That's our local bar in Monterrey, Mexico [1]! We received some paper flyers with a QR when we had our first lockdown, it's nice seeing it pop up in HN.
If anyone's wondering, the bar is still open and operating on a very limited capacity, which has made it much nicer in my opinion. Also, the usual jazz quartet has been replaced with a trio with much younger musicians, since understandably the older musicians don't want to play in a bar during a pandemic.
When you see the owner, please tell they to add their address including city and country somewhere. I was wondering where in the world they were located and I couldn't find it anywhere, not even in their FB page.
How is Monterrey for tourism? I've always been more interested in what Mexico is for most Mexicans than the typical tourist spots. It seems that Monterrey is the most "metropolitan" city in Mexico.
I've lived here for 10 years, so I might be a little biased. Monterrey is by far the most "americanized" city in Mexico, no doubt, and it's mostly a business and industrial hub.
As for tourism, there’s not much to do, at least not when compared to other Mexican cities with more heritage and culture. Being a big metropolitan city, there are many fine restaurants and entertainment attractions, and for me the stand-out landmark is Chipinque, a federal park in the mountains inside the city. You can go there to walk, hike, or ride, and you get a very nice view of the metropolitan area.
All in all, if you were making a tourist trip to Mexico, I’d recommend you pick some place else before coming to Monterrey. However, if you get to come here as a business trip, you’ll definitely have a nice time!
The problem is people saw China bring the situation under control in under six weeks and thought that containment rather than management was also an achievable goal here. They therefore interpreted the term "flatten the curve" in that context and assumed it would lead to containment. What they didn't see (and what was never really talked about) is just how extreme China's eventual response to COVID was relative to the constraints placed on Americans.
The Chinese were placing everyone under house arrest, mandating mask use, monitoring everyone's movements at checkpoints, temperature checking anyone who left their house when possible, banning people from going outside more than X times per week, forcibly quarantining, arresting non-compliant people, shuttering every non-essential business under the strictest interpretation of "essential", blocking internal travel, physically isolating cities, requiring quarantine when returning from traveling abroad, etc. The US government didn't really do any of that. To anyone aware of the contrast in national responses, it was very obvious that we would not be able to replicate China's success and that COVID would be around until we got a vaccine.
They didn't have to maintain the draconian initial lockdown the whole year though. A few months in they were opening things back up and thoroughly testing everyone that came into the country to keep it from being reintroduced while maintaining the monitoring to catch new cases. To all outward appearances it worked. The failure in the US wasn't inevitable, the US didn't even implement the basic versions of fever monitoring and test and trace, this whole time there have been two places that have temperature checked me; the courthouse and an store for a shared glass blowing studio. We have a lot of the same tools, medical quarantines, food distribution so people don't have to leave their houses, etc, there's just a massive difference in the attitude towards collective action in the US.
Fever monitoring is a pointless waste of effort. Those thermometer guns are generally inaccurate, most infected people don't have a significant fever, and those who do have a fever often knock it down using OTC medication.
For all we know, China just stopped counting and is accepting whatever new cases or deaths come up.
We know they fake other numbers. There's not reason not to think they aren't faking them here.
If the news wasn't telling me about the Virus all the time, I would not know there was a "raging" epidemic. I only know one person who contracted the virus among my entire family and friends group.
Show me the data. All existing data points to the fact that the Chinese largely beat this and have handled it in a way that is orders of magnitude more effective than the Americans. That includes anecdata I have coming from internal sources who have no reason to lie. If there was ANY data suggesting otherwise, you would have heard about it: they couldn't contain news about the original outbreak or any follow on outbreaks.
A few months into this, basically every single American media outlet was tripping over themselves to defend American values when it was abundantly clear that they were impeding our ability to successfully respond to this crisis. There was a huge appetite for bashing China / authoritarianism and pointing out the universal superiority of our system. The fact that we have largely heard nothing about the Chinese response (no criticism, no praise, no critique, not even general acknowledgement that it was much different than ours) from the government or the media suggests that it was a success whereas our efforts were a colossal failure and we don't want to talk about it or admit it: this situation doesn't align with the story we tell ourselves ((freedom and democracy) > authoritarianism, always).
> If the news wasn't telling me about the Virus all the time, I would not know there was a "raging" epidemic. I only know one person who contracted the virus among my entire family and friends group
We are basically a year into this with 500K dead and counting. How many citizens need to die before people stop feeling the need to create throwaway accounts to announce that this whole thing is overblown.
What data am I gonna show you? the only available data says "they defeated it" and it comes from the state government.
>We are basically a year into this with 500K dead and counting. How many citizens need to die before people stop feeling the need to create throwaway accounts to announce that this whole thing is overblown.
Like I said, I literally only know one soul who got this. They recovered in two days. My Aunt & Uncle are emergency room nurses and say that it's overblown _now_ (last April? was definitely bad).
I also don't know anybody who dies from the seasonal flu that claims a lot of people too.
"overblown_now" but April was bad? In April we were seeing roughly 2K deaths per day. The average the last month has been over 3K. Or perhaps you live in Taiwan, or NZ where they actually handled COVID properly. But in the US, it's been a shitstorm.
I literally don't know anybody. I'm not being facetious, though I'm incredibly frustrated watching my city melt away, but I just haven't seen it. I would've expected bodies on the sidewalk given how stringent everything has been.
Was there a reliable test in Feb 2020 at the time of the WHO article?. Who is to say that they are reporting the numbers correctly? For most of Jan 2020, china claimed covid was mild and wasn't spread human to human (and the WHO backed them up for some time as well).
There likely aren’t non-American sources for American data either, or non-European sources for European data. The only people with access to a given country’s data are the authorities of that country. Health statistics are not like election monitoring.
I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations.
First masks were unnecessary and hand washing was crucial. Now it’s essentially the reverse. It helps to wash hands of course but we realize it’s less of a vector.
Then various governments said it’ll be over by summer. Then various governments said it’ll be a year.
No one was attempting to gaslight; this was the culmination of millions of professionals doing their best to make sense of the situation, and occasionally, uncertain terms being communicated incorrectly. This is normal. The decision to perceive non-optimal performance in an incredibly complex situation as an attack on a population is yours, and you’re welcome to it. I simply don’t see the point.
> I think the error here is perceiving errors from medical authorities as having emotional or manipulative motivations.
I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid. Dont want to start was flamewar here but just pointing out a flaw in your response. That was factually a 'emotional or manipulative motivation', right or wrong.
> I think you might be forgetting medical authorities approving certain protests as being more important than containing covid.
Can you provide some examples? I googled around and found this [1] which seems like a reasonable summary of the Covid-related consequences of the George Floyd protests. The "reasons it seems like it was OK" doesn't seem too divergent from what many medical professionals are saying (don't gather indoors, wear masks, wash hands).
I'd also like to point out that institutional racism and police brutality are public health crises with uncountable effects on the health of Black Americans. Further, when you consider that Covid-19 has had far worse effects on communities of color, and that many essential workers are people of color, the protests don't seem that unrelated.
> “Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential,” Dhillon said. “The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.”
> "Staying indoors all the time in a pandemic is equivalent to an abstinence-only policy,"
> For her part, Patel says the core tenants of harm reduction fit into public health doctors’ broader obligation to protect human rights while also helping people stay safe. "You’re describing a broader human rights-based approach to policy and medicine," Patel said. "These are the tenants of human rights."
> "There’s broad recognition that racism is one of the top public health issues of our time," Beletsky said.
> "Racism is a public health problem," the health department tweeted Monday. "In New York City, Black and Brown communities face the disproportionate impact, grief and loss from the COVID-19 pandemic on top of the trauma of state-sanctioned violence."
> “If people were to understand that racism, and all of the social and political and economic inequalities that racism creates, ultimately harms people’s health,” Boyd says, they would see that “protest is a profound public health intervention, because it allows us to finally address and end forms of inequality.”
> "We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19," according to the letter writers, many of whom are part of the University of Washington's Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises."
The point isn't really about institutional racism or police brutality, per se. The virus doesn't know or care about your cause or ideology, it spreads through a crowd regardless.
The point is that there might be reasons why violating social distancing and lockdown mandates might be worth it. Protesting police brutality is one reason. Avoiding unemployment and accompanying mental health issues is another. One of these protests got the public approval of health care professionals and the other didn't. There was an entire movement called White Coats for Black Lives who endorsed the protests. Again, worth it. However, there's an entire class of folks who don't have options for remote pajama jobs. The protests against lockdowns was about avoiding the devastating effects to their lives.
Not sure why the response was surprising: one group was protesting police brutality, and the other was protesting the exact pandemic rules that the CDC (etc.) was pushing. It would be a bit weird for the CDC to say "hey, we need to keep businesses shut down and people should stay inside, but it's cool if you want to go out and protest that requirement, in direct violation of the requirement itself".
And sure, there's a political/optics component. Disapproving of protests against police brutality would have been an incredibly bad look, much worse than disapproving of protests against pandemic safety measures. That shouldn't require any kind of explanation or evoke any surprise.
One group was violating the lockdowns out of a need to be heard concerning police brutality, the other group was violating lockdowns to preserve their livelihood because they can't work remotely. It wasn't just "hey we think this is dumb and we wanna go to Disneyland". This shouldn't evoke surprise either.
Sure and I don't want to minimize the suffering of people affected by COVID-19, either directly or economically. But there really is no comparison with the systemic violence and racism that Americans of color have experienced for 400 years.
Ok, fair but it's not really a comparison. It's more a question of what is a threshold for acceptable violation of lockdown orders. It doesn't really matter if Reason X is N% worse than Reason Y. The scale of each protest fully explains the scale of the problem.
Totally, and I think it's wholly unreasonable to tell someone who's lost their income for months to just chill and stay inside. I think that's the correct advice, but I also think it's not gonna work. I fault our idiotic government for failing to help us when we needed it most. People were right to be infuriated, and I think this shows that when government fails--either to address systemic racism or to provide assistance in a pandemic--everything gets worse.
We shouldn't be faulting protestors or doctors here, we should be faulting our leaders.
'"Prepare for an increased number of infections in the days following a protest," the letter says. '
> “The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.”
This is obviously an emotional response. She didn't do A/B testing of various activity outcomes on public health and base her conclusions on that. Can't somone simply say going to church is good for metal health of the population, she didn't obviously measure the outcomes of that activity.
Sure, my point is that the medical professionals responding to the protests were acknowledging that racism is a public health crisis and that the protests are both deeply relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic, and even more important than containing COVID-19. They also compared those protests to other gatherings like religious services, social events, and anti-mask/lockdown protests and said those gatherings were not as important as containing COVID-19.
From where I sit, I think they pretty well explained why they think the BLM marches in the wake of George Floyd's murder were justified. I certainly wouldn't say they had "emotional or manipulative motivations", a characterization which seems completely off base.
anything that's not based on scietific hypothesis is obviously an 'emotional response', how is this even a controversial statement.
Can you point me to the study for public health outcome differences from protests vs going to church. And what what their scietific criteria for where to draw the line was.
Overdose deaths definitely spiked in the early months of the pandemic. I haven't been able to find anything after 5/2020, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that no one's in the pink of mental health right now, and that means the vulnerable among of us are much more at risk.
But I don't think doctors are making decisions about advice based on emotions. COVID-19 is the most likely cause of death for people 25-44 [1] (supplanting unintentional opioid overdose deaths). COVID-19 has a hugely disproportionate effect on communities of color [2]. Systemic racism also causes deaths; look at asthma for example [3].
Finally, even the CDC is kind of at a loss as to what to do about overdose deaths [4]. Essentially they're like "get more naloxone and get more treatment."
> Who are they to decide which population is expendable.
I get where you're coming from here but, I don't think it's as simple as "lockdowns kill people" because:
- Not imposing a lockdown also kills people
- Even in the absence of a lockdown order, people are hesitant to get together
- There are lots of ways to socialize and get outside that are very low risk (pods, outdoor activities)
- COVID-19 deaths are far, far outstripping opioid overdose deaths due to lockdowns (the numbers I've found show that COVID-19 deaths exceed all opioid overdose deaths, not just the total YoY increase).
But if I could summarize what I think your points have been, I think your argument is broadly that doctors treated George Floyd's murder and the subsequent protests differently than hardships in other communities, and that at least indicates some level of emotional reaction if not outright bias. But I think they themselves have explained why they reacted differently, and I think the data (gathered by medical researchers and social scientists) back them up.
I don't understand how protests had any effect on asthma outcomes among POC.
Are you saying that they calculated
deaths caused by covid protests < deaths prevented from potests effecting health outcomes of POC.
Hence Protests OK.
deaths from depression caused from isolation < deaths from covid
Isolation OK.
If so, can you show me how they calculated,
'deaths prevented from potests effecting health outcomes of POC'
> > I think the data (gathered by medical researchers and social scientists) back them up.
what data is this ? There is no way they gathered any data within 1 week of when the protests started. Thats just too crazy of a timeline. If they are saying that collected some secret data to prove that protests will save more lives than lockdowns in less than week, then that proves how brazen they are in in their lying.
Some ruling parties in Europe were aware early last autumn that restrictions would last all the way to the spring at least (and regardless of case numbers and hospitalization), but they never stated that overtly. They preferred to claim that measures were just a short-term, temporary thing, and then when those measures were set to expire, they were just renewed again on ostensibly a short-term basis. This was done because those ruling parties knew that there was massive opposition to long-term lockdowns, and being open and honest with the public could lead to their defeat in the next elections.
1. Lots of outright lies, for example Chinese people saying the truth getting arrested, WHO toeing the CCP line (for example claiming there was no human-human transmission) when it was obviously a lie already, etc...
2. Lots of governments around the world using the lies for their own gains at expense of population, for example in Brazil the media was quick to paint the president as evil, to allow a inconstitutional power grab by governors and mayors (mind you, I am not saying quarantine is bad, I am saying it was done in a extremely illegal manner, and often for corrupt reasons, now a ton of the people involved are going to jail after quickly stuffing all money they could on their own pockets).
3. Lots of politicians lying and trying to pin the blame on scientists, see Cuomo lying about deaths on nursing homes to avoid Trump criticizing him.
4. Tons of corruption in procuring vaccines, masks, remote working tools, catering, etc... some examples are various politicians from multiple countries getting caught getting bribes from chinese manufacturer, politicians forcing lockdowns but maintaining their own business open, that crazy case in hollywood where open air restaurants were shut down but there was even a catering company serving movie production crew in a makeshift open air restaurant right in front of a local restaurant that was forced to shut down...
