I compared it to AIDS and speculated that “everyone will know someone who died”
Last summer it looked like I’d been wrong
Now I don’t know what to expect, there’s no comprehensible future, anything could happen
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While trying to look up early social media stuff about the pandemic i happened upon this Gem from the previous administration in mid 2020:
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Personally, I still think masks are a distraction
but it’s not about me
My opinion is irrelevant—public health is about somebody somewhere making some goddamn decisions and then everybody else going along with it for the common good, regardless of our reservations
This is what makes those celebrity anti-vax athletes so shocking—people who are supposed to physically embody “team spirit,” and accept expert coaching all day every day, suddenly have a problem with it when it actually matters
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Yeah I distinctly remember sitting in a hallway at work almost exactly two years ago telling one of my coworkers “nah this isn’t gonna be a thing. Sure, maybe it’ll be like SARS but it won’t be a problem.” A coworker I went on to see twice more before we all immediately went WFH in Feb '20; she quit later that year and I quit the next year so we never worked together again. (Neither of these are fun /r/antiwork stories, just normal IT stuff.) My boss was incredibly prescient and it helped my 60+ person team go WFH in two days, which was great. Props to him.
It is crazy that we’re coming up on two solid years of this for most of us.
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i think in general it is good to dismiss, or at least hold lightly, anecdotal evidence.
for instance, pink eye and loss of hearing are *not" things that ive heard have since been linked to covid. and things like loss of smell is weirdly associated with mild cases of covid, not severe ones ( and now with omicron loss of smell apparently is somewhat rare. )
meanwhile brain fog can definitely be a thing ( and personally terrifies me ) so that list turned out to be a nuanced 50/50 - and who could know before the science was in?
i think health reporting is terrible handling ambiguity in the best of times. a middle ground of - we are hearing these things but they’re as yet unproven is good. but then even that can drive people to eating horse paste.
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I got really sick in January of 2020 (it turned out to be bacterial, but my white blood cell count was like 23,000, so…) and I remember thinking, “Could it be? I just got back from travelling to Taiwan* and all.” All of the doctors that I visited dismissed the possibility that I could have the new coronavirus that was becoming a big deal in China because I had not actually travelled to China.
*There were a lot of Mainland Chinese tourists in Taiwan, and I could tell because they were already being made to get in a separate line at passport control and that was a long line.
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Whatever people were saying in 1/2020, they were spreading the disease as they were saying it. No masks.
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Sarah Cody - Santa Clara County’s Public Health Officer who gave the word for the first U.S. lockdown order for the seven counties of the Bay Area (order was on March 16th, with the first detected case Jan 31).
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Well, in the early stages, the odds were that their blind guesses would be correct.
Eg, SARS, Nikavirus, Swine flu. All those were “crises” that then fizzled to “nothing.”
Trump, of course, (for reasons known only to himself, still) was in denials months and months after it was an obvious, undeniable epidemic.
Props to Jim Cramer! He’s usually the witless idiot making errant stabs: here, he was practically incoherent in his apprehension.
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Not hearing loss per se, but tinnitus is one of the unusual long covid symptoms. Not much it can’t mess up, when you come with down to it. If there is microvasculature or neurons involved, someone has had an issue with it. 2 years ago, WDKS. 2 years later, still, WDKS, but we are better aware of at least what we don’t know.
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I think SARS and MERS helped give me the wrong initial impression. Both of those looked like they had real potential as alarming pandemics, then mostly didn’t for reasons I was never clear on(but which didn’t include notable medical advances or atypically effective public health measures).
Those cases obviously proved nothing in terms of how bad something could get; but they did provide instances of situations that looked really dire going better than expected without terribly obvious cause.
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The funny thing is that the pandemic was his golden opportunity*. If he had gotten on TV and said that the country must unite under his leadership to fight this common enemy, he would have been the wartime president whose authority must not be questioned. You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream! He would have coasted to victory. And the pandemic would have been much less severe. So it’s a trade-off.
*a Russian kompromat joke is left as an exercise to the reader
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Same here. In retrospect, I’d say we misunderstood those earlier outbreaks, walking away with the idea that we’d worried for nothing, when in fact we’d dodged a bullet.
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Ah, but it was killing Democrats!
This part cannot be forgotten, nor forgiven, ever!
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How that right there isn’t an actionable action by the Trump administration, I don’t know what the fuck is… I mean, seriously…
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I don’t think I came away with the sense that there was nothing to worry about; but those examples did provide a significantly lower lower bound for how serious I could imagine such situations being.
Before SARS, I wouldn’t have believed you if you said that a novel, contagious, dangerous, respiratory pathogen that had already achieved international spread could turn out not to be a serious disaster, even in absence of a vaccine or particularly effective treatment. After SARS, I had to conclude that such a thing was possible, since that’s more or less what happened.
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