Originally published at: This depressing X thread highlights COVID breakup stories | Boing Boing
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Just because they want us to call it X doesn’t mean we need to call it X. I’ma call it Twitter
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Lost band manager / lead tech-head of band, because events of COVID pandemic triggered the toxic conspiracy theorist-“my opinions=medical facts” persona in him we didn’t know about. We were respectful of his opinions, he was -not- respectful to our physical safety. I hope he is healthy, and figures his stuff out.
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I refuse to call it, at all.
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I dunno, my SO still has high Covid anxiety, though not due to any health issues. I don’t have a problem masking most times, and for the rare occasion visit my parents for the weekend or have some other thing like the ren fair where I don’t mask, etc, I just mask around her for ~3 days to be sure I am clear. It’s not a big ask to make someone feel less anxious if you can.
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Exactly. Some of those stories made me feel the “safer” one was kind of lucky to get rid of their inconsiderate partner, though I’m sure it didn’t feel that way at the time.
My beau and I decided early on: we will both adhere to the protocols that the most cautious of us feels safest with. For him, I have masked in situations when I didn’t feel it was that important, and for me, he has skipped certain gatherings that made me nervous (mainly where indoor dining/drinking was part of it), and each of us did this with no complaint.
When I did finally get it this May, we were able to avoid household spread by practicing that same kind of consideration. If you care for someone, it’s really not much to ask.
ETA: 6 people a day are dying in my little state and wastewater is showing relatively high rates in my county. This is not anywhere near over.
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Sounds like a lot of people got out of toxic relationships with selfish assholes. I’m sorry they had to find out that way, though.
I wear a mask every time I leave the house, and I’ll probably keep doing so, even if covid stopped being an issue (though it doesn’t look like that’ll ever happen), just so I can do my part in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses. I can’t imagine not being willing to do that to protect a vulnerable loved one, when I’d do it for strangers.
I was honestly confused by the “X” in the headline. Took me a while to figure it out.
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… it still says “twitter.com” in my address bar
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And it should be “Xitter”
Pronounced as the vulgar colloquial with the definition “one who defecates”, also slang for outhouse or toilet…
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COVID wastewater levels were 4529 copies/ml at the height of the Omicron surge in early 2022.
Today, they’re 512 copies/ml, approximately 90% lower, when this article claims that COVID levels are ostensibly “high”. They’re not high by any definition of the word.
You should absolutely get vaxxed with any of the three recently approved seasonal COVID vaccines, wear a mask, and continue to distance to keep safe. But there’s some truly unnecessary fear-mongering going on in this article.
Have you seen anything recent correlating the wastewater stats to deaths/hospitalizations?
I haven’t looked yet. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around our current state stats (about 6 deaths/day, population 1.3M) and putting them in context of the overall level of danger right now.
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I’m a professional number-cruncher, and I think it’s unclear.
I believe you mentioned being from Maine? In 2020, there were around 3000 heart disease deaths in Maine; roughly 8 per day.
Traffic deaths in Maine seem to hover around 160 / year, or under 0.5 /day.
So your Covid death rate is around 3/4 the heart disease rate, and 12 times the car crash death rate.
In my view, that’s serious enough to take seriously.
On the other hand, Covid tends to kill older or unvaccinated people. Vaccination reduces mortality by a factor of about 10, and being in the 50 to 65 year old age bracket is about 8 times safer than being over 65. I like the bar graph in this article from March 2022 that explains this pretty well. So that crude number of 8 deaths per day might be more like 0.1 deaths per day in your demographic: 8 ÷ 8 ÷ 10 = 0.1
And on the other other hand, none of the mortality data tells you much about long Covid, which - last I heard - was practically unaffected by immunization status. I’m self-employed in a very thought-intensive job: I can’t have months of brain-fog.
ETA: on still another hand (gonna have a statue of Quon Yin if we keep this up), 6 deaths per day in a population of 1.3 M sounds high to me. All of Australia (pop around 26 M), is running around 3 deaths per day with 20 times the population.
Given all the above, I’m one of those still-masking folks. It’s maybe worth noting that I’m oblivious to fashion so I don’t mind how I look. And I grew up in a place where a cold winter day was -40 C (same as -40 F). You wore a scarf over your face when outside in winter, so because of my childhood memories, feeling my own warm breath on my face means “yay, it’s time to go outside and play!”
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And rightly so! I thought it must be due to our elderly population, but must’ve misheard originally and just double-checked. It’s 6 per week. So, still higher than traffic accidents, but not 12 times higher.
Thanks for the context. And I also like that bar graph.
At the height of the Omicron surge, when wastewater levels were high, there were 33.64 deaths/week of unvaccinated people per 100k pop due to COVID, and 3.33 deaths/week of vaccinated people per 100k pop due to COVID.
Assuming that your state roughly mirrored national levels of COVID cases, vaccination rates and deaths, that would be around 437/week deaths of the vaccinated and 43/week deaths of the vaccinated.
I saw your follow-up that the number was currently 6 per week, and I assume that would be a mix of the vaccinated and unvaccinated. With a population of 1.3M, it’s clear that is far lower than the peak nationwide during the Omicron surge.
While this does not indicate there is no risk, and nosaj’s breakdown makes a lot of sense here, neither current COVID wastewater levels or death rates can be reasonably described as “high” by the standard of peak rates of prior years.
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True. But compared to recent past, it can. And that’s what they’re talking about in the article you linked - higher than the last 6 months. Not to focus just on deaths, here’s our current case load:
I don’t know how this compares to other seasonal stuff. But having gotten this once and dealt with some long COVID, I don’t want to get it again.
Anyway, to the original topic of the post, whether it qualifies as “high” or not, ignoring living companions’ pleas for caution is not cool.
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