5. Lockdowns used for supression (see Iran executing the guy that asked why he had to lockdown but religious people didn't...)
Maybe health officials were more misleading where you are, but from everything i saw the "2 weeks" messaging wasn't intended to say that everything would be solved in two weeks of lockdown, it was that after two weeks we would begin to see if a lockdown was effective or not. and it never was effective because our lockdowns are more of a polite suggestion to please not lick strangers than an actual lockdown.
What the parent comment is trying to say is that we did accomplish the goal of those two weeks. The curve was flattened. Your perspective is a result of not living in the universe were it was a lot worse. This isn't the best time line, but it is one of the better ones.
The curve was flattened, but the goalpost changed. We went from flattening the curve to eliminating the virus. With flattening the curve, the question should be "how full are the hospitals"?. Instead, the metric was infection rates.
Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store, and probably don't even know what that is.
Flattening the curve was really about overloading hospitals. The end game is to make covid-19 extinct in the wild, or domesticated in the sense that only relatively harmless variants remain.
Without serious testing and contact tracing that may take a very long time. We completely fumbled the early 2020 chance to contain the virus. The vaccines should decrease the numbers enough that there will be a second chance to contain it, this time with real efforts at contact tracing if we actually want to make the virus extinct.
> Unless you live in New Zealand you probably haven't ever written down your contact information when entering a store
We did that for bars and restaurants in the UK, but it doesn't seem to have done as much good as it was probably just lost or ignored by our abysmal track and trace services...
We also had a QR code system to tag yourself in places, but it fell down because it was firstly optional, and secondly there was no way to tag out so the records weren't that accurate.
We check in with a govt app and QR codes in NSW and all of Australia does this and venues confirm before letting you in. It's integrated into the Service NSW app so I don't need a separate one. Same app where my digital drivers licence is. No paper. In fact I don't carry a wallet here anymore because public transport is with NFC - Apple pay.
We did (still do?) that in San Francisco, but it's incredibly inconsistent. Some restaurants would make a reservation in their reservation system on the spot for you to keep a record of you being there. Others didn't keep track at all.
Meanwhile, we spent last month in Honolulu, and every single restaurant took down our contact info.
Nothing for regular stores in either place, though.
I think the psychological toll of the lockdowns in different countries is highly underestimated.
I myself have no real economical shortcomings due to the lockdown, but even as a person who is normaly a total loner and who can spend weeks completely alone on a excessive hiking trip i am slowly going crazy...
For my wife, who is a highly social character, its even worse.
And i am not the only one in this mindset... what i hear and see in my region let me believe the mood is slowly turning into some sort of "Torches and Pitchforks" way...
Living in a big old house in the country with your family? Your life is probably basically the same as it always was. Potentially better, depending on the work situation. Okay, sure, you're not going on as many holidays, and depending on how strict the rules are where you are, dinner parties are off the cards.
Living in a flat as a single person in the big exciting city? Literally everything you do has been illegal or restricted in some form for almost a year now.
I have no issue with how people choose to live their lives. I'm sure one day when I settle down I'll be in that group too. It sounds lovely.
But we have to be very, very clear about this - a month or two more and I'm going to be in the 'pitchforks and torches' group. There are limits, you can't just delete my lifestyle for a year and counting as a risk-aversion play and expect me to roll over and take it. Nah.
Yes, it's terrible. Even those of us who are "coping" aren't coping terribly well. But ironically the disconnection has made the costs of the disease invisible as well. The zoom funerals. I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back.
The death toll dwarfs every single "disaster" in UK modern cultural history. Aberfan, Lockerbie, Dunblane, Piper Alpha, Grenfell, Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough, Herald of Free Enterprise, Marchioness, Titanic, Lusitania, Harold Shipman: COVID exceeds all of those put together. Invisibly. Any given one of those is dwarfed by the daily COVID death toll.
A rate that starts to rival wartime deaths. At the recent peak the death toll for 19 January was almost one HMS Hood per day.
But those mostly killed people still the prime of their lives, while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different.
Cynical thought: COVID lockdowns are extreme largely because unlike most public health problems it affects the rich too, and the decision-makers behind them fall into the high-risk categories.
Sobering thought: if you think COVID-19 is bad now, wait until there's a pandemic of something like the Spanish Flu that does target and kill the young and healthy too.
> while COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway.
The average years lost is 10 years of life in the US and 16 world wide[1] - and I think you need to reconsider how callous your comment comes across (to me at least, and I would guess others too). [edited: added detail]
I also feel your comment entirely disregards the point made by the parent comment: “I personally know a couple of people who are now effectively long-term disabled with respiratory issues - well enough to leave hospital, but their previous lifestyle can't come back.”
That's not how anyone should assess risk. You can't take an average and assume that it applies to everyone. The elderly hare far more likely of losing 10 years off their lives than young people who are very unlikely to lose 40+ years off their lives. For instance, the chance that I will die from COVID at my age and health are, for all intents and purposes, 0%, according to the CDC. It would be ridiculous for me to take a statistic that is more apt for the sick and the elderly and use that to determine the course of my life.
By the way, the truth can be very callous. I don't think it's particularly useful for you to point out how callous someone sounds on the internet unless the other person has some demonstrable intent of cruelty. We all know that we have the potential to sound like bad people through text online.
The metric you're looking for is QALY "quality adjusted life year". It's studied a lot in health economics but generally disregarded wrt covid because we don't have 2060's actuarial tables yet.
Yes there is evidence that 10-30% of covid infections have not resolved at 6 months
which is roughly what SARS 1 looks like (and those people are still sick). But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.
> But we still can't definitely say that 35 year olds who catch covid will lose 10 years off the end of their life so it's disregarded in our decision making.
That isn’t relevant to the 10 year statistic although it is an interesting point - you are saying the final result for years of life lost due to Covid could be a higher number than 10 years (after we get to finally tally the numbers in the decades to come as people die). Depends on how you paint your statistics I guess. [para edited to add clarity]
The point I made is that an average of 10+ years lost is strikingly different from the canonical “nearly dead elderly don’t matter” argument that I see far too many people use (and which my comment replied to). Obviously averages are very poor indicators when a distribution is wonky, and it is preferably to deep dive into the data.
Note I am all for people doing whatever they want with their own lives - if you want to go to a Covid party I would love to support that. I love taking certain risks myself.
However, when the choices of one age group can kill my mum, dad or friends, I would hope we agree to serious restrictions to help prevent that. With engineering balance to the compromises, given that prevention techniques cause significant human costs.
I am from New Zealand, so I can resoundingly support everyone acting together in concert to protect everyone else (as most kiwis did, with a good outcome for us).
I'm sorry if it comes off as callous, but we're comparing incidents of mass death here and disability-adjusted life years is how insurance companies and demographers do it. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good thing that 500k people have died from COVID in the US, but simply that having same number of young, healthy people getting gunned down in the Battle of the Somme is almost any measure objectively worse.
Do you really not know any young people who have been permanently damaged by COVID? I know multiple people in their 20s and 30s that spent weeks in the ER and will never be the same. I'm always surprised to find people who think the lockdown is excessive. COVID is absolutely no joke even if you're young, it's not the flu. Not even close, you don't want it.
My anecdotal experience is the opposite of yours - everyone I know in their 20s and 30s who had a positive COVID-19 test got through it within a week and it was about the same as the flu.
If my anecdata is irrelevant, then so is yours.
The only people I know who have had permanent damage from COVID-19 in this age range, have all had their trauma caused by excessive lockdown policies.
You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it.
> You know what's even less of a joke than COVID-19? Our histrionic, insane, and completely violent overreaction to it.
Quick question: how would you propose dealing with a global pandemic? Social isolation seems like the most common sense solution, since in 2021 we know how disease is transmitted and how to deal with that.
Social isolation may be the best solution. Fine. Don't force it on us. If it's the right solution, then it will be followed.
I am not going to entertain further the notion that we have locked people into their homes, given trillions of dollars to multinational corporations, and restricted the lives of everyday people, just because of a pandemic that kills less than 1% of the people infected. This is such an obvious cash-grab and overt attempt to impose further fascism upon people, just like what happened after 9/11 in the US with the imposition of the Patriot Act.
> If it's the right solution, then it will be followed.
I'm sorry, I simply cannot let this go unchallenged. Even a moment's thought should demonstrate that that's not the case:
* It may be the objectively-best-solution for society as a whole, but not-best for an individual (for instance, a young healthy individual who is at low-risk for long-term impact for COVID, but who could act as an incubator and carrier to spread it to more vulnerable folks). The overall-harm-done by these free-circulating individuals will, I am willing to bet, be much more than the "harm" done to them by asking them to stay home.
* It may be the best solution, but to recognize that as such requires specialized scientific knowledge that the average person doesn't have. Meanwhile, propagandists are free to influence society as they wish with more-easily-consumable (but, possibly, less true) messages.
* Similarly to the 2nd point - it may be the right solution, but that might not be obvious until late in the process. In this situation, trusting experts and following their advice earlier will reduce the overall harm done.
The calculus of impact here is "what is the harm done by following advice if it's wrong?", vs. "what is the harm done by not-following advice if it's right?". Folks are free to make their own decision on this, but almost-every analysis I've seen suggests that "staying home" is the massively better choice, _even if_ the global pandemic turns out to have been less-severe than first expected (in fact, the opposite seems to be true). All of that is leaving aside the fact that much of the harm done by isolation could have been offset by basic social welfare programs (stimulus cheques, UBI, etc.)
Contrary to the common American mindset, freedom is not, in fact, always an unalloyed good - especially when incentives for an individual are in opposition to incentives for a group. (ironically, I wrote this summary _before_ reading your second paragraph, but it works even better. Your argument that "a previous social program restricted freedoms in an unproductive and unhelpful way, therefore any social program which restricts freedoms is unproductive and unhelpful" does not hold)
* I'm not assuming that you are American, but I _am_ contrasting my position with a mindset that I have noticed disproportionately _among_ Americans.
> Fine. Don't force it on us. If it's the right solution, then it will be followed.
Do you actually, really believe this? Do you really believe that if that the research studies come out and say “hey stay inside” that everyone will read the studies front-to-back and go “oh, it’s in the public interest for everyone to stay inside”? Is this a thing that you think will happen in America?
I have considered it for an entire year. And my response to that is: who cares?
People are still dying from respiratory viruses at a totally unacceptable rate. We're a very sick culture who cannot handle a respiratory illness without freaking-the-fuck out.
We have way bigger problems than COVID-19, which is nothing more than a symptom of those problems.
> If it's the right solution, then it will be followed
Social isolation isn't an opt-in kind of measure. Furthermore, the average person doesn't have the background or tools to evaluate whether it works. It's a public health matter, and you do have to follow the advice of the relevant authorities.
This is like the law against drinking and driving in many countries: you cannot decide to opt-out of this restriction. It negatively affects others who do decide to comply with the restriction. If caught, you will be subject to some kind of penalty (such as having your license revoked), for good reason.
If your country is less restrictive, I'm happy for you.
It's been illegal for me to have a friend over for 100 days.
It's illegal to have a picnic on a park bench.
So yeah, I'm not doing this any more. If you think that's selfish - cool, I'm selfish according to you. I'm not going to kill myself for your social credit score, stop trolling.
What country is that? We've had about 295 days of social distancing -- we recently moved from almost total lockdown to a less restricting stance, which also requires social distancing and discourages gatherings of people.
> If you think that's selfish - cool, I'm selfish according to you. I'm not going to kill myself for your social credit score, stop trolling.
I really hope nobody gets sicks or dies needlessly because of you then.
As for your accusation of trolling: please follow HN guidelines and do not encourage flamewars.
I'm simply refusing the concept that my mental health is "opt-in".
If you don't want to interact with me, that's cool. If you want to ban large gatherings and restrict smaller ones for a period of time, I get it.
When it gets to the point that it becomes illegal to be outside without an excuse, 300 days in, you're just subjecting people to cruel and unusual punishment at this point.
The idea that people are going to die in greater proportion than the damage caused by preventing people from going for a walk to the park and sitting down with a cup of coffee is not backed by evidence, and I absolutely believe that you are trolling if you think we can all just endure this indefinitely. You're just gonna have to throw me in prison because I will treat those basic freedoms as absolute until the day I die.
In the UK it's neither illegal to go outside, nor illegal to have lunch on a park bench as you keep claiming. Your entire argument is false (and selfish).
It's not about you, it's about not spreading disease to others.
I'm not making any cash on this, and I want the lockdown to continue. Because I don't want COVID and have a rudimentary knowledge of how disease is transmitted.
> Social isolation may be the best solution. Fine. Don't force it on us. If it's the right solution, then it will be followed.
I think your own statement is proof that this is not the case. We know social distancing works, yet you don't want to implement it.
> just like what happened after 9/11 in the US with the imposition of the Patriot Act.
I agree that governments will always do this. That doesn't make COVID any less of a threat though. The lockdown isn't the only lever of authoritarian control. There's plenty of others you can fight to increase individual liberty. Things that won't put millions of others (and yourself) at risk.
> I think your own statement is proof that this is not the case. We know social distancing works, yet you don't want to implement it.
I said I don't want to force it on people - I never said it was a bad idea to remove yourself from close contact with strangers during a pandemic. Forcing it on people is how you get deaths of despair, run everyone's businesses to the ground, and ruin every healthy person's life who isn't at risk.
You don't have to force it. Social distancing is a decision an individual makes, and a rational individual would choose to do this if they wanted to live without the risk of getting infected.
> I said I don't want to force it on people - I never said it was a bad idea to remove yourself from close contact with strangers during a pandemic.
Allowing anyone to opt out disproportionately negatively affects people who are unable to isolate for whatever reason: essential job, medical emergency, etc. People not isolating creates more risk for the grocery checkout person or power plant operator, for example.
> Social distancing is a decision an individual makes, and a rational individual would choose to do this if they wanted to live without the risk of getting infected.
It's just selfishness (or at best rank ignorance) to believe that whether or not you personally isolate only affects your health.
We are unable to identify when, where, and how an individual got infected with COVID-19. It is absurd to say that people "not isolating" creates more risk, unless those not isolating are the people at risk in the first place. Those at risk of dying from something as benign as COVID-19 ought to be nowhere near a power plant or a supermarket. The responsibility to not die from COVID-19 is in the hands of the individual at risk of dying from it. If you are that frail and in such poor health, stay away from the public. You don't need a damn law to enforce that, since this is typically what is done naturally in human populations; the sick & frail stay home and out of the public, the healthy live on and try to keep the world turning.
