The thing I don't miss is that I got sick every single Winter. All it takes is one inconsiderate person to not cover their mouth and everyone is getting ill. And it happened all the time.
I had a commute time that ranged between one and two hours over that stretch as I'd lived in a couple of different places, but that wasn't even extreme. I knew people with 2+ hour commutes each way which they did for years on end.
I understand there are a lot of people who need a place to work away from their home, but who is going to voluntarily return to an office when they don't need to just to prop up your portfolio and obsolete businesses? Why should they?
It's like the argument that people should support local businesses instead of buying from Amazon. If Amazon is cheaper and more convenient, why would someone buy anything elsewhere? (It's not like those businesses are going to help with your rent or food costs).
A few years ago I thought personal masking didn't really matter. Wow, I was wrong! And not catching bs colds from weirdos on the bus or the grocery store makes it worth it.
My face isn't that pretty anyway.
Day to day i'm not religious about masking, but for things like public transportation, airplanes, etc I try to always have face protection on.
The standard for AC/H for offices is 3-4.
You can site all the statistics and propaganda in the world about plane ventilation. It clearly isn't enough to prevent viral spread (I don't care about air changes per hour or cfm or anything else, the only endpoint worth discussing is viral spread--I give precisely zero fucks about how fast the air is moving around). I'm using n95s on planes from here on out.
I'll take my mask off to eat/drink in the air, which I didn't do the one time I had to fly mid-pandemic.
I've been on a handful of flights in the last 2 years where the air system didn't work at all, and others where the climate control system was otherwise failing (80°F). This is accentuated by stale air when you embark and disembark when the aux generators aren't providing power.
That's a myth from the early pandemic. Viral dose doesn't correlate with disease severity:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-11-relationship-viral-do...
the likelihood of becoming infected may rise with the size of that "dose."
So a small dose might still prime the immune system even if you don't get sick.
This is correct.
> So a small dose might still prime the immune system even if you don't get sick.
This does not follow.
If you don't get infected following a small dose, you'll have fought it off with your innane or intrinsic defenses. You won't generate any humoral immunity, form T-cells or B-cells or neutralizing antibodies and won't be any better off for the next round with the virus.
Working in a grocery store, especially as a cashier, can be unpleasant to disgusting at times, especially when cash was a bit more common. I think you’re around everything all the time that your immune system tends to beef up a bit.
Conversely, the kids are getting hammered in winter time the last few years after covid after not getting sick between 2020-mid 2021.
I’m not so sure that humans evolved to avoid illness, despite how unpleasant it is.
Wearing masks does not compromise one's immune system: it just shields you from exposure to respiratory bugs. Kids are getting hammered because people have relaxed on wearing masks, so they are now more exposed than before.
I have always looked at Japan as a mixed bag of things that the entire planet will be doing in 10-100 years (yes, even sex bots and other forms of liberal individualism). I am so glad that at least parts of the west have caught onto the practice of masking up when sick, if there were ever a silver lining from the pandemic.
I'm still looking for a solution to the mask straps biting into my ears on planes, but a few hours of discomfort is still way better than being sick when I get to/back from my destination.
If you fly a lot, there are also very likely commercial solutions for this.
Try getting a proper N95 instead of a flimsy ear-loop mask: https://www.amazon.com/3M-Aura-Particulate-Respirator-9205/d...
COVID-19 is 10.5 um. Water droplet to carry them just a tad bit above.
Hydrostatic testing to get that 50um in N-95 mask were based on 8.0 pH Latex hydrostatic droplets.
COVID-19 best infection spread rate is at 5.8-6.2 pH (opposite spectrum of Latex's pH).
So, more will pass thru that mask unhindered.
Nonetheless, the dispersal rate is lower only if the infected wears it. Tough to make a public policy on that to this day
The mask is rated to capture 95% of airborne particles generally, but it’s efficiency doesn’t correlate to the spacing within the filter media.
Now if they would construct a hydrostatic test using 5.8 to 6.2 pH aerosolizer, then the data becomes more robust.
Give it a few years without exposure, and you will have very hard time if you have to get exposed again. I did 2 years for remote work with a single day with long exposure each week, after a few years with low exposure.
I then had a kid, it took at least 3 full years once it got to day care for my immunity to get trained back to normal. Middly sick at least 4 months total per year, strong fever and/or weakness 4-5 times per year.
I'm all for limited exposure to dangerous infections, but for the sake of everyone, we have to keep our immunity active to stay healthy, and this happens by getting sick times to times.
Or do you think kids get enough exposure at school? (assuming schools don't keep going remote too)
edit: I suspect the article only states that life long immunity does not wears off. I don't challenge that at all.
> we have to keep our immunity active to stay healthy, and this happens by getting sick times to times
Is going to the grocery store, out to dinner, having friends/family over not enough exposure? Genuinely curious about the science if you need to be around kids (directly or indirectly via co-workers) to build or maintain a "strong immune system".
If anything I'd expect the lack of activity to cause your immune system to be hyper-aware and you'd get less sick. Trade-off is allergies and autoimmune disease.
That's not really how it works afaik. The immune system can only respond quickly and effectively to the things it knows. If you spend 3 years outside society and you come back, your system will be 3 years behind on disease evolution. When you finally do get exposed, you'll have a much stronger immune response because it's an unknown threat.
