Just thinking out loud here, but I’ve got a camera monopod I can use as a cane that also has a sharp spike on the end. It might come in handy.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Just thinking out loud here, but I’ve got a camera monopod I can use as a cane that also has a sharp spike on the end. It might come in handy.
The Blood God is not the one you need to be making sacrifices to for protection against pestilence. Everyone knows that.
Old folks have been sacrificed to Mammon from the beginning of this (for-profit long-term care facilities).
Well, that or get a trekking pole, which also can have a sharp tip.
Mine has a nice carbide tip, for durability.
When not trekking, I use my aluminum cane, pending my finding a good hardwood cane to my liking. While the aluminum one may bend in defense usage, it only cost me $5.00 on closeout and I have spares.
Or I could use the one with that nifty sword hidden inside of it…
Although, my usual go-to is to simply throw an attacker into a nice solid fixed object. Let it, their mass and gravity do the work for me as I hobble away quite briskly.*
*Think speed walk. Slow, I ain’t.
It feels a bit like that awful sci-fi film, Logan’s Run. But instead of 30 being the age of termination it’s now closer to 60 in our society. Speaking as someone north of 60, being made to feel expendable for the ‘greater good’ pisses me off. Oh, you want your old life back, do you? You want to eat out, go to the movies, go to concerts, travel, cruise, have sex with strangers, chuck that mask into the trash bin and go your merry way? Well, so do I (maybe not the sex with strangers any more, but I’m open to the possibility.) The only things holding you back are people my age, the immunocompromised, the occasional child, or anyone else whose immune system can’t handle a new coronavirus. So, we should all just die already and get the fuck out of their way. We’re all expendables for the deplorables. Fuck them all.
I’ve been using a crutch when venturing out, because knee replacements have been off the cards for a couple years. A flick of the wrist, and it’s a decent club.
Well, really, the Covid-19 virus only kills the old and those with comorbidities, that is other underlying health problems.
Those underlying risk factors include old age, cardiac problems, lung problems, overweight, high blood pressure, smoking, immunosuppressed, pregnant, and generally being in poor health.
If you add those risk factors up, it is the large majority of the US population.
“In the United States, 36.5 percent of adults have obesity. Another 32.5 percent of American adults are overweight. In all, more than two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or have obesity.”
That is why I’ve never found the presence of underlying medical problems to be all that informative.
It has been noted that a whole lot of those people willing to sacrfice the old and sick to the Covid-19 virus are themselves, the old and sick. And they are almost all antivaxxers and quite often end up dead from the Covid-19 virus.
We’ve all seen the usual memes. Antivaxxers rarely post original content because most of them seem to be barely literate.
Unmasked
Unmuzzled
Unvaccinated
Followed by
Unwell
Unalive
Underground
Well, one of the earliest tasteless jokes was “Boomer remover” allegedly made popular by mean-spirited GenZers. But I seem to be the only one who remembers it.
“Well, really, the Covid-19 virus only kills the old and those with comorbidities, that is other underlying health problems.”
Except that there are plenty of cases of a young, otherwise healthy person with no identified co-morbidities also dying from covid. Sure, they have better chances, but it’s still a deadly health risk.
I am one of the people who is over 50 and has co-morbidities. Used to travel a lot, go to concerts, attend a movie at least once a week, play in person poker, etc. I haven’t done any of these things since the beginning of Covid. But you know something? I don’t need a healthy 8-year-old kid to wear a mask in school as a gesture to my health. Especially as the healthy 8-year-old kid has basically a zero chance of being seriously harmed.
We can make accommodations like requiring masks in grocery stores or government funded grocery delivery for those who qualify. Remote schooling and working accommodations should be required whenever possible. But we need an offramp and many medical professionals and public health officials are saying that now – or at least sometime within the next couple of weeks – is the time to begin lifting restrictions.
When I wrote “Remote schooling and working accommodations should be required whenever possible”, what I meant was that it should be required to be offered as an option.
marner@10,
Well maybe you can easily avoid potentially-infected 8-year-olds if you want to. Many people whose age and health makes them particularly vulnerable to Covid cannot – particularly those who are less well-off and live in crowded conditions as part of a multi-generational household.
@12
Then that multi-generational household has/should have the option of remote schooling.
Artor@9 I’m sure comorbidity gets defined circularly as “some condition, possibly unknown before, that cause them to die from COVID when I said they shouldn’t have.”
marner@10 Part of the point (already stated above) is to make sure they don’t bring the infection back home. My daughter (who is immunocompromised due to transplant medication) attends high school in person. Students all comply with the masking policy, and it doesn’t look like a huge hardship. I see high schoolers and middle schoolers walking home with their masks still on when I’m out walking unmasked, since it’s outside. (According to my daughter, you might just forget you’re wearing it, and also it makes sense if you’re walking in a close group.)
