically gross (life glued indoors is not really living).
Reasonable accommodations are fine, and necessary and can include: wearing a mask if a known immunocompromised person is present. Setting up free grocery delivery for them. Ambulatory health care.
When you remark that they're "alive only because of artificial means", are you implying that your judgement might be different if they were, say, healthy and athletic young adults?
Are you proposing that additional suicides due to lockdowns are comparable to the number of deaths prevented by social distancing and stay-at-home orders?
Also, why are you telling me this? Find a housebound person to tell that they're "not really living". Find an immunocompromised person to assure that it's fine if you never wear a mask except when they're nearby. (Don't do either of those things.)
No, my judegement wouldn't be different if a similar number of “healthy, athletic” were somehow pegged as high COVID risk (perhaps a genetic marker?). What forms my opinion are their small numbers. Its easy to cater to the exception, but exceptions make bad generalities.
The “artificial” refers to point that immunocompromised people already (justly!) have greatly extended lives because society has expanded a lot of resources on research and development for their care. These people are our sisters and brothers and should be taken care of, and have been to a large extent (otherwise they’d be dead).
They do have a claim to our assistance, and Ill gladly pay more taxes for better programs, but they don't have a claim to have society turned upside down on their behalf
Lockdowns are not reasonable accommodation.
“ Are you proposing that additional suicides due to lockdowns are comparable to the number of deaths prevented by social distancing and stay-at-home orders?”
Your original point was about immunocompromised, a small group. I gave one example of people that are being killed by lockdowns. Add deferred cancer patients, etc.
Anyway, today if you’re not immunocompromised and you’re still dying of COVID you probably made the choice not to get vaccinated. Which is fine, btw.
“ Also, why are you telling me this? ”
You want to lock me up in my room like a truant schoolboy.
“ Find a housebound person to tell that they're "not really living".”
They’d agree with the general sentiment. Certainly its harder to grasp at life’s meaning when your only companion is TV.
My very independent 95 year old grandma who has been housebound for two years due to COVID is uncharacteristically depressed. Which is why instead of a pseudo-philosophical talk like we’re having she’d probably appreciate it more if I took her for a walk in the mountainside (alas, she lives 10 000 km away).
Perhaps because I cant be there for my grandma, next week we’re planning on taking my housebound ex-neighbors for a trip outside the city. They’re very lovely but they’re too old to drive and housebound to a large extent. I’m sure they agree with me about lockdowns.
“Find an immunocompromised person to assure that it's fine if you never wear a mask except when they're nearby.”
Does telling a friend with a kidney transplant that my kid goes to school without a mask count?
I live in seattle. It's dark and cold. Hell the mask helps, it's great for keeping my face warm.
I don't consider myself locked up. I miss in person game nights the most, i miss dinner with friends (in a private home or restaurant) somewhat.
We do gamenights online using videochat and products like roll20 and boardgame arena. It's not super awesome but it works for us for now.
I leave the house, go on walks go shopping etc. But I take very reasonable precautions. I shop during low traffic times, get up early and hit the grocery store before work, I order food for pickup and wait outside for it. During the more temperate months we'd set up a few tables in the backyard and have friends over for meals, each 'pod' got their own table nicely distanced, we were probably a little louder than most dinner parties but it was nice just to have them around.
For a friends birthday we wanted to go see spiderman, we rented a theater (it was actually not especially expensive) invited about 20 people who we knew were supervaxxed and responsible enough not to come if they though they might be exposed and had a grand, masked and distanced, time.
I'm just trying to be responsible, I know several people that are immunocompromised and they can't even do half that stuff. I'm trying to be responsible so that they can. When some asshole declares that 'covid is over' I just realize how fucking narcissistic they are.
You and your friends are well off and it looks like you dont have children and can work remote. Thats great!
Unfortunately most are living under wildly different and much more difficult circumstances that they are being asked to bear month after month with no end and with dubious effect.
If half our population hadn't decided covid was a hoax and didn't take even the simplest precautions from the beginning we probably wouldn't be in the situation we are in now.
CDC told us not to wear masks initially. Democrats were vaccine skeptics until Biden won. But who cares? Thats in the past, get vaccinated or not. Go out or not. Just dont try to control others.
Also, the world hasn’t stopped it so it is unlikely ANY US only measure would have done much unless we went fill isolationist which would probably have had worse outcomes.
How much longer are you willing to live like that? Keep in mind that people who decided to move on are living happy and healthy lives without making as many sacrifices. You can call them "narcissistic" but the reality is that this virus is here to stay, regardless of how many people get vaccinated, for a very very long time.