Not the parent poster, but I still think a bunch of people getting killed in a war is worse than dying from COVID, even if they are literally the same people dying in both cases.
The latter is just nature being nature, and while we can respond in some ways to reduce deaths, it will never be perfect. I get that in some ways that feels worse, because there's a feeling of powerlessness. But the former is humans being shitty and murdering each other in the name of nationalism, land, resources, religion, whatever.
It's "natural" for humans to fight too, it doesn't make it pleasant. I don't know that war and disease need to be ranked. Both are horrible and humanity has a long history suffering with both.
We now know enough about the nature of disease that we can be somewhat effective dealing with it. If people embrace the science that is.
“Findings: 236,379 patients survived a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19. Among them, the estimated incidence of neurological or psychiatric sequelae at 6 months was 33.6%, with 12.8% receiving their first such diagnosis. Most diagnostic categories were commoner after COVID-19 ... including stroke, intracranial haemorrhage, dementia, and psychotic disorders.”
It would be interesting to do a relative comparison of physical and psych effects of lockdown versus post-Covid complications. It isn’t clear what the severity for the “33.6%” was.
My mother died of cancer in her mid-40s. She had me pretty young so I had a front row seat to the entire thing. Terrible, terrible thing to go through. I do nothing to reduce my risk of cancer. I just can't live my life like that. Some people can and do. I wish I were one of them.
> If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different.
I think you missed this part of their comment. They were arguing the deaths weren’t the same kind of deaths as in past catastrophes, but the long term ailments are bad and real.
Though I agree the years lost is bigger than people think.
> the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway. If we measured the toll in disability-adjusted life years instead, the comparison would be quite different.
It's a hell of a thing for someone who only had a few short and precious years left, to have those ripped away from them as well.
I'm hard of hearing - people joke that there's no point in wearing ear protection since I'm already deaf. No, the opposite. Because I have only a little hearing left, it's so much more precious to me than normal hearing is for most people. I protect it jealously.
I get your point, but I can't forget the human part of that equation.
> COVID mostly (not entirely, but mostly) advances the Grim Reaper for the old and sick who likely only had a few years anyway
What a disgusting attitude.
How is this different from "Why bother treating cancer patients? Most are going to die early anyway"? Do you think old and sick people simply provide no value to society?
I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way.
This attitude seems to be what's largely made this pandemic so bad: it was viewed as "just the flu" and "only affects people with pre-existing conditions" and so rather than fast, decisive action (reducing burden on healthcare system, preventing deaths, reducing the need for lockdowns and shortening the time they take), many countries instead delayed and did half-measures, causing an exponential increase in cases, which causes everything to be worse. The completely obvious outcome of willing to let old and sick people die to "save the economy" was an economy that's in turmoil as well as a massive death toll.
At some point the exuberance of the young and their ability to determine their own lives has to take priority over the comfort of the old. I am nearing middle age myself and I might be in a risk group, but I want restrictions lifted. People in their teens and twenties need to have their big social coming-of-age and courtship rituals. I see restrictions as an approach to COVID, as the greatest betrayal of young people since May ’68.
> rather than fast, decisive action
It is worth noting that even if there had been the "fast, decisive action" that epidemologist advisers wanted, that would have still imposed border closures in perpetuity. Life might have gone on "like normal" within a country, but people could not interact with their neighbors.
We see already some Australians advocating for hotel quarantine to be obligatory even after COVID, because a year of closed borders has made them regard outsiders as dirty. How long before border closures awaken old nationalist conflicts that freedom of movement and actually getting to know the other side had largely put to rest?
Treating elderly cancer patients does not negatively affect the lives of other people.
Locking down the near-entirety of life has long-term physical and mental health implications that we probably don't fully understand. There have already been suicides directly attributable to COVID-imposed isolation.
It's possible -- and even likely -- that the lockdowns are the right move overall, but the lockdowns themselves have destroyed lives too. Taking measures to protect against something that overwhelmingly affects one segment of the population has a big negative effect on everyone else as well.
> I think you're trying to argue that it's worse if a young, otherwise healthy person dies, but it's really not necessary to rank lives against each other in this way.
No, the GP is pointing out the well-established social-psychology theory that people already implicitly rank things this way, and that this is why the death toll doesn’t have more of a mental impact on people in changing their decisions, even when they hear about it.
It’s the same reason that news like “baby of suburban WASP nuclear family gets kidnapped” turns into a whole-community man-hunt with special ribbons that gets remembered for years, while news like “baby of urban black single mother gets kidnapped” never even gets acknowledged by the community.
When people who are high-status to society go away, the whole of society mourns. When people who are low-status to society go away, only those directly affected mourn.
Any death-toll number, in the mind of most human beings (or rather, of any human being who’s only engaging with the problem using System 1 thinking), isn’t interpreted as “raw numbers” of lives lost, or even QALYs lost — instead, it’s felt as an aggregate of social-status lost, subjective to the listener’s personal social-status ranking function.
For the same reason that people don’t tend to worry much about disasters half-way across the world (the aggregate social-status weight computed through their status ranking function still sums low), people won’t tend to worry much about the impact of a local disaster if it’s only directly hurting local low-status people. Even if it’s indirectly impacting high-status people by taking away people they care directly about, that still doesn’t generate the sort of performative shame for not having acted that comes when high-status individuals are taken†.
And since that very performative shame is what policy-makers rely on as a group impetus to for getting changes pushed through on a society-wide level, a lack of it means that nothing can really change, even when there are clear rational reasons to implement change.
——————
† Evo-psych just-so hypothesis (i.e. take this with 50 grains of salt): people are expected to sacrifice to protect high-status people; people who do so are rewarded by the high-status people; and so, over generations, it became a eusocial instinct to feel an urge toward performative shame when you “fail to protect” a high-status person in your community—even one you never personally knew.
But people aren’t expected to sacrifice for low-status affiliations of high-status people (since it’d “only” be the high-status person, and not the rest of the community, enforcing the norm on you), so a similar eusocial instinct toward performative shame for failing to protect those people never arose.
> 2.4M people is 0.03% of the global population. Heart disease alone kills 0.23% of the global population per year.
One would have thought that by now we wouldn't be comparing fatality rates of a disease that propagates exponentially when left unchecked, with a more or less stable family of diseases that isn't contagious, but here we are, apple pies to orange sorbets.
If we're talking about South Korea, you need to add widespread testing, mandatory quarantine for confirmed cases, and isolation for people possibly exposed.
Regardless, areas of the US that have mask and social distancing mandates still have high case rates. It seems like the driver of surges in those areas are mainly due to people violating other restrictions, like having indoor gatherings.
We are doing so now, by choosing to take the suicides and mental health problems lockdowns will result in over the deaths the pandemic would cause without lockdown. I mean, I'm not opposed to the lockdowns generally, but you can't pretend we aren't making choices about who suffers.
Mostly we're choosing to take our chances on the unknown long-term consequences over the fairly well-understood risks we face now. The people who pay the cost will be different.
Yup, and I wish more people would recognize/admit this. The lockdown decisions may be the best decisions, but let's not pretend we're not trading some deaths for others.
The problem of course being that after extreme isolation and/or social breakdown, even those of us that know full well how large those numbers are start to snap.
Approximately 0.2-0.3% of the UK population has died due to coronavirus.
But my personal risk of psychosis as a result of lockdown is far higher than that, it's starting to approach 1, and when it happens, it doesn't matter if those figures are 10%.
Maybe it's just me, but I really doubt it is. Social unrest is coming if we do this for much longer, I can't see any other way.
I can't live in a world that doesn't allow me to have a friend over for a cup of tea indefinitely; compromise really needs to happen soon.
The death toll is greatly exaggerated. Remember the "shocking" scenes from China? People dying on the streets, running out of coffins. Now we are in theory in multiplies of those infection rates and we don't see that anymore. What happened?
Or maybe not even that. The 6pm BBC radio news just read out the latest 500+ dead and apparent R number. It's just ... not important to the discourse somehow?
I'm in between the two groups. I live with my partner in a mid-sized house in the centre of a small city.
Financially I'm doing great, I've worked throughout and there's literally nothing to spend the money on. My mental health is starting to deteriorate though. I'm not sleeping well most nights, I've turned very much inwards, I feel angry and despairing a lot.
Part of the current problem is that we don't have a timetable. There is no plan. There isn't even a set of criteria around which a plan could be built.
I don't agree that this is "a risk aversion play" here in the UK though - we have well over 100k people dead from this disease, hospitals beyond capacity and all sorts. Cancer treatments being pushed out, causing more death down the line. I don't think you can say that trying to control the spread is unwarranted.
Poorly communicated, yes. Mishandled, screwed up, too little, too late every time, yes. But unfortunately necessary to stop it just getting worse.
One thing that helped for me was to treat this period as also life, rather than something I must sit through.
I still highlight dumb holidays (next week is International I Hate Cilantro Day), read by the candlelight, explore abandoned buildings, ride my bicycle around etc.
I had to delay the plans for which I have strived for many years, but I don't consider that time lost. I got to try things I wouldn't have tried otherwise, and to invest my time in different places.
When I get hit by a wave of despair (usually after they push the dates further), I do something that reaffirms this.
I'm trying to treat it as a good time to get things done.
I can't go anywhere so I have time to finish painting the hallway, fixing the garden etc etc. It helps I also have a home-based hobby (brewing) so I can carry on with that.
I should cycle more, and I'm sure I will when the weather picks up a bit. It really helps my state of mind.
> Part of the current problem is that we don't have a timetable.
I can understand why people want things to look forward to - and why businesses and people whose jobs will reopen would want dates in advance so they can plan.
But the dumbest thing the government could do is schedule reopenings before we know if it'll be safe to reopen.
That's what they did with the second lockdown - announced upfront that it was from to 31st October to 2nd December. Then they kept to their timetable and reopened things even though every metric on https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ made it clear we hadn't stopped the second wave - and now we have a third lockdown.
> But the dumbest thing the government could do is schedule reopenings before we know if it'll be safe to reopen.
Sure. But while there is no end in sight, despair will rule. Whether it's reasonable to want a fixed timetable or not.
This is also why I mentioned criteria - even if not a fixed timetable, we could at least know what sort of criteria would trigger a rule change. I.E. when we get down to X cases per day, X deaths etc etc, the schools will open. If it keeps falling then the rule of six reapplies in outdoor public spaces ...
At least something rather than just being locked down indefinitely.
I agree the lifting of Lockdown 2 was a really poor choice.
> Sure. But while there is no end in sight, despair will rule. Whether it's reasonable to want a fixed timetable or not.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. After the second timeline turns out to be completely made up, people will stop trusting them and add "more distrust of government" to their despair.
So come up with a timeline that's not made up, then.
In the absence of Government leadership, I've had to do it for myself - I have a set date beyond which I will no longer follow social distancing. If I didn't have that, I'd have snapped long ago, which is strictly a worse outcome.
People individually snapping and choosing to do whatever they want is more dangerous than the alternative of the Government explicitly announcing that lockdown is a time-limited policy (and as such providing more support to the hardest-hit individuals).
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
Well, if that's even a good analogy, since lockdown is clearly nowhere near perfect, it's trading life for life.
I'm so confused as to how excess money can be enough fuel for so many people's positive feedback loops that it keeps them working. That already wasn't working for me, but as soon as there was almost nothing to do, I crashed and lost my job.
In my case there's a goal. I'm putting together enough money for a house deposit in another country when we emigrate later in the year.
When I'm tired as all hell and wishing I could just go back to bed, that's what keeps me going. When I'm not tired as all hell I actually still enjoy the work, so that helps.
Out of curiosity, where are you planning to go? I am planning to leave the UK too and would like to know some options. So far my plan is to end up somewhere in Eastern Europe. Cost of living is low enough that I can actually afford a property instead of burning piles of cash for a shitty London flat.
Western Australia. I lived there for a couple of years about 10 years ago as a skilled migrant, then came back to the UK. I was (really, really unexpectedly) lucky enough that when I applied to reinstate my long-expired visa they said "sure, you have a one-year window to get back over here".
Cost of living is pretty high, salaries are pretty OK (better than a lot of UK perm, not as good as UK fintech contracting AFAICT), houses are big if you live out of the city centres, the sun shines and the beaches go on forever :)
I guess I don't know what the alternative would be. I miss travel/events and getting together with people socially. But it's not like those would exist if I weren't working either. I almost certainly have more personal contact than if I weren't working. Plus I'm fairly close to retirement so I might as well put some more money away.
The part of me that isn't horrified by the death toll or frustrated by the inconveniences in my own life has thought about a million times, "man, I bet we're getting so much interesting data out of this pandemic."
Beyond the bucket of cash dumped onto new vaccine technologies, the international DiRT for all of our emergency preparedness, the data on pandemic spread and transmission reduction strategies, we're also getting all sorts of psych and social data on how people respond to a crisis, to government orders and to isolation. A thousand dissertations and new departments of study will spring from this.
Heh, the old "leak it to the press and if there's no immediate outpouring of rage, announce it properly next week" trick.
Been very popular over the last year or so. Yeah I've heard a few of the trickles of info. I'm hoping for the official reveal on Monday. Guess we'll see.
I understand your sentiment but for me the realization is different.
For me seeing the streets of my capital city completely empty at beginning of lockdown, as well as the trams and buses (even though you could ride them), made me realize that I was living in an environment that is fundamentally not pleasant. That it was people that made it alive.
Without people, I saw that this city which I always thought of as "the place where I can do anything, almost any time of the day" is really just a conglomerate of gray buildings, commerce, lots and lots of roads and noisy traffic, and very little green.
The spell was good while it lasted. That said I am also past 45 now... if I was younger I might still want to come back to a big city when I can in order to have access to more activities.
Wasn't that something we all knew already? People are what make cities worth living in, the point of living in a city is to be close to more people, and that naturally involves some compromises (though I'm all for non-grey buildings and minimising the space devoted to cars - something my city is fairly good at).
To an extent - but city-dwellers also often deal with the high density by ignoring one another, to a much greater extent than they would in a smaller community.
I've heard city-dwellers claim (perhaps partly in jest) to have spent decades standing with the same people at the commuter rail station every day without giving them so much as a nod or smile, let alone learning their names.
I was living in the center of a major city on the east coast when the pandemic hit. I was renting a 400 sq ft apartment, but that was ok because I really only slept there — the coffee shop nearby was my living room, the park was my backyard, the restaurants my kitchen. That’s city life.