8 year olds? OK, little kids are a different story. I think 8 is actually at a point where the purpose of the mask is well understood and compliance is not hard. Kindergarten and preschool? Yeah, I get that there is a point where it could be an encumbrance to learning and socialization. But it honestly just doesn’t seem to be a big deal. I see apparently well-adjusted teens and pre-teens out there with masks. They’re not the ones being babies about it.
8-year-old kids are rather good vectors of propagation and while they have a low probability of serious harm, it is not 0. And it doesn’t take a large percentage to make a significant number of affected kids and some of them will have long COVID. We don’t know yet how long this will last but if it is chronic, it will be decades of low quality of life for some people because it was too inconvenient to wear a piece of cloth on your face (or to make sure that schools have adequate ventilation but that’s another issue…).
There’s a lot we don’t know yet about the long term effects of being exposed to the virus (even for those with minimal initial symptoms) and there are indications that it may well come back to bite us in the ass in the future. So minimizing the impact on the young just by the numbers we currently have is not a good idea.
“The Economy”? Lot of talk about inflation these days. Is anyone starving to death because of inflation? Let’s talk about the REAL source of inflation. It’s not consumer level, it’s corporate level. Corporations are turning record profits They have been this whole time. The consumer level tax breaks, extended unemployment, and emergency checks are a pittance compared to what Amazon and Kroger are raking in right now. They’ve been profiting from this pandemic. I have a friend who just stopped grocery shopping. She get’s everything delivered.
TLDR: The economy is fine. Inflation is fine. Talk to me again when people are actually starving to death in the street.
Remember when conservatives used “death panels” deciding if Grandma gets to live or die as a scare tactic against making any improvements to the American healthcare system?
@15 PaulBC
If they want to wear the mask, more power to them. A friend’s daughter (13? 14?) actually likes wearing it. It’s part of her style now.
@16 Jean
I am sympathetic to your argument. But like it or not, we are beginning that experiment. Even Washington state has announced that state mandated school mask wearing is ending next month.
FWIW, I support – well, am at least very open to – mandated vaccination requirements to attend in person.
I see above that everyone has already made the point I was going to make.
Sigh.
You’ve never heard of the Germ Theory of Disease.
That 8 year old kid is likely to not be harmed by the Covid-19 virus. They are however, guaranteed to get it from one of the other Mobile Inoculating Loops at their school and bring it home.
The unit of transmission for this virus is quite often the family.
It’s been common for school kids to get it, bring it home, and…kill mom and dad. And/or grandmother and grandfather. There are now around 200,000 Covid-19 orphans in the USA.
This isn’t hyperbole either. I’ve heard of scenes where small children are in the hospital saying goodbye to their parents in the ICU, while knowing that they were the original vector.
This has been one of the weak points in this whole pandemic. How do you quarantine a sick 8 year old? You are supposed to put them out in the RV you don’t have in the driveway you also don’t have, and let them forage for their own food for 10 to 14 days.
@ 20 raven
Common? Citation (ideally post vaccination availability) please.
@R L Foster #4:
You take that back right now, else I set the Sandmen on you!
Sigh. It’s 2022.
Close to six million people globally have now reportedly died from covid. There is massive undereporting, so the real number is bound to be much, much higher.
Given that immunity only appears to last for a few months (maybe up to a year), we should all still be careful.
Young people have healthier bodies and can take more damage, on average. But many an 8 yo will have damaged organs too, after the 10th corona infection. If the virus is allowed to simply exist unabated, we are looking at tens or hundreds of millions of people suffering from life-long, debilitating health problems. In the near future.
For an old person, this is bad enough. But an 8 yo long hauler is looking at 50-70 years of bad health.
No one is safe. Everyone has friends or family or classmates or colleagues or whatever, and you literally cannot know how well someone handles the virus until it is too late.
The issue of underreporting goes further. An 8 yo, as you implied, is unlikely to end up in the ICU. They’re also unlikely to see a doctor or even take a test in the first place. Which means that our numbers are severely skewed.
In the face of this uncertainty, the best course of action is still to wear a fucking mask, get vaccinated and keep social contacts to a bare minimum.
I agree that, in a better world, children shouldn’t have to do any of this. But if the state already forces them to have social contacts, then it should also do its utmost to protect them and their relations. Whether the state (any state in the world, really) is actually doing that is for another post.