You are welcome to live any way you like, but please don't judge others for examining the situation and deciding how to live their own lives.
i love this viewpoint because your behavior is so similar to what i see among 90% of my friends, it seems logically consistent, and you seem to have arrived at it from your own reasoning/volition.
and then we have the mandates. presumably, your behavior is the same with v.s. without them. as is the case for most people i know. with the exception of my one friend who was building a japanese-style coin-operated 24/7 unstaffed arcade business in a stripmall off aurora. she ditched that a year into the pandemic because navigating the mandates as a business owner is not easy (how does one check vax cards at the door if their business only works because it’s unstaffed? once she does find a solution, how long until the next mandate changes things for her again? it’s settled down a little, but the policy changes were really chaotic through to last summer).
“return to normal” as a phrase is a bit ambiguous. does it mean everyone goes back to living how they did two years ago? or does it mean everyone, within each area of their life, has the option to return to what worked for them then, while keeping the parts of their current lifestyle they prefer? obviously, we can’t grant that level of optionality to every area of life without bifurcating society (e.g. separate schools for in-person vs virtual), which doesn’t sound great. but we can grant that optionality in lots of areas of life that are already adept at catering to different preferences — e.g. restaurants (if you want italian food, go to an italian restaurant), entertainment venues, gyms, and really most small/medium businesses.
i’d love for my friend to be able to open her arcade some day, and i know there are hundreds of other individuals in a similar position as hers trying to bring new things into our community. i think it’s reasonable that we allow a “return to normal” in the areas of life that are already adept at catering to different preferences, and leave the mandates only for those areas in which there’s less optionality (e.g. public transit, schools — for now, etc).
"a year into the pandemic" vaccines were literally just becoming available to the general public. Mandates pre-vaccine were a totally different ball game than mandates now, as far as what would be reasonable in the interest of public safety. I also find it hard to believe that Aurora was requiring strip mall stores to check vaccine cards before any vaccine was even fully FDA approved, and I can't find any evidence of that online either. Are you sure it wasn't something about verifying mask compliance?
an arcade is an entertainment venue. entertainment venues (along with bars, restaurants) are required to check vax cards (i believe that’s a WA requirement, as opposed to a local requirement). i was being approximate when i said “a year”: more precisely i think the vax card mandate was sometime in June? July? a few months after the vaccines themselves had widespread availability.
Generally I agree, this fall was uncharacteristically warmer and sunnier, but out winter had some pretty brutal spots thanks to the arctic river or whatever that was in early jan.
People complain about seattle's wetness a lot, but as someone that's lived here their whole life we generally get a few stright up downpour days, but most days (in the colder months) are somewhere in the overcast and misty to drizzly range.
It doesn't really change my assertions though. Even on days with downpours I'm pretty happy to swaddle myself in rainjackets and waterpoof shoes and take a walk or wait for takeout outside. When we had our little bout of snow this month I took walks every day, but little to no takeout because seattle essentially shuts down at the sight of the first flake.
People over here in France are generally living pretty normally. Far from madness, it's pretty nice. Sure, everyone masks up and whips out their phone for constant QR scanning, but restaurants are still pretty full, trams busses and trains as well, and people are getting together. Schools are in person. It probably helps that home tests are cheap ($25 for 5) and super easy to get.
It's frankly pretty weird that these comment threads are always so ragey and judgey, let alone the ones on Twitter. Everyone should chill a bit and stop reading the news stories stoking fears - at some point the mental effects are riskier than the physical ones, and I'd say that many in this thread are well past this point.
People bitching about restrictions in the US just want something to be mad about, because there really aren't any life-altering ones. Masks on public transit and in healthcare facilities, and in some schools (it is very variable by district). Some cities require proof of vaccination for indoor dining or large events. That's basically it, just as you describe it in France. The only things that have been cancelled lately have been due to staffing issues (e.g. concerts happen unless performers get COVID, schools are open except where the absence rate is very high there may be a brief shutdown, etc.).
I'm in the northeast, and it has been this way for at least 9 months now. Just imagine how little life was impacted by restrictions in some other areas of the US. So IMO it's the people mad about "restrictions" that should calm down with the hyperbole. Yes there are also some hyper anxious pro-lockdown people, but reality doesn't reflect their opinion anyway. I don't get what there is to be upset about.
For those that are so angry about US-based restrictions, what have you been prevented from doing in the last 9 months?
The masks are if you want to go into mass transit or peoples’ businesses, and it’s mostly theater in restaurants - they come off and stay off almost immediately. It’s just common courtesy to others to wear them in public places while omicron is raging.
The QR code scanning is just for dining at the place (not takeout), and for things like long trains and planes. It’s not a big deal, except for the privacy implications.
My point was mostly that people aren’t holding back from going out, despite very high infection rates, and things appear to be mostly fine.
Covid spread throughout the entire world very quickly. "Locking down harder" in any region simply delays the inevitable spike in cases once those lockdowns end.
I mean if you want to argue to close all indoor dining rooms, that's a case you could try to make. I disagree, but at least it'd be a consistent thing to argue for. Opening dining rooms, but then requiring everyone to wear a mask while they walk from the door to the table is pure theater that does nothing at all.