With all of that gone, the 400 sq ft apartment stopped being livable. That apartment wasn’t cheap, but I was able to afford to buy a house in another part of town. So I did — as did every other person in that downtown area that I knew.
Those areas are now severely depopulated to the point it’s not safe to walk around in after dark, despite being one of the nicest areas of town a year ago. Businesses are continuing to fail because their customers keep moving away. City centers will be absolutely dead for a decade or more. People are underestimating the long term impact to cities because office workers aren’t coming back en masse any time soon either — if ever. People are what makes a city great, and they’re not coming back for a long time.
Also my city feels much more dangerous now. PReviously with loads of people always milling around I would feel safe walking around alone at 2-4am going home from bars.
Now it can feel pretty dodgy as soon as its dark in the city centre. No one has any reason to be there so the junkies, homeless and others have seemingly gotten more brave.
I was in the city centre around 9-10pm a little while ago and it was almost 100% drunk / high / homeless looking at me really weirdly and got approached by a couple in a semi-aggresive way.
That had never happened to me in the five years I've lived here previously.
Anecdotally my experience has been the opposite in my mid-sized US city. Previously the only people out during the weeks at night would be drunks from bars.
Now even in the dead of winter, on my nightly walks I see people strolling around at night. Many times the same people, assuming they're just looking to get out of the house.
Summer was even more drastic, I don't think I have ever seen more people take to cycling and walking for enjoyments sake in my area before.
>Literally everything you do has been illegal or restricted in some form for almost a year now.
I've more had the mindset that everything I normally do can put other people in danger and potentially kill them or someone close to them. Or leave them with lingering side effects from illness for who knows how long.
I feel better now that we have competent leadership enforcing rules and rushing to get us vaccines. It has made all the world a difference for my mental health knowing that others are now doing what I am doing and we are all pulling our weight. It makes me feel connected again even without going to bars, theaters, vacations, etc. I don't know why that makes all the difference for me but it does.
> Living in a flat as a single person in the big exciting city? Literally everything you do has been illegal or restricted in some form for almost a year now.
And unsafe, too. I'm not not going to restaurants because I'm not allowed to (they're actually opening back up a little bit here now), but because under the present circumstances it's not safe to do so.
Open-air dining with six feet of separation is almost certainly safe. There's literally no evidence to the contrary despite multiple court orders to produce any.
It's below freezing here right now, currently snowing, and with high winds. No one's eating outdoors. I did it a bit before winter started but this entire season has been a wash.
Unfortunately when restaurants around here could open, they didn't have the required distancing between tables because that'd mean they'd make half the money. Your country culture may vary.
Have you quantified that? How unsafe it is to your personally?
I don't know anything about your personal situation, but if you're healthy and relatively young the risk from Covid (first catching it, then having a bad time with it) in resuming these aspects of normal life may be extremely low, even compared to activities you wouldn't think twice about doing pre-pandemic - like taking a short car ride for example.
I think there are probably a lot of people struggling with this sort of thing. Cognitive behaviour therapy incorporating aspects of exposure therapy could be useful here.
That's a very selfish way of looking at things. The problem with being a communicable disease is that even if I'm fine, others I give it too might not be. I'm trying to be a team player here.
Also, I'm not in a low-risk group personally anyway.
There's currently around 80 people dying from COVID-19 per day here in NYC, and the highest death rates have been from food service workers. 80 is way too high (it's over 10X what it was late summer), and I'm not going to do anything to potentially contribute to that. And Cuomo the nursing home reaper doesn't exactly have the moral high ground here in saying what is and isn't safe.
I'm going to go back to my normal life once I've been vaccinated. At this rate there's only a couple more months to go. I've already made it 11 months, I can do a couple more.
Are the young as at big a risk as older folks? No. CAN THEY COMMUNICATE IT TO OLDER FOLKS? Yes. Yes they can.
This kinda falls into the 'social obligation' column. Just because it doesn't affect you personally, doesn't mean you shouldn't be part of the solution. Sooner or later something WILL happen to you and you'll benefit from being a member.
I understand that aspect. Vaccinations, social distancing, mask wearing, mass testing, self isolating with symptoms or while vulnerable - these are all tools designed to get society running again, while minimising risk. The OP said they felt unsafe about going into restaurants which were open in their region. My opinion is that is incumbent on all of us to get back to normality as swiftly as possible within the guidelines set out by our local governments. That is my idea of social obligation, thanks.
I mention local guidelines since I wouldn't want anyone to get in trouble with the state.
The economy is not an abstract thing, it represents living people and their lives. People who feel its important to prioritise the economy and a return to relative normality generally don't think that way because they're callous about Covid deaths, they're simply more concerned about the death, ill health and strife that result from a long term economic downturn. We can discuss the degree to which those views represent reality without impugning people's characters.
Local guidelines have been highly politicized throughout this pandemic though and a lot of governors have been making terrible decisions for political reasons. I'm not seeing any rational reason to listen to local guidelines when the guidelines are politically-motivated (not evidence-based) and are set way too loose even while COVID-19 was in the midst of tearing through a community.
Many of these states couldn't even get on board with masks, let alone anything else more stringent (like reducing capacity).
I'm from the UK, we have national guidelines and laws, so the situation is a bit different.
But I wonder what claim to authority or special knowledge you are using to feel confident your own attitude is purely rational, and uninfluenced by your political beliefs and personal biases?
Moreover, whatever you think about the balance of scientific evidence, science should not be used to directly drive policy. Elected politicians create policy, and science is one sort of advice that feeds those decisions. Policy created purely from scientific advice would be a recipe for arbitrary decisions, and technocratic undemocratic rule. The politically motivated aspect is a feature not a bug!
That argument means nothing unless you're also able to decide for yourself what to do about something "unsafe". Consent is key, and we're watching in real time as we are turned into human livestock under the care of the "state".
It boils down to: "Shut up, stay in your pen". I'm not a crazy person and I agree with herd immunity and generally think we should strive for it and not fight it for the sake of the unhealthy, but excuse the language, holy-shit people... it's been a year of "flatten the curve", "lockdowns" and "stay at home orders"!! I stand by this fully: This disaster could have been solved in a month with closed borders, tracking and a dedicated, absolute and draconian effort. But, we didn't get that and instead treated the potentially "misbehaving" people like cattle because they threatened the wider herd.
It all rests on what happens after a wide rollout of the vaccine.
> I'm not a crazy person and I agree with herd immunity
You're not crazy, but you are incorrect. Herd immunity only works for COVID if a) you can get 60-70% of people infected, and b) getting the disease confers immunity, and for a meaningful amount of time.
Getting to that 60-70% in the time frame that most people would tolerate would absolutely destroy our health care system, resulting in many more deaths (due to people being unable to get the treatment they need). Consider that hospitals in many areas were overwhelmed without most people going out and trying to get the disease.
And the immunity bit is still an open question. Many people have suffered re-infection, and it's not clear that post-infection immunity lasts more than a few months, which might not be good enough for herd immunity to stick.
The second bit is a bit of a gamble, so I'm totally open to argument there as to whether it's a gamble worth taking, but the first bit includes unacceptable outcomes. I'm not saying our current outcome is acceptable, but trading one bad thing for another isn't clearly better here.
Citation needed. Every source I’ve heard has said reinfection is rare in both percent and absolute terms. And resistance to the disease is proven to last at least ~9months and estimated by the medically knowledgeable to last much much longer.
What a weird comment. You think people with families don't miss their social lives? You think it has been easy? People aren't meant to spend so much time together. Not to mention work and full-time child care don't really go together.
I'd say if anything, I considered maintaining a social life to be a form of self-care, one I was already struggling to get enough of.
> A month or two more and I'm going to be in the 'pitchforks and torches' group
Why wait a month or two? I'm not saying I agree with you, but nothing's going to change in 2 months. I'm pretty sure nothing's going to change in the next 5 years.
I think it may be tough to imagine what being alone and isolated for a year does to a person if you are someone who is stuck inside with the same people all day. I would imagine the situation for those with family is very difficult and exhausting... but not suicidal ideation level of difficult, which has been my experience with this extreme social isolation. This is in spite of devoting a lot of time and energy to self care: exercising daily, eating healthy, not drinking alcohol, and many other things. Maybe my assumption here is wrong and there are plenty of people out there living with their families who are in as precarious a situation as I currently find myself. Either way, everyone is suffering right now, but my experience has been that long term social isolation is a unique form of torture that can really push a person to the edge.
> Maybe my assumption here is wrong and there are plenty of people out there living with their families who are in as precarious a situation as I currently find myself.
Yes, you are wrong. Everybody I know with little kids is suffering the same social isolation as you. 4 year olds do not count as socializing, especially when all of our kids are also feeling the negative effects of isolation as well.
Besides that, you specifically mentioned doing self-care. It's amazing you have the time and energy to do it. My day starts at 530am (if I'm lucky) and the only time I could work out is after the girls go to bed.
I could think of plenty of ways to get some form of social interaction if I wasn't so stretched. All my single coworkers are playing video games together and doing zoom hangouts. My friends do a poker night and I can't stay up late enough because I'm so worn out by the time it starts. I've barely spoken to anyone besides my wife, who is also being slowly ground into dust, unless you count my weekly one on one with my manager.
I'm not trying to one up anybody. If anything I think that most of us are going through some comparable form of mental anguish. The irony is that Covid keeps us from seeing how other people go through it too
Because I have just about enough left in me, and by then, in the UK we will have vaccinated the groups which make up ~99% of preventable mortality.
At that point, the moral argument of "go outside and you're putting people at risk" completely falls apart in my view.
If there are variants which escape the vaccines, then at that point it's game over since I know I definitely won't be able to make it through another year.
The parent comment was wrong to assume that people with families aren't also struggling due to dampened social lives - we're all struggling.
The people who are isolated by themselves are struggling much more.
In prison, the worst punishment you can receive is to be taken away from the all rapists and murderers, and put in solitary confinement. Being stuck in a prison cell with a partner and family probably sounds like a dream to the person stuck in a prison cell alone.
People in solitary confinement aren't allowed to go anywhere or speak to anybody. What country has restrictions that keep you from socializing online or calling people on the phone? In most places you have never not been able to interact outdoors or go food shopping.
The idea that nothing will change in the next two months is absurd because things are already changing. There's already been an easing of restrictions over the last few weeks as the rate of new cases declines. And this is before the vaccine has had a chance to make much of an impact. Because of the vaccines, we have very reason to believe the rate of hospitalizations and deaths will only go down, which will inevitably lead to a further easing of restrictions.
> I'm pretty sure nothing's going to change in the next 5 years.
Given the speed in which effective vaccines were developed I think this is a rather bleak outlook.
Sure, a lot is still unknown with the new virus variants and as has been expected vaccination drives had their teething problems. But in a few month time (almost) everybody who wants their jabs can get it (in rich countries, that is).
I for one, see myself on a 3 week vacation in Asia later this year. Optimistic? Maybe, and certainly dependent on a number of factors beyond my control. But I think it's a much better perspective than wallowing in misery and not seeing a way out.
It is worth reading what the epidemologists advising Western governments actually think. Many of them are arguing for social distancing and border closures to continue until the entire world is vaccinated, regardless of how many people are vaccinated within your own country. That is expected to take probably until 2026, so the OP's worries about five years are founded. Some outliers among those advisors are even arguing for social distancing for the rest of the 2020s, or (because they want to take the opportunity to end flu transmission as well) in perpetuity.
Are you sure this is the case? From the Norwegian news it seems very much like the epidemiologists that are advising the government in many cases are advising lesser restrictions than what is actually implemented.
There is zero chance that democracies will conform to those kind of restrictions. Once most people are vaccinated, people are going to shift back to business (mostly) as usual subject to changes like more remote work. Governments can't enforce policies if people won't follow them.
Many of these advisors are speaking directly to media. Devi Sridhar, one of the advisors to the UK government, for example, has been doing interviews recently about maintaining long-term border closures and requiring expensive hotel quarantines.
Right after I posted my comment above, at 15:12 comments regarding Canadian forecasts appeared in The Guardian's COVID live blog, in which epidemologists say that restrictions must be preserved within the country because the vaccine rollout is a global problem, not a local one.
If you go to Google News, set your location to the UK, and search for "devi sridhar", you'll find abundant content that is not behind a paywall. Here is just one article[0] of many in which she advocates for an approach where borders stay closed until the whole world is vaccinated.
Apparently this[1] is the permalink for The Guardian post.
Thank god the epidemiologists are not the ones making policy. Most state and local governments in the US have not shown a willingness to follow such a hardline approach, and we're already seeing reopenings as numbers drop, long before the vaccine has even had a major impact.
So far no meaningful action has been taken that indicates he's particularly concerned. He's focused on trying to reopen schools, last I heard.
Some people have argued that the vaccinations are evidence of his success regarding Covid-19 but I don't see any part of that that wouldn't have been proceeding with or without him. As far as I can tell, the only difference between Trump and Biden's handling of covid has been "Biden knows to keep his mouth shut about specifics and predictions, because he might be wrong" which is exactly the kind of playing-both-sides I've seen from many state and city governments for the last year (talking a lot about how we need to follow the science and keep locking down to keep the spread low, but also taking no steps to enforce the rules or financially support people/businesses.)
Oh I'm sure he's concerned. But there's precious little he can do other than doing what he can to get vaccines rolled out faster and closing borders to foreigners. Most people certainly support the former and most are at worst indifferent to the latter. He can also set a "good example."
But getting into a tussle with states he thinks are opening up too much, etc. is almost certainly counterproductive at this point.
Nothing Biden has said or done has implied he wants to take a hardline approach to COVID restrictions, aside from briefly floating the idea of limited domestic travel. And he made no effort to tie the massive relief package to restrictive state polices. Beyond that, he has limited authority over state and local restrictions.
To say nothing of control over how people actually act.
In any case, listening to scientists means you take their input and factor that into the tradeoffs that drive policy. Which may well involve simultaneously that there is e.g. some risk associated with allowing people to travel by air while allowing them to do it anyway.
One of the Biden administration's first moves was to reinstate the ban on travel to the USA from Schengen that was about to expire. And it was just announced that this ban would now be extended indefinitely. The US ban on travel does not just affect tourism, it affects family reunification as well, and I would consider that a hardline approach.
Can you cite those exemptions? There is a longstanding campaign on Twitter (loveisnottourism) that complains that the US policy is preventing partners from seeing one another. Also, even if in some cases one could theoretically board a flight, that means nothing if you need a visa and your local US consulate won’t issue you one, because it says no visas will be issued during the pandemic.