The point is that none of this is a performance or virtue signalling or a fucking gesture for your sake. There are actually lifes at stake. Which is a ridiculous thing to have to re-state, two years into a world-wide pandemic.
OK, you also haven’t heard of Google, the internet search engine.
.1.
This study was up to June 2021.
The actual number of Covid-19 orphans is now estimated to be 200,000 or so.
.2. This is post vaccination.
There are huge numbers of people in the USA who are unvaccinated, mostly the antivaxxers.
While they are the cause of their deaths and of leaving orphans behind, they are still people and their children are still traumatized.
You haven’t even noticed that even after the vaccines came out that people up until today are still dying by the thousands per day in the USA.
You are an idiot.
.3. Watch Marmer keep digging the hole he is in.
It is what dumb people do.
In this study, children were the source of infection for their parents about 8% of the time. And this is post vaccine availability.
I am sick of all this BS! all this crying about disruption, of lack of freedom, of crying about being oppressed.
I am tired of all this as well everyone is so f’n what! there is no disruption like death and disease. The god dam storm is not f’n over yet no you can’t go out and not expect to get wet,
it looks like we will not kill human domination of the earth with war (unless someone makes a mistake) or over development and environmental degradation. the current situation suggests it will be our obstinate stupidity in handling disease .
In regard to children and covid, Sweden has seen a surprising number of children being admitted to hospital during the omricon peak. Few children get sick, but when the infections get very widespread, those few start to add up. Fortunately the kids rarely need intensive care.
This happens a lot.
Both parents get Covid-19 and die, leaving children behind as orphans.
The only thing unique about this is that they left 5 children behind.
It’s been noted and is sort of eerie that a lot of the antivaxxers who end up dead have large families for these days, 4 to 8 children instead of the usual 1 or 2. They are also almost all fundie xians.
Australian data: (https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2022/02/covid-19-vaccine-rollout-update-18-february-2022.pdf)
19,799,178 people have had at least one dose
over 95% of people over the age of 16 have had at least one dose
19,418,011 people are fully vaccinated
94.2% of people over the age of 16 are fully vaccinated
10,583,499 people over the age of 16 have received more than two doses
—
Not really any excuse any more for vaccine hesitancy, is there?
(The vaccinated aren’t exactly keeling over)
@ Raven
I note that you do not provide evidence that it’s common for school kids to have infected their parents and killed them. Which is the question I actually asked. Especially their vaccinated parents.
From your quoted study:
And your immediate comment about the study:
Gently, vaccinations were not approved until December of 2020 (both Canada and US). And there is not a mention of deaths.
I would like to deescalate. I am absolutely for vaccinations. As I previously posted, I am open to requiring school kids to be vaccinated (only just open to it because maybe there is some big issue that I am unaware of). I also maintain social distancing in my life, wear a mask and avoid crowds.
To me this is about risk assessment and risk aversion. Look at European recommendations for 8 year old’s masking. Some do, some don’t. https://www.thejournal.ie/face-mask-requirements-school-children-europe-ireland-5617916-Dec2021/ A better conversation would be what is our definition of acceptable risk. I like what is said here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/too-soon-to-lift-mask-mandates-for-most-elementary-schools-in-u-s-study-finds/ I recognize the irony of my quoting an article entitled “Too soon to lift mask mandates for most elementary schools in U.S., study finds” – (I actually am good with us waiting a few weeks locally to ending the mandate to let transmission die down a little more).
I am comfortable with “Or do they want to keep the number of cases among students, staff, and families low enough that no one is likely to be hospitalized?” Except that I would throw in vaccinated people to it. I admit that my level of concern for adults who refuse to get vaccinated is limited. For those who cannot or for those it does not help is a different story and thus remote learning.
I did.
.1 The post-vaccine Ontario study shows that 8% of all cases are school age children to parent transmissions.
.2. We know that the Covid-19 virus is lethal is some cases to parents.
That is how we end up with 200,000 Covid-19 virus orphans.
.3. Some of those children to parent cases will inevitably result in the deaths of one or more parents or custodial grandparents.
I can predict the behavior of some people but only if they are really, really dumb.
Still digging your hole.
You win. You are way too stupid for me to waste any more time on.
if anyone could like do that we would not have a problem but we can not guarantee that if anyone gets sick they wont have to be hospitalized the only way that could be accomplished would be making all of the guide lines absolutely mandatory with no ifs ands or buts, or everyone doing that with out having to be forced.
there are just too many people who are too stupid and emotional to follow a reasonable course of action for the best outcome for all of us Instead here we are still much where we were 2 years ago
Whatever. I just read an article in Nature about a team of scientists that found that risk of stroke and heart problems are elevated to 52% and 72%, respectively, for at least a year after a COVID infection, even if it was asymptomatic. I’ll be keeping my mask on, thanks.
