Where I Live, No One Cares About Covid
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
We can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist, because it infects and kills people anyways. But we also can’t just cancel things because it‘s here for a while and vaccination is very effective at preventing severe cases.
For me, this means getting the vaccines and boosters and wearing masks in essential places e.g. stores and doctor’s offices. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people to do these things even if it’s for the long-term.
I do think it’s unreasonable to ask people to avoid holiday celebrations and weddings and bars everywhere long-term. I especially think half-assed measures like wearing masks in restaurants “except when eating” and putting carefully-planned events online last-minute is unreasonable.
Like having a bar where everyone is just mingling, but they have some store bought croissants so they are a "restaurant."
And businesses skirt the rules anyways. Like I remember many places converted their restaurants to “open”, and did other things to get around covid restrictions
They're not? Logic would dictate that the cohort which is most sociable and least likely to be symptomatic, would be the most likely to cause spread.
“I don’t mean to deny COVID’s continuing presence. (For the purposes of this piece, I looked up the COVID data for my county and found that the seven-day average for positive tests is as high as it has ever been, and that 136 deaths have been attributed to the virus since June 2020.) What I wish to convey is that the virus simply does not factor into my calculations or those of my neighbors, who have been forgoing masks, tests (unless work imposes them, in which case they are shrugged off as the usual BS from human resources), and other tangible markers of COVID-19’s existence for months—perhaps even longer.“
You gaslighting Californians?
I can understand a moral argument to be made for pushing back against authoritarian abuse of power. Ignoring the consensus of the entire field of medicine during a global pandemic is not that argument.
Masks catch the moisture in your breath. It's like covering your mouth when you sneeze.
Imagine someone walks in a room where you are eating, sits in the seat next to you and starts sneezing without covering their mouth.
"Excuse me" you say, "could you cover your mouth? I'm eating here."
"Sorry," they say "I prefer a risk-filled existence over a safe, constrained one."
Kinda missing the point there, friend.
Mask mandates are unnecessary. It is a bunch of elitists in urban areas trying to be big brother.
If a store owner is worried about it, they can mandate for their store.
People don’t care, and you can try to guilt them into caring with crap like this, but you will fail to do anything but look like an elitist donkey.
I don’t know how to put this in a way that will not make me sound flippant: No one cares. Literally speaking, I know that isn’t true, because if it were, the articles wouldn’t be commissioned. But outside the world inhabited by the professional and managerial classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many, if not most, Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over, and they have been for a long while.”
I’ve decided to make that word which cannot be named, like Voldemort.
I’m done talking about the thing to help prevent it, the thing itself, and the thing that purportedly helps the thing from spreading but behaves more like a sign of which team you’re on.
By which European standards? Last month we took a vacation to Italy (Naples and Rome), where pretty much everyone in stores wore masks and restaurants were rigorous about checking vaccination cards.