"the mood is slowly turning into some sort of "Torches and Pitchforks" way..."
That mentality can actually be helpful, and provided it stays metaphorical, it is called for. We're coming up on the one year anniversary of authoritarian rules. We accepted them because we were (rightfully) scared. The facts are that it is now getting under control, and it would be healthy and cathartic to assert normalcy again. We're rightful in being optimistic now, and should reclaim our rights and freedom. The craziness comes from trying to contain it.
> We're coming up on the one year anniversary of authoritarian rules.
What exactly is "authoritarian" about them? These rules were imposed and enforced[0] under authority granted to the government through democratic processes. And if enough people don't like it, most states have recall/impeachment processes that can allow the citizenry to remove the elected officials and replace them with people who will take a different path.
The fact that none of that has happened shows that the people who truly believe the measures taken were incorrect are in the minority, likely a small vocal minority.
If you want to talk about authoritarianism, look to actual authoritarian states, where curfews, lockdowns, and quarantines were implemented, along with severe restrictions on people's movement... with no avenue for citizens to oppose these measures (and if they try, they get arrested). That is not at all what has been happening in the US, UK, and similar nations.
[0] Also consider that many of the rules imposed on individuals have essentially been voluntary and under the honor system. In most (but not all) places in the US you don't get ticketed or arrested for failing to wear a mask or socially distance, or for violating a quarantine or curfew.
> These rules were imposed and enforced under authority granted to the government through democratic processes.
Not in many countries. Courts have overturned some rules, finding that the government did not have authority to impose those rules. For example, in Poland the ruling party ordered that masks be worn in public spaces and that restaurants have to close, but courts have already found that this law was void because the government did not pass a formal state of emergency (which would have enraged the population and cost them the next election).
Similarly, in the Netherlands their curfew was overturned by courts. It was hastily reinstated through parliamentary vote, but this reinstatement is questionable when this curfew appears designed to prevent the ruling coalition’s position from being challenged before the upcoming election. In France, Macron has clearly resorted to harsh anti-COVID measures because they can help stamp out the Yellow Vests movement that was bothering him pre-COVID. Dishonest strategems like this – even if not the most blatant example of an authoritarian state – leave a bad taste in one’s mouth.
The UK roadmap that will be rolled out Monday but was already leaked to the press, calls for social distancing to be maintained for essentially the rest of the year, even after most people are vaccinated. (Restaurants can reopen where you can meet people from another household or two, but no concerts, theatre, clubs, etc.) So, the connection that you mentioned between getting people vaccinated and going back to normal, is no longer what is guiding policymakers in some countries.
Seeing that disingenuous planning on the part of state authorities, I would simply prefer to go back to normal behavior right now, allow young people to have their big social coming-of-age and courtship rituals and open the borders so that Europeans aren’t separated from their fellow Europeans, and simply accept all the deaths that would result in the in-between time.
Lockdown has allowed me to properly realize how much I really do not care about going out. I may enjoy social outings, and for a while I used to have weekly scheduled social outings having much fun in them. In spite of that, I've always been "homey", and I've always been very affected by going out multiple times -- especially weekends. It just drains me and physically exhausts me. Weekends should be sacred. I absolutely hate going out in them. It screws my whole week.
Thus, lockdown has not impacted me negatively in the slightest. At least not directly (it has indirectly through the mental health of those around me). I really do not care about going out. Even more so than I thought.
I like it this way, and I think that while I knew I could stay "home" for long periods, and liked it, I was never aware just how much I really am not affected by "staying home". I have basically been living for almost a year in a "leave the house on average 0.75 times per week", and for at most 4 hours. In a week, I go out an average of 3 hours. I live just fine.
Some of my close friends who considered themselves to be just like me are slowly going a bit crazy. I guess it's not even their need to go out, but the fact that they _know_ they can't.
I understand other people function in other ways. I'm sorry if you're in this group (or your loved ones). Nevertheless, to me, I just really don't feel the impact at all. If anything, having other people "live more like me" has made my life somewhat better, because they can empathize with me more and because the whole world has become "easier to live in", more adapted to my ways of living.
Mind you, this doesn't mean I can live anywhere because I live "mostly remotely, and mostly in my head". I live 5 minutes from my parents (and for a while I was living 1h away from them). Even though I may not go there every day, not even every week or every two weeks, the fact that I'm here gives me immense happiness and calmness. Staying at home does not mean not caring about my immediate and even my "nearish" surroundings.
I feel a fair amount of guilt about this. I live with my spouse and toddler, and not having a commute and spending lots of time with my daughter everyday has been great. Also, it’s now easy for me to fit in exercise every day, so I’m in the best shape I’ve been in in a while.
When relatives ask how I’m doing, I immediately say, “Great!” But then I realize - oops, I should probably give a less selfish response, and acknowledge that the grandma I’m speaking to is perpetually bummed because she can’t see her daughter (which I absolutely believe sucks).
On the original topic: I’ve always thought that Baldur’s Gate did a good job with their atmospheric music. That’s usually my go-to when I want to listen to “tavern sounds.” It basically sounds like the Prancing Pony from Fellowship. And there are lots of similar options on YouTube. It’s fun background music!
In my opinion - Don’t give a less selfish response, it’s good if you’re doing great. Don’t feel ashamed or selfish for being in a healthy state. But of course, don’t hold back your sympathy either. You’re in a good place to offer support to those around you. I think this is an important facet of how humans work together, personally.
Yeah, agreed. I think it's a sort of "read the room" type situation. If it feels like the person you're talking to really needs some commiseration, downplay your good mood. Otherwise, being in a good mood yourself could help boost the other person's spirits.
You have no idea how much I feel the same too. I sometimes journal my thoughts, and I have a bit of my journal here to share with you which reflects exactly what you mentioned about "feeling bad about feeling good":
---
For most people, (...) 2020 was a mostly terrible year. A dark spot in the book of life, filled with misery, missing loved ones, habit changes and an overall feeling of “this is too bad, too fast”. For some, it’s like we’re still in 2019, ending in a shitty way. For others, it’s like a pit of awfulness that’s been going on forever and doesn’t seem to end.
I can’t say I relate, though. I’m sorry if you’re reading this and you’re one of those people, but I just can’t relate.
(...)
2020 sucked for these people. Some lost their job. Some lost their routines — and to some people routine _really is important_.
But 2020 didn’t suck for me. Or, rather, it didn’t suck as much. Sure, 2020 still sucked in many ways, but they’re not really that related to the pandemic we’re living. Maybe they are indirectly (...), but I cannot personally say that I felt really negatively affected by the pandemic. Some things still hit me, but many didn’t.
It feels like I’m committing some kind of heresy by saying this, but it’s true. I _feel bad_ that 2020 didn’t _make me feel bad_. But, really, it didn’t.
(...)
This was 2020. COVID didn’t really mess with me directly. I already worked remotely most of the time. Here’s how COVID has impacted my life, in the most blunt honesty I can have:
- It enabled me to be much more easily socially accepted when I wanted to do remote meetings.
- It enabled me to multitask: I can do many tasks at home (dishes, clothes, etc) while having remote meetings without my camera on.
- It made it so that instead of going every weekend to visit (...) family, we started doing it much more sporadically (...).
- It reduced the amount of traffic on the street, noise around the house, etc.
(...)
Personally, COVID didn’t do much for my life. You could very fairly make the point that, in terms of my _direct personal life_, it bettered it. I didn’t really stop doing things I liked. Sure, we can’t really go out or go to concerts, but I don’t need that. I have never needed that. Similarly, I stopped hanging out with my friends, and while I’d like to do that, I’m at a stage of my life where I don’t need it. It’s not a part of my personality. I don’t need to go out. I don’t want to go out most of the time. (...) I don’t _need_ to go out. I can stay for months inside my home just fine.
Glad to see I'm not the only one. I've seen so many posts across the internet along the lines of "I'm a total loner, but I can hardly take it anymore". Meanwhile, I'm definitely an introvert, but not even that much of a loner and I'm doing just fine.
I'm an introvert that's doing fine as well. As long as we're talking about positives (which we should!) I'd say no business travel is the #1 benefit for me. I've gone from being forced to take a dozen trips a year to zero. It's been wonderful. No more rushing around filthy airports, crammed next to strangers for hours in coach, disgusting hotel rooms... all in the name of my job.
I quite frankly hope business travel never returns. Better for the environment too.
I feel the same way. Not sure if it is completely due to my psyche or the fact that I have a partner and a child. That's a lot of social interaction. If I lived alone, I might feel differently. Hard to tell.
I did notice a bunch of people who got really anxious. They were pro lockdown then against, then again pro and they were noticeably nervous and unhappy.
> what i hear and see in my region let me believe the mood is slowly turning into some sort of "Torches and Pitchforks" way...
In several countries with lockdowns there is definitely collusion between ruling parties and mainstream media on which the ruling party has a close relationship or outright tight grip. In Poland, independent media across the ideological spectrum have been reporting that the majority of the population opposes lockdown, and support for business owners opening their restaurants regardless has risen. Yet you won't hear a word about this in state-controlled media. The ruling party is, however, aware of sentiment turning against them, because party functionaries have privately expressed to independent media that they fear that lockdown might cost them the next election.
The problem, however, is that when mainstream media refuses to report common sentiment, the average person feels that he or she is all alone in feeling that way. This prevents people from organizing and pushing together for change (which is just the way that many ruling parties like it).
Your region might be different, but I've heard others say the same thing about my area and, frankly, I see it as wishful thinking. People aren't happy in general, but they both have surrogate outlets for their frustration(Netflix, porn, junk food, weed) and have been conditioned to accept lower standards; being able to eat outdoors in someone's parking lot with plastic dividers is considered "exciting" now, depending on where you live. Even people who were against lockdowns behave like their masters are giving them an extra scoop of kibble every time that restrictions are loosened. As long as people tirelessly hang on to the hopium, I think there's no way we'll see "torches and pitchforks" manifest in any substantial way. To reiterate, I'm sure this is region-dependent, and I'm speaking primarily for America in general.
Those "torches and pitchforks" would quickly be followed by ventilators and graves. I absolutely despise authority and loss of individual liberty, but this isn't a fabricated crisis. Once you see multiple people you know devastated by COVID, you quickly realize it's not a hoax. I'm talking about younger people too (20-40), permanently damaged respiratory systems and near death experiences.
I have seen people getting shot, stabbed and blown apart, was shot at and was near an botched airstrike... perhaps this makes me a bit ehm... "unempathic", but the only thing i really, really fear is an perpetual lockdown with no real end in sight.
So... i myself side with freedom and (risk of) death.
A lot of places used "shelter-in-place", and officially over here it's still "stay-at-home". The colloquial term having switched so totally to "lockdown" is another symptom of people caring for it less and less.
I was endlessly annoyed by the misuse of the term "shetler-in-place" by so many state and local governments. At no point should anyone, anywhere have sheltered in place due to this pandemic, which is an established term in emergency management where people are instructed to shelter in whatever structure they happen to be located at the time of the emergency.
What happened last spring was more or less incarceration. We weren't free. We weren't allowed to leave our houses. The term "lockdown" works quite well.
Thankfully, while there were a few places that attempted to restrict outings to "essential" trips, it never was enforceable. I am not a fan of many things police do, but I am proud that my local sheriff announced that he would not enforce any such order.
I feel that. I'm a loner, in normal times. But the prolonged isolation had induced me to participate a lot more in online forums, more than I should. They had grown to be increasingly addicting, because how my life is now lacking inter-personal interactions.
This is an odd framing to me. The psychological toll is from there being a deadly global pandemic. I guess we could have made the choice to trade the toll of social restrictions for the toll of even more people getting seriously ill and dying, but whatever choices we made and are making, the fact of the matter is that pandemics majorly suck. I think railing against lockdowns is a coping mechanism -- as policies we've chosen, we have some measure of control, so complaining about social restrictions gives us a sense we can change something, whereas going on a rant about bits of protein that don't quite qualify as even being alive doesn't really grant much relief.
We're all tired. This is a crappy situation. And if complaining about lockdowns help people feel better, well we all do what we need to try and feel a bit better I guess. But, in our more calm and reflective and honest moments, we should remember that the psychological toll here is from the pandemic, and there's not some magical other option where the pandemic is anything other than a very difficult situation.
> The psychological toll is from there being a deadly global pandemic.
How do you know? I think this claim, if it is to be believed, deserves some solid and objective evidence.
How come the pandemic is the deadly one? Why not put some of the blame on the millions of people who died from this thing, who probably could have lived through it had they lived healthier lives? There has been ZERO discussion of how to improve the body's natural immunity to viruses, which is without a doubt the most efficacious way to prevent death from coronaviruses.
> I think railing against lockdowns is a coping mechanism
This is so condescending I have a hard time believing you're being honest. No business owner would choose to completely shutter their enterprise as so many have had to do under threat of government violence. The complete upending of normal life was not something anyone did because it was the right thing to do. We did it because we were all under threat of fines, violence, and losing our freedoms even further if we didn't.
> But, in our more calm and reflective and honest moments, we should remember that the psychological toll here is from the pandemic, and there's not some magical other option where the pandemic is anything other than a very difficult situation.
The "pandemic" has done absolutely nothing to me. All of my difficulties have been tied to the complete shutdown of my local, state, and federal government. I haven't gotten sick nor have any of my close friends and family. I have, however, been assaulted by random prisoners let out of prison too early, have been price-gouged by corporations, and have had my basic liberties stripped. Those were all lockdown policies causing those things - not the pandemic.
To me, it's overwhelmingly obvious that our infrastructure is failing and the government is using ridiculous histrionics regarding the virus and regarding "anti-racism," to cover it up.
The psychological toll is from there being a deadly global pandemic.
I agree that there's going to be an ambient level of anxiety from knowing that there's a nasty disease out there, but are you really saying that not being able to see your friends and family, or losing your job, or having to scramble to work from home while managing your children's remote "learning" has no additional impact?
there's not some magical other option where the pandemic is anything other than a very difficult situation
Lockdowns aren't binary. We're allowed to consider the costs and benefits of individual measures. Banning large indoor events: probably worth it. Forbidding people from leaving their homes: probably not. And then you get into the more controversial areas like shutting down schools and trying to forbid small gatherings, where different governments have made different choices and it is not at all clear that stronger measures lead to better Covid outcomes.