#1 NURGLE will win. Always and every time. Forever.
Nurgle is an inescapable force of reality. It doesn’t matter if you make sacrifices or not. You will decay and be food. But Nurgle will take away the pain…
I feel like my warhammer mention was too much. Dark universe. Nurgle references have some merit with warhammer political uses. But if that was too much I am sorry.
@32 unclefrogy
First, I have been reading your comments for a long time and I appreciate where you are coming from.
As I said before, I am open to requiring vaccination for in-person students. They have to be vaccinated for other things so it makes sense. I agree with you, though, that too many of us are too emotional to probably allow this to happen.
I would suggest that we are in a much better place then 2 years ago, though. Doctors know how to treat it and they have developed some exciting therapies (just need to get more of them produced) There are vaccines. And about 75% of us have some protection.
@16 Jean “it will be decades of low quality of life for some people because it was too inconvenient to wear a piece of cloth on your face”
So, you think it’s okay to trade possible decades of low quality life for a few of those infected with Covid for decades of low quality life for everyone because we’ll be forced to wear masks, isolate, etc? Also, it has been long proven that cloth masks are all but useless, you might as well be wearing pantyhose. The only effective masks are well-fitted N95’s, and those ARE a pain to wear (I know, I’ve worn them when required at work).
KG, I recognize that Remote Learning has not worked well for a lot of students, including many who were already disadvantaged. The Covid Slide. We should start a National Remote School and pay what it takes to get the absolute best educators. Think people like Michelle Obama, Nikole Hannah-Jones or even SpongeBob SquarePants. Add in award-winning teachers who have proven to be engaging in this format. Then allow the student/parent options as to which teacher matches the child’s needs/learning style. You can have a lot of instructors that help provide small group and individual assistance. Have stock recorded answers to common questions geared to different learning styles. AI. Use data to constantly improve the product. Continuous constructive feedback! Start to mix in augmented and virtual reality. Have regular guest lecturers like Taylor Swift. Pick a sister class to engage with in their choice of country. Hire the best sound and video people. Make it a truly attractive option. Ideally, of course, there would be some sort of in-person socialization. At least eventually.
there is the flaw in the plan This here country will not do that it has never done that. The operative word is pay the only thing we ever pay top dollar for are things someone with a vested interested in and can make money off of wants.
i.e. see defense contracts
torcuato @ 38
First, the piece of cloth was mainly used as a proxy for a mask in general. Second, the CDC has a study about the effectiveness of different mask types and cloth masks are definitely not useless. And the surgical mask is the one mostly recommended now even though an N95 is certainly better.
Having said that if you think that a mask will be needed for decades then this pandemic would be different from any other we’ve seen and would defy any conventional public health prediction. And if you think any government would impose a mandate for this long, you’re delusional. At worse, I would expect a yearly boost which would not be mandated especially since there are now efficient treatments available and more to come.
In short you don’t have anything intelligent to say.
I think it was Mano Singham who pointed out USA has 7 million immunocompromised people with lupus etc and the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers are comfortable about letting them die.
This is even more ridiculous than on the face of it. It’s not as if Khorne cares whence the blood flows. He only cares that it does.
On another note. There’s loads of people who are not openly and proudly stating that the lives saved through quarantine, masking, distancing measures, and so on, were not worth the hassle. Apparently, we should just have let them all die.
I doubt that surprises anyone.
Pearl Buck:
I had to track down who actually said that. It is often misattributed to Gandhi, and for some reason I had it stuck in my mind that it was Hannah Arendt.
The question today is whether we believe this, and clearly there is a large segment of Americans who do not. That’s not new (blaming the vulnerable for their own problems) but the attitude toward the pandemic takes it to a new level.
So how do we measure up as a civilization? We suck.
Good. You’re doing the bare minimum. As are we all. What do you want? A medal?
You say “low enough”, but you don’t specify what exactly that means. Tell me what “low enough” means to you.
At what exact level of human sacrifice is “low enough” actually “low enough”? Actually explain yourself, here. Because–as surprising as this may be to you–it is actually you whose position is alien and nonsesical. You’re the one being unclear. State some numerical, objective threshold below which humans no longer deserve protection. Do it. Because that’s your argument.
I would prefer a cookie. No raisins, please.
