My wife and daughter met at Aldi this morning because this is the day all the weird advent calendars are put out and sell out.
She said she hasn’t seen so many masks wearers in months, old people young people just about everyone was wearing a mask.
I wonder if RSV is scaring them.
If the flaws of the article don’t discredit it, then what should?
It sounds like people really, really want Covid-19 to be the work of human agency, malevolent or just careless, rather than face the reality of unpredictable, uncaring and sometimes deadly dangerous nature.
Certainly a question for Yglesia…
Agreed. If things are a conspiracy theory, it means that there is someone to blame.
I think that the scariest thing to most folks, not unreasonably so, is not that there are evil, stupid or clumsy people out there. We already know this to be true. It is that nature, as a whole, takes no notice of us, and does not care. To a virus, we are just feedstock. It is easier on the mind to think that this thing was cooked up in a lab, because that gives us some impression of being in control. The hard truth is, while it is impossible to prove a negative, there is a long genetic trail of related viruses in the wild, and no real need to invoke malevolent or clumsy scientists to get where we are now. I, too, read The Stand, and imagined horrible consequences of stupid actions in virology labs. And it still may happen. But I see no evidence that this one is such a consequnce.
Some people would never be convinced it wasn’t man-made no matter what evidence was discovered, but at the current point in time the specific animal origins of the virus are still fairly uncertain.
It didn’t take very long at all before we had strong evidence through gene sequencing of viruses in infected animals that the 2012 MERS virus was transmitted to humans from infected camels, or that the 2003 SARS-CoV outbreak in Guangdong originated in a population of infected palm civets. If similar evidence was discovered for SARS-CoV-2 that would help convince some (but clearly not all) people that this wasn’t man-made.
There have been fairly convincing studies showing that the seafood market in Wuhan was the epicenter of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak but much less evidence pinpointing the specific animals that it may have spilled over from. The best paper I’ve seen on it is the one in Science from July 2022 and it talks about multiple plausible animals but explicitly states “We also lack evidence of an intermediate animal infected with a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor virus either at the Huanan market or at a location connected to its supply chain, such as a farm.” So there’s definitely still a lot to learn about the origin.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
Edit to add:
Here’s what the “Lancet commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic” said in their September 2022 report:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01585-9/fulltext
Our daughter and husband went to see Nigel Ng (Uncle Roger on YouTube) at a 3,000 seat theater in Detroit last night.
Someone took a crowd shot from the stage, she sent it to me and asked if we could find them in the crowd. Wasn’t hard, they were the only ones wearing a mask. She said there were a couple other people but basically no one was wearing a mask.
We raised her right, not giving a crap what anyone thinks and do what she thinks is right no matter what anyone says and she found a husband on the same page.
Of course I have to avoid her now until I now she didn’t pick up a virus.
On my flight back from Dallas recently- I think I was the only person wearing a mask.
On the way there - maybe 10%
I wore N95s last time I flew. Thankfully I was on a Canadian carrier and the rules were ‘masks mandatory’ - not sure if that’s still in place here or not, but I was really glad it was.
I don’t trust people to not fly when sick, since they’ve usually dropped a boatload of cash and don’t want to lose out on it thanks to greedy airlines that never want to give your money back. It’s like the worst case scenario for incentivizing sick people to go anyway, and the worst case scenario for transmission of airborne diseases.
I hope I don’t have to fly again for a long time, but if I do I’ll be buying a fitted mask before I go and not eating/drinking during the flight.
I’m flying again this month - January & End of February.
I have to say - my precautions there seem to have been effective. Mask up. With a real N95. Take a window seat so no one on one side. Blow the filtered air full blast on me. Bundle up because of the air blowing.
Last week we saw some relatives we hadn’t seen in person for a while, they told us a couple months ago they flew out to the west coast for a vacation. They said on the plane no one was wearing a mask and they decided it was safe so they did not wear masks.
Can you guess how this ended up?
They spent their vacation sick and quarantined in their condo because they had covid within a few days of landing. They said it wasn’t pleasant.
Weird how the more wealthy (and, by implication, more educated) you are, the more likely you are to be vaxxed and boosted. You would think those same folks would know all about the Deep State Conspiracy and avoid the Magnetizing Fauci Ouchie. I guess not…
Or how your health and access to care are dependent upon your income. And your ability to get time off.
Wait. There are cheese advent calendars? And hot sauce? How was I not aware these were things before? Like hot sauce and cheese together would be the best thing ever.
I cannot access the link, is that the bivalent vaccine? I did not not know that needed a booster.