> I agree that there's going to be an ambient level of anxiety from knowing that there's a nasty disease out there, but are you really saying that not being able to see your friends and family, or losing your job, or having to scramble to work from home while managing your children's remote "learning" has no additional impact?
Of course it has an impact. If we didn't have social restrictions and consequently had much higher rates of infection, death, and long term disability, that also would have an impact. There's no world where, given a global pandemic, there are no severe impacts. Most arguments against social restriction that I've seen don't acknowledge this though. I mean, the other reply to my comment said "why not put some of the blame on the millions of people who died from this thing, who probably could have lived through it had they lived healthier lives", to which I can only reply "what?" For at least the most vocal opponents of social restrictions, they seem to have a radically different understanding of how respiratory infections work than I do.
>Lockdowns aren't binary. We're allowed to consider the costs and benefits of individual measures
Absolutely. It's not the people who are able to do nuance I'm taking issue with here.
> it is not at all clear that stronger measures lead to better Covid outcomes.
Well, I think the evidence is pretty clear that taking either none or very few measures has led to worse outcomes. Among places that have taken measures, I agree it gets hazier as you then have to go from the general "lockdown or freedom" argument into "which specific measures work best." The latter discussion is where we should be; the former one is, to my mind, based on an unrealistic set of assumptions.
I appreciate your reasonable response. I wish we could have more discussions like this rather than the shouting matches of "masks in grocery stores are tyranny" and "you're a selfish asshole for occasionally wanting to have human contact".
>The psychological toll is from there being a deadly global pandemic
My friends and I could not possibly care less about the virus even if we tried, and half of us were even infected with Corona. The only thing affecting anyone in my friendgroup mentally are these lockdowns that are keeping us from living our lives, because I can guarantee you that every single one of us would rather be sitting in a crowded, closed space without even wearing masks than being forced to deal with god-knows how long of not being able to do anything, so I really wouldn't say the pandemic has any effect on us other than the fact that it brings with it lockdowns that none of us want.
I live in a small and wonderful city-town in Western EU. Unsurprisingly, much of the atmosphere is in doldrums. As a long-time remotee, I'm often used to working from the library or a pleasant coffee shop. It's tough not to have this access to the gentle human buzz around me, or a stranger's smile, much as I'm used to long stretches of solitude. And this extended lockdown has aggravated the ability to deal with a recent personal setback.
It helps that I built a healthy lifestyle, and have no problems giving structure to my attention. Long walks in nature, hours of dedicated reading of offline books (the medicine of the mind) help immensely. And my studies in areas like ancient Greek philosophy, psychology, neuroscience all help, and continue to provide some relief. But it's strenuous to keep grinding through it, without access to much of humanity, in the normal sense. So far, it's been a potent stress-test of resilience.
Same, I mean we didn't really go out as a rule anyway, but we would go into town for a stroll, shop and a beer or two, or the cinema, little things like that.
We're all right, but it's slowly wearing us down. But there's people who are seriously worn down by it. I for one am glad I'm not alone, I'm not sure I would be in any good mental state right now if my girlfriend hadn't moved in two years ago.
I can really imagine the torches and pitchforks more and more. Because my country didn't do enough during the summer last year, cases spiked after people went back to work and school. The measures and carefulness of people failed because things kept going on for too long.
And now the government has set a curfew, which messes with the only time I actually go out during the day (taking the dog for a walk just before midnight). It feels like we're being punished for something other people did. They're still handing out thousands of tickets a week (although those will likely all be voided because a court decided the curfew was introduced on the wrong grounds), they're still breaking up a hundred parties a week, and there's still millions of people that go to work every day even though they can work from home.
At the current rate, it'll take the rest of the year before we get to an 80% vaccination rate. I mean I hope things will return to a semblance of normality by the summer (last year the number of cases went down sharply after flu season finished), but I'm afraid we'll be stuck for another year at least.
The slightly weird thing for me is that I'm bored but I'm also silently nonplussed about quite a few social venues being shut because I simultaneously don't really enjoy but also get FOMO over (say) nightclubs - I'm sort of doomed to be perpetually normal enough to talk to but odd enough to weird people out.
Basically one less thing to be neurotic about, although the fact that of my two real friends one is hard to talk to because of a subtle cultural difference and the other clearly only tolerates and has clearly reached the stage where a friendship bifurcates and people trying to hurt each other suddenly, has been cruelly exposed to me.
I feel you: my life is as good as it can get during this challenging time, I live with my SO in a somewhat large apartment, we both still work, I from home and she from office, we don't have any sick relative, nor kids, so we have our space, and we don't have to worry about money or anything at all.
I'm quite loner on my own, and the first lockdown was quite a breeze. But these days I'm becoming more and more tired, and I spend my time after work doing basic nothing. Also watching a movie is boring! I have no idea how people with kids, or without job stability, or with relatives to take care off haven't gone crazy yet!
I know others feel differently, but my toddler has actually been a reprieve. Each day has been some small step forward, some word or new idea discovered. There’s bad with the good, of course - but I don’t know that I would have had the time to see all this if I weren’t home.
As an introvert, I really enjoyed it. I do love bars and miss going there but not a big deal. We had tons of happy hours on Zoom. Yes Zoom is not perfect replacement for in-person socializing but it is not that bad.
On other hand, my wife really didn't like socializing on Zoom. So she didn't socialize as much. Also she really misses in-person gatherings. And my biggest issue been trying to cheer her up.
I find this very interesting as well. I definitely have felt way more anxious during the lockdowns we've had. There's definitely a pervasive atmosphere which is very draining even though objectively my family have had a very easy time of things.
The link posted is cute and all but such initiatives are so easy to dismiss - what, you guys can't live without going to a bar? What are you, some kind of alcoholics? You don't want to save some lives?
When in reality the lockdowns ask us to give up everything that makes us human - closeness and interaction with other people, hobbies, and many people can't even work or see their families any more. And we're making this effort without even being sure it's worth it - sure, there's a vaccine now and that's an amazing achievement but we still have the risk of vaccine resistance so long-term not sure how we can avoid the (mitigated) risks.
That's at the current pace. The pace will almost certainly continue to accelerate. You also need to add in the unvaccinated who have immunity from prior infection.
We're on track for a quasi-normal (as far as restrictions go) Summer, and there will be an enormous push to get kids back in school full time and people back in the office regularly right after Labor Day.
IMO Summer is a bit optimistic to be calling anything "normal," but I broadly agree we're near the end. Maybe by Fall or Winter we can hang out in bars again without feeling like we're killing somebody. In either case, now is not the time to give up. A few more months and we'll start seeing things ease up, I think. But we won't get there if we make things worse now. It sucks. Stay strong. Do what you can.
> But we won't get there if we make things worse now.
I have seen this claimed a lot, but is it really true? In some countries the authorities ended restrictions (or ostensibly maintained restrictions but stopped enforcement of them) because the population simply wasn't observing them. In those cases just "giving up" really worked in terms of the majority of people being able to get back to normal socializing.
The studies that have been done have shown that whatever benefits that lockdowns may have had were far outweighed by the toll they've taken on mental health and the economy. Short of literally locking everyone in their houses for 2-3 weeks (including essential workers) lockdowns just feel like they're doing something.
In the US, it's probably going to be more like late summer/early fall for truly widespread vaccination at which point, I have trouble believing things don't open back up because at that point, people are going to be "We've done what we can. F' it. We're not continuing like this indefinitely."
But, truth be told, come late spring especially younger people are going to be out and about and restrictions are going to start to be widely ignored even if they're still officially in place.
Sadly, this is a self-inflicted problem. Instead of trying to understand the purpose of the imposed measures and trying to maximize their impact to get us through this as fast as possible, lots of people saw them as pure nuisance instead. They tried to bend the rules to work around them and so we are still stuck with these measures for far longer than would have been necessary otherwise.
This is true, BUT, loss of loved ones is surely worse than loneliness, when talking about depression.
And it's still an indication of early/strict lockdowns. People in China, Vietnam, Taiwan and New Zealand are enjoying social contact, punctuated by periodic lockdown. Some countries are basically placing the burden of reducing R0 on volunteers.
I miss quarterly visits with a friend in a town midway between us. Just us in a hotel room, watching movies, going out to dinner, looking for new places or revisiting the old, chit-chatting away. We still communicate now but it lacks the spontaneity of our usual routine.
On a weekly basis, I miss "camping out" at my Starbucks and reading, growing slowly more wired on caffeine. This is the lack that seems to have put me off of my game the most, despite it not having a whole lot of personal interaction.
Just being able to go out into the social world without a plan is something I miss a lot. It feels like every time I leave the house now, I have a very direct objective and I try to accomplish it as quickly as possible with as little human interaction as possible
I miss being spontaneous about going out. I’m not even sure what restaurants are still open, what bars have gone out of business, why can’t we return to normal already?
It's a great opportunity for non-commercial spontaneity, choosing not between "what bar to go to", but which direction to walk in, and really taking in reality.
In my country, the UK, you can be fined for going a walk to a park if it isn't the closest park to your home. Basically if the police want to be arses to you they can ask you where you are going and why you are where you are, if they dont like your answer you can be fined.
There was an article in the BBC a while back about two friends that met up for a walk in the country side, they drove to the meetup point. It wasn't the closest place they could have walked so they got fined.
Also IIRC, they were carrying a cup of coffee each so the police said technically they met for a picnic.
After the furore surrounding that everything was overturned and they apologised [1].
> if the police want to be arses
This is what's completely wrong about the situation.
Police officer had an argument with their spouse that morning and is in a shitty mood? Police officer was bullied at school and is using their power to punish the kind of person that looks like their bullies? Any number of entirely random things can change the "rules". Not good.
What I think is under discussed is the fact that we allow for all of these social restrictions measurements but yet air travel across all the EU countries is still allowed.
Air travel might be allowed in that flights happen, but the second travelers land they are immediately sent into quarantine in some countries. Poland, for instance, requires 10-day quarantine for anyone flying into the country, even from other EU states. That quarantine is checked by requiring you to install a mandatory phone app and also by sending the police around to your address.
Also, because some EU countries are claiming that crossing their borders is only allowed for essential reasons proven by documentation, the airport in the country of origin will prevent many people from even being able to board the plane in the first place.
Absolutely false. I am not saying airports are a source of infection. What I am pointing out is that air travel is allowing for all these variants to propagate to new populations.
The pervasiveness of the UK variant in Europe would have been contained or at least decelerated with travel restrictions.
A living proof of this is both New Zealand and Australia. These countries still allowed for sea and air freight but banned travel. Both countries are roughly back to normal life, while we in Europe are still trying to blame pharmaceutical manufacturing vaccine output, as if that is the sole cause of our problems.
Yeah but you can't meet strangers. We're all bubbled in. And I love my friends, they're my pillar of peace in this pandemic, but there is a different part of me that craves the interaction with strangers in strange places.
I know you're trying to be helpful, but these kinds of posts just come off as incredibly condescending and out of touch. Lack of nature is not considered to be actual torture, but complete isolation from other people (solitary confinement) is.
I apologize if that came off as condescending. That is exactly what I mean, however, you are writing off non-human companionship and interaction as worthless, when it can bring endless joy and comfort when humans are not available.
I grew up outside a small rural town, running barefoot all over creation every chance I got, and most of the time by myself. These days I'm a wildlife photographer by avocation, and over the last couple of years I've gotten deeply into macro - I take pictures of wasps while they're doing wasp things, and as a result of that, I'm not only no longer afraid of them, I've kind of fallen in love with them. They are at this point by far my favorite insects, and high up among my favorite animals overall. I like them better than most mammals at this point, and some of the best pictures I've ever taken of a spider wasp, I got in my backyard last October. Aside from that, research papers on wasp ethology have been a gateway into entomology as a special interest, to an extent where if I had it to do over I might go into that instead of software engineering. I've even learned to make and bind books from scratch, initially because I wanted paper textbooks instead of PDFs.
All of that means a great deal to me. None of it makes up for the fact that, over the course of the last year, I've only been able to spend a few hours in the company of a friend, and none in that of colleagues. I'm somewhat solitary by inclination, and I think that makes it less hard on me than on most. But even for me, it's been hard. I can't imagine what it's been like for anyone who came into this both alone and without the good fortune of knowing how to be satisfied with their own company. These aren't good circumstances under which to have to learn that, and even the most cursory glance at the comments in this thread overall is enough to show that the success rate has probably not been high.
Yes, every so often you get someone like me, who can feel good for days about the pompilid wasp who turned up in his home office for an impromptu visit. Every so often you get a Birdman of Alcatraz, too. To suggest that everyone should just instantly be a Birdman - I mean, I get that you're trying to help, and I respect that. But you seem not to have given any thought to how to make your advice potentially useful to someone whose perspective differs greatly from your own.
It's an easy mistake to make - I do it often enough myself. But it's still a mistake, and it's why the criticism you're getting is warranted. The intention is obviously good, but the execution needs a deal of improvement.
Legally, though, in solitude. In Germany only one person can officially visit another household. I think that is excessive bullshit which is why I do break this rule occasionally.
Good! The relationship between you and the Bundesrepublik is a non-voluntary one, where you never signed a contract with them to follow their laws. It’s a state created by the victors of the last great war. There is no moral responsibility to please people who are in your life involuntarily
With your attitude you have to be willing to not use tax-funded hospitals, community-financed health insurance or state-sponsored cultural events. Not sure if I'd like to take that step. There has to be a healthy balance in the relationship between society and citizen.
The same argument applies to a slave being fed and housed by their master.
I think it’s very healthy to avoid some government funded “services”, such as having children far away from government schools. If you are not paying, you are the product.
I’m familiar with it as being ethically relativist (no universal eternal ethics) and arguing that man needs to be ruled to live in peace.
Would you recommend spending a couple of weeks on it? If so, are there translations to modern English, or is the original easy to understand for us in this century?
Which country more or less is it? When the hot season will arrive will you be able to go out and make an impromptu bar with friends somewhere free (public squares, forests, beaches, etc.)
I'll do it anyway, of course, but it might not be legal.
[redacted] 97 days since it was last legal for me to have a friend over for a cup of tea.
You know in the movies where at some point the psychotic main character thinks "I'm not the crazy one, it must be them"? I flip flop on this every other hour.
I think we should be clear. The lockdown, in more or less its current state, is necessary. Without it we will see a spiralling death toll, the collapse of health services, and many people saddled with chronic conditions for life, yes even the "young". I personally know some. Their lifestyles will never be the same.