No, it isn’t. I have offered examples that would provide protection. Sure, they won’t be 100%. Is that what you are looking for? Complete safety? What is your acceptable level of risk? Should we go back to lockdowns?
You are looking for some metric that I can point at and say, OK, here. This is where we ease restrictions. And if it rises above this metric then we reinstate the restrictions. As I had pointed out in a previous comment, this would be a healthy conversation to have as a community.
To reduce mask mandates – and I am not sold on any one metric – but a community positivity rate lower than 4.9 %, the number of cases per day less than 8 per 100,000 and the total number of ICU beds occupied by Covid patients at less than 7%. Ish. I do not pretend to be a health expert, so am open to suggestions and have no problem being corrected. As long as your numbers aren’t zero.
Let me use this sportsball example. Does the fact that I do not want to outlaw high school football – even though it kills kids every year – mean that the players do not deserve protection or that we cannot work towards making it safer? No. We can change the rules, the equipment, the training, and the accountability to make it safer. But life is not safe and there is a cost-benefit to living it.
marner @ 22, a few seconds on search engine:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33721405/
Obviously didn’t spread, because of hand wave.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html
Good thing kids live in school, rather than spending most of their time at home. Well, in magic math, anyway…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7323934/
Kids don’t shit at home, so everything’s safe, as toilets autoclean anyway or something.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7036e2.htm
Kids are safe, fuck the dead ones.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33437465/
Spreads in schools, but magical homes are sterile environments hand wave.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-in-babies-and-children/art-20484405
Sick kids get sick from COVID, fuck them sideways and bury them, eugenics all the way!
There are around 20 high quality studies as well, but those are even more easily searched with eosertic things like “child unit of transmission covid” or “child transmission covid”.
asclepias @ 33, that’d likely be due to antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, previously largely only observed in lupus, but insanely common in COVID patients. :/
marner @ 46, a better way to explain is that no protective measure or set of measures is ever 100% effective and one then chooses at which relative risk exposure level does one cease mitigation. As an example, the US government defends its networks quite heavily, but does not put most of its budget protecting all segments or assets, choosing operability and effective usage over complete, ironclad protection. So, Buckshot Yankee infected every network, but could only report back on the unclassified network. So, that got the greatest mitigation measures. The first outbreak cost $1 billion, the second outbreak mitigations costs remain classified, but suffice it to say, there was no third outbreak and special snowflakes had a really, really bad day with the second melting their efforts to remain snowflakes.
Simple put, I don’t spend a million to protect a penny, I don’t cost hundreds of lives to protect one. But, determining that magical cutoff point is far beyond my pay grade or interest, even if I end up with the shit end of the stick at times.
And both I and my wife are in the high risk groups. What do you think endothelial activation would do in someone with an abdominal aortic aneurysm? Definitely not clot city, it’d be more like clot county.
I am reminded of an argument I had in the early days of the pandemic with one of those “Let ‘er Rip!” fans. His argument was “So, the flu kills (some inflated number) per year and we don’t take any precautions from that “. To which I replied “Influenza kills 0.05 percent of those who catch it. . . . covid is projected to kill 0.45% of those who catch it.” By the time this is over we will have lost more to covid than we lost to the US Civil War. and I hope I’m wrong” I was not wrong. I was on the low side.
marner@39,
The problem with your suggestion here is that those wondrous facilities are not available now, when they are needed. As you acknowledge, remote schooling doesn’t work well for many – and that will particularly be so for children from poorer, more crowded households.
Incidentally (this is not for marner in particular), a recent study (not yet peer-reviewed) indicates that viral infectivity decays rapidly in air, suggesting that masks and physical distancing are likely more important than ventilation levels in reducing transmission.
marner @various
It’s only an anecdote, but I know of an eleven year old boy who bought COVID-19 home to his pregnant mum. It killed his mum and, despite a caesarian in an attempt to save her, his much wanted baby sister last September ie after vaccinations here. Try and imagine what that boy is going through.
Over 1,200 children have died in the USA alone, tens thousands have been hospitalised and we do not know what lasting damage any of the children who cought COVID-19 will end up with.
Tabby Lavalamo @18
Absolutely. I’ve brought this point up a few times in various comment sections where conservatives argue grandma should be sacrificed to the God of “normality.” The talking points were completely opposite when fighting against the ACA.
In a way, it reminds me of how anti-trans bigots are always bringing up the “dangers” trans women pose to women’s sports. You just know these are the same people who were joking about how unpopular and boring women’s sports were just a few months before but pretend to care about them if they can use them as a cudgel against something they hate more.
*Sorry Tabby my autocorrect butchered your name.