Compare this to a immune system that has also never seen the latest variant, but has seen the one before -- it'll be much more effective at recognizing and fighting the threat early, and the person might not even notice they were exposed.
Is that true? I'm not sure. Another question is what does it mean to be "known". I'd get a cold or a flu every year. At what point has the virus mutated sufficiently so that I don't have an effective immune response? This is also a great point to get vaccines. Best of both worlds.
I don't think anybody really knows, this is an active area of research. What is known is that, the more similar a virus is to something you already had, the more likely your immune system is to be able to respond quickly enough that you don't show any symptoms and don't even realize you were exposed. And if you do show symptoms, it'll be more likely that they will be much milder than for somebody who wasn't exposed previously to something similar.
Given what we could read about covid, exposure is a combination of length and probability of sharing air with sick people. Public transport is a short exposure with many people, evening with friend, long exposure, but less people. Kid: well for all the sickness they have bad immunity for, and the long length of exposure, you have good chances ti get something that you never had or have no immunity for anymore.
My experience is that I now use public transport every day and I have two kids, I get sick time to times, but much less than a few years ago.
I rode the subway every day for years and rarely got sick, but a few weeks of a kid in daycare and it was all coming at me at once.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-...
I don't have citations handy, it's just something I've seen mentioned here and there some months ago, as a possible explanation why after 2 years of lockdowns, many more people seem to catch the common seasonal diseases.
Some things like the uptick in RSV can be explained by children being initially exposed to RSV a bit later than usual, but for your average adult that's not really relevant.
When I visited Hong Kong in 2008 I was amazed by how many people wore masks (presumably because they were either feeling sick or were worried about getting sick). It's too bad that post-COVID masks have become associated with authoritarian government overreach in many parts of North America.
I wonder why?
Everybody is always entitled to their values and preferences of course, but it's really hard to see how a chance of getting sick once a year is a worse outcome than a guarantee of missing out on normal society permanently, particularly when you can do everything about as perfectly as you possibly can and still get sick.
Besides, if "normal society" means miserable unpaid commutes and cold offices with bad cafeteria food and a lot less time and energy for the things in life that really matter, then I'm quite happy to miss out on that. I'm not living in some kind of self-imposed total isolation, if anything I'm more active outside work these days, and my whole life feels a lot healthier (and that sure helps too)
It's really depressing that even with the pandemic, the ratio of people covering their mouth didn't seem to have increased at all.
Once remote working has started we said screw that and moved further away from downtown. Now we own a nice apartment with a garden (unthinkable before) and go the city only when required.
Mine (Dublin, Ireland) is still about an hour on the tram (for EUR 2) from where I live, so I'm not saying it's perfect, but my manager, in the Atlanta area, is a two-hour drive away from the office. That and he starting meetings at 6AM (because Dublin) makes me support remote working even more for the ATL teams.
I gladly traded the rich cultural life and world-class restaurants for a walkable city and a house with a small park one gate away from the back yard.
Even considering the occasional invasion of the house by a bunch of screaming little 10 yo's who are my daughter's gang (who lives mostly on the same street).
Such an amazing movie...
You know when fluoridation first began? Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, rbanffy. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Pre-pandemic, my drive averaged 1hr to the office, and 1.5hrs back. So, I'm wasting 2.5 hrs of my life every day... to do the same exact job I do from home (not to mention cost of gas/car maintenance).
I also get more done at home, because I haven't reduced my hours any, but I don't waste time in the break room grabbing coffee and chatting. I don't know what the overall data is, and if I'm just a productive outlier or if that's a general trend.
If I'm ever required to commute again, I 100% view it as a pay decrease.
Let's say you work from home and make your lunch. Previously you'd buy ready-to-eat lunch. While you still buy ingredients and pay for energy, you don't pay for someone to prepare it and then sell to you, prepare the housing of the eatery and so on. Effectively some GDP was lost. Next, let's say you grow some of your own veggies...
Honestly, remote work allowed us to stay in the city (our preference), if I'd had to keep commuting I don't know if raising my kid would have been workable for us.
Living further out is much nicer when you have kids - more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore.
I'm part of a DINK couple and could not imagine leaving an urban area. There's so much more to do, so much easier to get around, etc.
I suspect we'll be in that space in about 10 years or so, when being next to a good hospital with excellent geriatric services will be more important than having trees to climb.
> more space, more freedom for the kids to move around, more trees for them to climb and places to explore
Or „nowhere“ as in doing commercialized trendy stuff? Of course, when pop culture is pushing that lifestyle and people are glued to the screens, it ends up as a sad state of affairs.
Last time I checked, teenagers still eat food and socialize in the physical world. It's not a huge reach to understand how suburbs stifle and constrain that (nor has that changed particularly in the last 20 years).
It was frankly so miserable I have resolved never to live in anything even remotely approaching a suburb again - in the UK I’d countenance the idea of living in a village with at least two pubs, but actually live in a city where I can walk to dozens of different events, bars etc every night if I want to and never see a situation where I would accept anything less.
The NYC suburbs are vastly different to suburbs in TX or CA, of course, and many are much more livable simply due to having a train to NYC.
As an urban father of a three-year-old I'm actually anxious about how much stuff seems to be 21+ or expensive in my city (Baltimore). In principle we're a short electric scooter ride from trendy eateries, coffee shops, theaters, music venues, etc. But my wife is super-scared of crime and traffic so I don't know if this will actually translate into him being more independent than a typical suburban teenager.