However, it didn't have to be this way. The UK practically beat the pandemic over summer, and then snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by persistently ignoring reality. Reopening schools, Eat Out To Help Out, failing to stop international travel - these are the things that led to the current situation.
Get mad, by all means. But place the blame where it belongs. We are doing the right thing now, in order to deal with the idiocy of before.
That sucks, had no idea you couldn't spend time outside over there. I can understand the ban on having friends over, but not allowing people to spend time outside is a recipe for disaster.
UK having what seems to be the most potent variant of the virus doesn't help, and the island factor either. Try to be strong, and don't let cabin fever tell you otherwise.
Predicting the future is difficult. After the overall incompetence of leadership that 2020 brought in many western countries, making any rational predictions about 2021 is irrational in itself.
Based on their website, GP is likely in the UK. There’s vague hope based on vaccination rates, but given the number of self-inflicted own-goals by this government, anything more than vague hope now feels like setting oneself up for disappointment.
Same in the Netherlands and any restriction introduced for whatever reason is forever. For instance, when bars had to close at 22:00, people would flood the supermarkets to get booze for drinking at home. So they made a rule that supermarkets can’t sell alcohol after 20:00.
Now the bars have been closed for 3 months. Think anyone would remove that now useless limitation on selling alcohol after 20:00? Think again!
It seems that most people are catching coronavirus in private homes.
makes pubs shit to be in with distancing rules and masks etc
people start to socialise at home more
It seems that most people are catching coronavirus in private homes.
closes pubs earlier
people start to socialise at home more
It seems that most people are catching coronavirus in private homes.
close everything else, make meeting up outside illegal
people start to socialise at home more
It seems that most people are catching coronavirus in private homes.
I literally cannot come up with an explanation for this that isn't conspiratorial. For all of Boris' fluff, I don't believe that our Government is this incompetent or stupid - there has to be an ulterior motive here.
Socialising inside a home was restricted pretty early. Those socialising at home are breaking the law, it's just not something that can be enforced very easily.
Our government demonstrably is this incompetent. Not just on coronavirus.
Yeah it’s like ‘30% of infections are happening in bars’ so let’s close the bars. Well now ’30% of infections are happening in gyms’ so let’s close these.
Wow now that everything is closed, 60% of infections are happening at home! Let’s restrict that!
Are you implying that the total number of infections is held constant somehow, and restrictions merely move them around? Because that's false. Restrictions work.
Statistics show a different reality but even then, if everything outside the house is closed it stands to reason that the percentage of infections inside the house would grow by a lot. Simply because there are no others. And it turns out to be pretty tempting, once infections start rising again (despite the restrictions) to use these percentages to impose even more draconian restrictions.
If you think outside the box there’s plenty of things to do:
* quarantine the infected person outside the home
* develop protocols to avoid infection of the others
* use medication that blocks people from getting infected
* use measures to block infecting the others
It is kind of strange that in this situation somehow the government is justified in taking no action. While in others apparently they are obligated to act.
> I literally cannot come up with an explanation for this that isn't conspiratorial. For all of Boris' fluff, I don't believe that our Government is this incompetent or stupid - there has to be an ulterior motive here.
I do believe the PM is this incompetent and stupid. He's demonstrated a total lack of belief in anything, and is utterly spineless.
(Un)fortunately, the same cannot be said for some of his staff. There's a certain special advisor who drove to a castle (and got a raise) who has an interesting history when it comes to his views on eugenics.
A lot of us wish we could; but in the UK it is illegal to leave the house for anything but food-shopping, a medical appointment or (limited) exercise. I don't think "escaping a police state" falls under any of those.
Afaik most European countries have a travel ban unless it's for work.
Minimizing contact and travel, together with masks and sanitation，is proven to work and currently the only solution- unless hey you have a non tyrannical alternative then please let me know
Few European countries prevent people from leaving the country for leisure or family visits. I myself have managed to travel a bit this winter.
In some places, ruling parties have complained that they simply couldn’t prevent people from leaving even if they wanted to, because freely leaving and re-entering is enshrined in the country’s constitution. The UK, Australian, and New Zealand prevention on even leaving the country is much harsher than in most other developed countries.
"Minimizing contact and travel" is not the only solution, just perhaps the only solution you personally find palatable. Keeping borders open and simply accepting deaths works for me. Deaths are bad, but a new wave of nationalism and wall-building is worse.
It is, but then when your paranoid friends only want to walk around it gets old quick, and isn't ideal on shitty days. Even a coffee inside or shooting some pool would be fine.
Exactly. Just like with open source software, if you don't like something make your own instead of creating cargo cult around the ashes of a mediocre past.
Saw blurb that Marin county thinks they've vaccinated 68% of everyone over 75. And 50% of 65-75 year olds. Everyone in a long term care facility plus staff. They had an average 60 active infections in January, this month it's 4.
Bay Area Counties are starting to extend eligibility to essential workers.
Same time noises are that the amount of vaccine shipped is going to double in the next few weeks.
I gave up booze in Dec 2019 as a (temporary?) experiment so lockdown has been helpful for me as I don’t have to not drink with friends in bars. But I know lots of people miss it and I hate seeing business owners in trouble.
I'm drinking more since the lockdown. Not excessive by any means but about a bottle (.5l) of beer every day and sometimes a small glass of scotch.
It makes it easier to draw a line between work and leisure time. The alcohol signals to me and my brain that now it's time for some relaxed activities ... well, youtube, netflix, mubi, reading (hacker)news.
Think I've drank almost every day, probably the least amount was maybe the odd week where I drank like 3 days.
Work wise I'm probably working on the most important project of my life there's nowhere to offload that stress. Can't meet any friends not even allowed to meet outside, everyone stopped doing virtual meet ups months ago and just became introverted instead so what else is there.
I found exactly the same in our lockdown; by not having the physical act of leaving the workplace, you need something to replace that, and a beer fits that pretty well. Too easy to continue that habit though
While I didn't give up booze I introduced a rule that I won't drink during work week unless I'm in company and pretty much stuck to it.
That was before the whole mess started. But this, and sticking to a rigid daily work schedule (rigid in terms of time, in which I really fully work) helped me a lot to cope with it all.
Alcohol (and other drugs) may help to keep boredom away, but it comes with a heavy cost.
never really understood this severance. You can drink without getting drunk.
I like to drink good beverages, but I don't like being drunk, so I just take a few glasses.
No shit. The problem is that when you get into the habit of drinking 2-3 drinks every night you’re bordering substance abuse. Also, “a few glasses” is enough to be arrested for drunk driving, so you might not be the caricature of a drunk but you’re drunk nonetheless.
Severance is a great way to understand your relationship with alcohol. The only reason it even seems weird is because the shit is so deeply embedded in our society. If you give up caffein, nobody gives a shit. Give up alcohol and suddenly people express incredulity at the very notion!
> The problem is that when you get into the habit of drinking 2-3 drinks every night you’re bordering substance abuse
If you're drinking 3 bottles of beer a night, 7 days a week, you're likely consuming 6 units of alcohol a day, or 42 a week.
The NHS (UK health service) recommends less than 14 units a week, spread across at least 3 days (so less than 5 units a day, 3 days a week, tops).[0]
Drinking 3 beers a day 7 days a week results in you drinking more than 3 times the maximum weekly recommended allowance.
I think we're largely in agreement about how one can drink, but 2-3 drinks a day is not 'bordering' on substance abuse from a health perspective. Societally we've normalised drinking to this level, but it's not healthly, and is absolutely substance abuse.
It took me tracking my alcohol consumption daily before I realised that my 1-2 beers a weekday / 4-6 beers a weekendday was so far beyond what is healthy, that I stopped entirely for 6 months. I've since backslid back into 1-2 beers a day. I know it's wrong, but most of life is right now anyway that it doesn't seem like that big a deal anymore.
Agree, except when I gave up coffee all my coworkers were extremely incredulous and unsupportive. Caffeine is also super ingrained in culture but arguably less dangerous.
What I meant was that you should appreciate the quality and forget about quantity. At 2-3 glasses every night, I bet that you just drink the same thing over and over, so yes I agree with you that you are bordering abuse.
I used to do this with whisky, but nice bottles are pricey so I drank cheap whisky and quickly got bored. Now I buy expensive bottles and appreciate it from time to time.
Alcohol is embedded in our society because it is the traditional way for people to let off steam.
> Alcohol is embedded in our society because it is the traditional way for people to let off steam.
You have those backwards. It’s only the “traditional way” because we pretend it’s not just “getting high” like every other drug and we push it everywhere (on flights, in restaurants, on trains, during dress/suit fittings, at sporting events, etc etc etc).
I suggest you should try to have a soft in a situation where you would have a drink. See if you're missing something, is it the taste ? the lack of alcool ? It really puts the relationship with the substance in the light, moderation doesn't mean you have total control, even if it does the trick for the body health.
I haven't given up but I have cut down a lot. There are some pretty tasty alcohol free beers now. Not all of them, by any means, but there are some good ones.
YT is great for this as well! I've been using these 'ambiance soundscapes' to help me get in the right mood a lot during the pandemic. It's also really useful for DnD sessions, writing fiction (or non-fiction too!), and for getting house/work done.
Here's some links, but searching for the right mood is fairly straightforward on YT:
I miss the bars a little (I wasn't too much for going out), but the current 6 pm curfew is rather annoying, how I can't do anything after work. Of course I adjusted my habits, going shopping or running during lunch breaks or the week end, but still
In France, I've slowly started returning to nighttime walks and runs, and I haven't been hassled by any police yet. I guess I'll gladly take the fine if some cop is on a power-trip one night. Some désobéissance civile is healthy :)
A 6pm curfew? In heavily urban parts of the U.S. and perhaps other parts of the world, people don't even get home from work by then, and the virus doesn't pay too much attention to what time it is either.
here in France, a lot of people who went to work aren't back home at 6 pm, but I think they aren't really the people targeted by the measure, but rather those who go see friends to have a drink in the evening
That's tough. Seems like if they're going to a tiny and consistent group of friends' homes in the evening to have a drink, then they're effectively an extension of your family and any spread would be limited to that relatively small group (unlike in a bar).
And if they're actually going to a bar instead, then just close the bar at 6pm. A general curfew seems like a chainsaw approach, instead of a scalpel.
Extremely unlikely any of the ones I frequented will reopen in my country.
They survived the first lockdown but this one will surely have killed them off. Probably result in the historical buildings being sold off to be turned into luxury apartments.
What I find most interesting about this whole pandemic, is that my life hasn't changed in any noticeable way.
I work from home more then I did before, but I still need to go do work in-person on our servers occasionally. I go get groceries on Saturdays (although I need to stand in line now). I wake-up, work, eat supper, watch something on TV and/or have computer time, goto bed, repeat.
My wife hasn't left the house since March or so. But she's an introvert like me.
But by any measurable metric, my life hasn't been inconvenienced. And I know that I am lucky.
For some reason I went in expecting either someone complaining about a UI redesign where a bar had been removed, or a former lawyer commiserating about being disbarred.
I tried the background sounds for a while. Didn't really make me feel like my usual bar - none of the regular customers there, no good discussions, no meeting new people. After a while I didn't hear the noise at all, it just blended in the background. Then I switched it off, and realized how much it had been filling. Fun experiment.
My s/o is Estonian. The thing is - yes, rates are high - but ... that's about it. There is not much going on beyond incidence rates being high. Which makes me question the panic.
Don't be afraid to ask for help, don't be afraid to seek support. We are all feeling this right now, some more than others. I am just some rando on the internet, but if you need to talk to someone let me know.
I think this is somewhat tongue in cheek, almost a form of gallows' humor. Sometimes people deal with this sadness, pain, and isolation with humor, others create silly shit as a way of distracting themselves.
People are still people, we are just being told that people are unsafe, with an invisible enemy attacking. I think these lockdowns are too far, I think we can't hide from danger. Most people disagree with me. I can't say I've found a way to deal with this. I am depressed. I take medicine, but that only worked when things were normal. I am more depressed than I can remember, but it feels numb. When I was depressed in the past, I was actively sad, actively self-harming through excessive drug use. Now I am just, existing, like you said. But there is hope. We can get out of this mess, things are getting better. Hopefully things will be better soon.
I've been joking that I don't know what a woman looks like anymore. But it's kind of true, if I see people at all it's either through a camera or they're wearing a face mask.
I really miss just having a cup of coffee and talking to other people about nothing at all. Sure you can call people but it's hard to talk about nothing or just sit and look at the people going by on the phone.
There should be an Irish version of this, called 'I Miss My Pub'. There would be sliders for trad music, yelling, cursing, arguing, laughter, glass breaking, and people falling.
Cool bit of audio mixing. I'd appreciate "IMissLiveSports" personally, and "IMissLiveMusic" that could played in the background of any other music would be fun, too.
The NFL was piping crowd noise in to their empty stadiums all season. Some games seemed to have a live person controlling the crowd reactions. Not the same, but I got used to it. For the music, can't you just listen to recordings from live concerts? Those usually have plenty of crowd noise.
(It's telling a lot about the state of the internet that this site loads google malware, but won't remember where I let the sliders when I refresh the page though.)
Yeah, we miss that, too. My wife bought a gym membership at the local "meathead" gym (i. e., not a national franchise) right before I went into the hospital December 2019. While I spent about three months and another surgery recovering, man, I was going to so hit that gym when I was ready. Yeah, well, I was ready to hit that gym smack in the middle of March 2020.
Point is, we paid for a year's membership we never used. And we're going to pay again this year just so the place stays in business (Eastside Gym for you Redmond, WA folks). One of these years we'll actually darken the doorstep of the place. In the meantime, our garage now has a new treadmill and rowing machine, and I finally tracked down some adjustable dumbbells. I'm a distance runner, so that should tide us over. If you're a lifter and don't have a big stack of plates at home already, my sympathies.
The only time I felt the pandemic affected me was when they closed the gyms. I was on a 5 day workout routine before, and suddenly being without that was the moment I started struggling.
The gyms have finally opened up again two days ago, and while most of my body is hurting now, my mental well-being is going up again.
The lack of gyms has hurt people in immeasurable ways. For some it’s a way of life, if not just good therapy. There are more victims to covid than those that contracted the virus.
Thanks for making this! I love these types of independent creative projects that don't rely on third party content to work (minus the Spotify embed).
There is something about ambient noise from people that helps me work and focus. Offices and coffee shops closing has saved me a ton of transit and coffee money but it's hurt my productivity a lot.
With Youtube 1hr mixes of ambient people sounds and Pomodoros, I'm doing a bit better.
I need some downtime from people in order to recharge my social battery. I really enjoy being around people but I just can't do it 24/7. Having your whole family around all of the time is really stressing since my social battery is empty and stays empty.
This is where an office or a commute happens, by the time you get home you really missed everybody, at least when everything is going right ;)
Similar is Sounds of the Bodleian [1], which offers ambient noises from four different reading rooms in the Bodleian library (the main research library at the University of Oxford).
Maybe it's the rural setup where I'm from, but I'm glad that in 2020 and 2021 I barely visited bars. Summer was spent by lakes and forests, drinking beers, cocktails, appetizers, and eating freshly grilled BBQ for a fraction of the price, having quality time in the sun with friends.
I don't miss commercial society, I don't miss their tropes and their rituals. Fake friendship and banter from people hanging around to get some of my money in exchange of half a glass of ice and a dribble of liquor.
Bonus annoyance this year: the eternal covid lamentations of bar and restaurant owners, as if governments purposely wanted to destroy their businesses, as if one's bar is more important than other people lives, as if they didn't paint themselves and their stupid restaurant for years as an example of entrepreneurship (apparently the free market is a good idea only when your business goes well).
To hell with paid service, picnics and aperitivi in the main square with cheap liquor and (honestly) friendly smiles.
"I command this dump to wither, board its doors and windows forever" as Dan Feeder says.
Nah, it’s almost certainly (at least in this context) your privilege. I should hope that you’d never have your income, overnight, ganked out from under you. Not to mention the dozens of other hard working, honest humans on your payroll.
I also hope nobody has the completely disconnected uppity spirit to post paragraphs of text telling you why you’re worthless, as you’re inhaling water and drowning. Because that would be shitty.
Do you have any solution other than assuming things about others, their supposed privileges? Do you think the state should give you money or leave you to your enterprise? Do you think that taking things from businesses was some sort of conspiracy plan against business owners or the result of something terrible plus bad management plus decades of no preparation even when the scientific community was proactively warning everyone of this problem?
I made myself resistant to THIS specific problem by decades of choices, losses and failures. My time to drown will come again as it did in the apat and hopefully won't blame others for that.
> Do you think the state should give you money or leave you to your enterprise?
I haven't taken a dime from any government entity, including the unemployment pool that I 100% qualify for and have spent the last 15 years paying into. I also have ~4 other streams of income, so yeah, leave me to my 'enterprise, I'm good.
> Do you think that taking things from businesses was some sort of conspiracy plan against business owners
No...
> or the result of something terrible
Correct.
> plus bad management
Nah we run an extremely dialed joint that pays all state & federal taxes with all cash components (door cover, tips, etc) on the books. My round of ownership (I'm 1 of 3) dug the place out of ~$100k in debt from prior ownership (primarily to other local vendors, and the IRS) and hard course corrected the place inside 24 months time. I'd argue we're a great example of fantastic management – in this business and plenty of others.
> plus decades of no preparation
I've been in this business for ~5 years, so I can't speak to decades.
> even when the scientific community was proactively warning everyone of this problem?
This is so wildy out of pocket, I can't even respond with anything reasonable.
Are you suggesting that restaurant/bar/venue owners should fall to zero and grind it out on the streets because they weren't accounting for scientific research that presented the possibility of a pandemic that'd stop all economic activity across the globe for 6+ months, and their businesses for 2+ years? Are you high?
> I made myself resistant to THIS specific problem by decades of choices, losses and failures.
Like I said, I'm good. But I also have a responsibility to a payroll of 18+ humans, and I'm not a large enough piece of shit to tell them that I win, they planned poorly, I am superior, and to hit the line at the fuckin' food bank.
> and hopefully won't blame others for that.
Nope but you'll blame the ones drowning as you stomp on their heads and flex on them with your wild time traveling foresight that makes you better than all of them and worthy of watching their lungs take on water with an 'I told you so' attitude. Hope that works out for you, boss.
Of course I do, but what does that have to do with this? Are you suggesting bar owners or workers will be on here seeking some kind of comfort? This is clearly for people that go to hang out in bars as customers.
So because those people probably aren't here, it's fine to demean them and act like all of the horrible things that have happened to them and their employees are actually GOOD THINGS because some people "got to" spend more time by lakes and forests?
My tech job is very safe. My financial situation has not changed. But many of my friends own and work in bars and restaurants, and I have seen firsthand how their lives have been so negatively impacted by all of this.
The bar was the meeting point, and the place where we closed the week. I met my friends there, and sometimes made new ones.
You may not like bars and the fact that they exchange services for money, but that doesn't mean you don't have to show sympathy for people who are losing everything because of a force majeure.
>Bonus annoyance this year: the eternal covid lamentations of bar and restaurant owners, as if governments purposely wanted to destroy their businesses, as if one's bar is more important than other people lives, as if they didn't paint themselves and their stupid restaurant for years as an example of entrepreneurship (apparently the free market is a good idea only when your business goes well).
Fuck off into the sun. Of course people are going to lament when their jobs vanish and the business they built over years of hard work is in a very real danger of tanking. I should know, my food service business is down quite a bit - and we're one of the lucky ones that is doing well enough to stay afloat given that we had a strong takeaway focus even before the C-19 hit. An entire segment of jobs blown away - what do those people do? Shit like "learn to code" is not a helpful answer, and history suggests that what they do end up doing after a long enough period of hopelessness is not pretty.
> apparently the free market is a good idea only when your business goes well
This statement is so confusing. Forcing millions of businesses which were previously legal to shutter under questionable authority is literally the opposite of a free market.
Well it's easy to say this about summer but in the winter you have no options. It's too cold to hang out outside, play sports or whatever. You could hand out at each other's houses but people prefer to have neutral ground where no one has to prepare for everyone else
Yep, the UK went full authoritarian pretty much straight out of the gate, it's been illegal for me to have anyone in my house for 97 days now (and was also illegal or heavily restricted a number of times before that)
> Yep, the UK went full authoritarian pretty much straight out of the gate
We really didn't. Had we done that, we may have succeeded in controlling this thing. Instead what happened was too little, too late, over and over again the government shut the stable door after the horse bolted.
We closed things down too late, this is pretty well understood.
The last lockdown was imposed when it was, essentially, because the powers that be wanted christmas retail open, and christmas day to happen, when cases were already massively on the rise. I'm not saying "it wasn't harsh enough", I'm saying that every time it's been done too late, and ramped up too slowly. It could have been shorter and well controlled had it been sooner, like it has been in other countries.
There's no need to be so incivil. Perhaps think about your own words.
No, I'm quite seriously talking about how it should have been done sooner, and if it had been, could have been shorter.
I'm sorry you're so upset about this. It's not easy on any of us and it's been handled appallingly. But there really is no need to call someone that disagrees with you a "lockdown ####" and fantasise about violence upon them.
I think you probably ought to seek some counselling if you're fantasising about violence towards others on a daily basis. What you're expressing is deeply unhealthy.
I'm not saying this as some sort of point of argument or to belittle you - it really sounds like you could use someone to talk through this with.
If you are fantasising, daily, about committing violence against people in favour of public health measures, as you said you were, please seek some sort of mental health support.
I'm calling for less locking down, but done earlier so that it can be shorter, and I'm largely talking about how it could have been done better last year. If that's enough for you to want to physically harm me, I really think you need to get that support.
Yes, if they’re helping a deadly virus spread during a pandemic then go ahead. Except unlike you I’m going to accept that, because I don’t want to be stuck at home for another year while morons continue to spread the disease everywhere.
I don't know what I have to say to explain this to these people. Maybe it's not quite explainable.
Restrictions haven't pushed their buttons in the same way. The only way to get this across is to describe all of their needs disappearing. But it doesn't hit the same, and it seems petty.
I do not think it's easy to convey to someone what this last year has been like for a lot of people who live alone. As such, I can't really blame the crowd that pushes for more intense lockdown measures - their motives for doing so are generally good. Thankfully the vaccine is being distributed so I'm fairly confident this will all end soon
Yes, I understand how damaging this is for people who are alone. It's also the reason why I've been staying inside since march, to help get this whole thing behind us. Unfortunately some people just don't give a shit.
No one has a moral responsibility to not live their lives, if ethics are universal. And no one has the ethical right to hinder others from living and letting live. End these government lockdowns
Until people rise up against the restrictions, the restrictions will continue and will be more restrictive over time. There's always a third, fourth, fifth wave, there's always a new strain immune to current vaccines. Just hold on for two weeks so we can defeat the virus!
I don't really understand why this can get downvoted... Seems like pure HN censorship to me. I fully agree. We need to do something, whether that be writing your senators, protesting in the streets or making your voice heard for what you believe in. If you have an opinion that is different from others and your opinion is valid. It should never be discounted even if others believe it is wrong. Discourse is the key to rational thinking.
Indeed. It truly is mind-boggling that certain governments seem like they want to literally obliterate the virus and drive the number of cases all the way to zero.
Heck, why don't they enforce a quarantine until the common cold disappears as well?
You miss the bar or the environment you ingested alcohol in? When your brain misses the ethanol high it is reminding you about the circumstances and makes you want to repeat it.
When I see stuff like this it reminds me just how different I am to many people. It feels like I'm an alien trying to understand a new civilisation.
I used to go to "bars" and the like, but it was only to meet women and get laid. Now that I've secured the means to reproduction I don't have to force myself through that hell any more. Sites like this suggest there is something attractive about such places even if you take the sex away. I'm so happy, happier than I've ever been, that I don't have to go to bars or drink alcohol ever again.
“Secured the means to reproduction”, sure does sound like something an alien, trying to act human, would say about finding a partner.
A lot of people, especially in pub cultures like the UK socialise at their locals, they don’t just go there to aggressively pursue sex with strangers. It’s where they meet their friends after work, where they go to watch sport on the weekend etc.
I know. I live in the UK. I literally started my comment saying how different I am to other people and people keep replying about how not everyone is like me. Is reading comprehension really this bad or am I just rubbish at writing? I'm always happy to learn if it's the latter.
Saying you don't "understand" something when it's clearly, obviously understandable with a shred of empathy - especially since you live in the UK and have likely met many people who go to the pub for reasons beyond "reproduction" sounds extremely condescending at best, and malicious at worst. If that wasn't your intention, then yes, I suggest you go back and try to improve your writing style.
Nah, I think the problem is I was talking about me but everyone else think I'm talking about them. I learnt a long time ago to accept that people are the they are. I don't try to analyse people. I just thought you empathetic people would find it interesting to hear how I feel. I guess I was wrong.
> suggest there is something attractive about such places even if you take the sex away.
Erm, you don't just like going to a pub or a bar with friends? Even if you don't, lots of people do. Perhaps what's different about you is that you assume your own tastes are universal... actually that's all too common with humans!
Bars/Pubs are an integral part of both socializing and unwinding with your work colleagues and also a destination to meet up with your close friends. In many places, it's actually far more about socializing.
These are great inside jokes, there was one thread where myself and another both accused each other of being GTP-3 (not realizing until later).
Especially in this age where all of our interactions are through text, and there lingers the possibility that everyone else does not exist, solipsism is becoming increasingly true.
When I see comments like this it reminds me just how different I am to many people. It feels like I'm an alien trying to understand a new civilisation.
I used to have "sex" and the like, but it was only to experience certain transmitters firing in my brain. Now that I've discovered my right hand I don't have to force myself through that hell any more. Comments like this suggest there is something attractive about such acts even if you take the pleasurable transmitters away. I'm so happy, happier than I've ever been, that I don't have to interact with another human ever again.
Good for you. Finding happiness that works for you and the rest of society is the most important thing there is. I tried a way of life similar to yours for many years, but I always found before long I would want sex with a real person. Also that person has to want to have sex with me. It can't be overtly a business transaction.
You are very, very lucky to have been able to find true happiness alone. You'll always have yourself and you won't be responsible for anyone else or have to worry about them. Some people might look down upon on you because you're not "doing your part" or something, but remember Stockholm syndrome is a real thing and you don't owe anyone anything.
I don't miss my bar - because me and all my friends never stopped going. What people who 'Listened' don't realise is that people still go out... in every city. Most sheriff's in California have flat out refused to comply with the lockdown regulations. Since when did America get the ability to shutdown business'? Never....
During this Pandemic i've lost three 'Friends' (Social Media acquaintances I knew from HS) to suicide and have not heard of a single person who's had any long-term damage from Covid and the majority of my friends have has it at one point in time by now. I got it in early March in SF and again in July in Miami. Both times i caught a little sniffle. I got tested and quarantined but it did not stop me or scare me away from living my life. Most of my friends have the money, willpower and social distain for authoritarian governments to move to wherever state is not trying to follow China's example. (Mainly Socal, Florida, even Mexico)
Smoking cigs, riding motorcycles, and a million other things can kill you in this life. Live your life and anyone who tells you "You must do this for the saftey of others" can go fuck themselves. You have no right to tell me what I can and can't do as long as i am not causing DIRECT harm to you. If you're scared of COVID stay inside, but let the rest of us live our lives.
> anyone who tells you "You must do this for the saftey of others" can go fuck themselves. You have no right to tell me what I can and can't do as long as i am not causing DIRECT harm to you.
Do you not count spreading a virus & possibly infecting others as causing direct harm?
No - I don't. If you are at a bar at the height of the pandemic, i'm definitely not causing you any harm by being there also. However, I do avoid my family who might be older. I don't go to large family gatherings. I do, however, believe American Ideals of freedom and free speech have definitely been harmed through this ordeal. No one can have any different opinion about COVID without being canceled.
As we are getting more and more data, the infection rate to death ratio is dropping lower and lower. At what point does Forcing people to lose their job and their entire lively-hoods, Taking on massive amounts of national debt that MY GENERATION will have to pay for, massive suicide increases going to be counted as direct harm? When we find out in the future after scrubbing all the data that the death toll was less than 1% but the suicide rate spiked by 30%, increased our total debt by 20% and fueled a massive recession in 5 years; how will future generations feel about the decisions we made?
See my anecdotal comment above. Also, do alittle research on the parabolic rise in suicide hotlines. People's mental health has been damaged and that fact can't be discounted. Mental health is as important as physical health in my opinion, if not more.
If anyone's wondering, the bar is still open and operating on a very limited capacity, which has made it much nicer in my opinion. Also, the usual jazz quartet has been replaced with a trio with much younger musicians, since understandably the older musicians don't want to play in a bar during a pandemic.
[1] Maverick Monterrey - Lugar de Encuentros https://www.maverickmty.com