End of COVID Pandemic is 'in Sight' - WHO Chief (reuters.com) 228
The world has never been in a better position to end the COVID-19 pandemic, the head of the World Health Organization said on Wednesday, his most optimistic outlook yet on the years-long health crisis which has killed over six million people. From a report: "We are not there yet. But the end is in sight," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at a virtual press conference. That was the most upbeat assessment from the UN agency since it declared an international emergency in January 2020 and started describing COVID-19 as a pandemic three months later. The virus, which emerged in China in late 2019, has killed nearly 6.5 million people and infected 606 million, roiling global economies and overwhelming healthcare systems. The rollout of vaccines and therapies have helped to stem deaths and hospitalisations, and the Omicron variant which emerged late last year causes less severe disease. Deaths from COVID-19 last week were the lowest since March 2020, the U.N. agency reported.
don't worry (Score:3, Insightful)
There's always monkey-polio-ebola. We'll deny it exists for a year and let a million people die because that's just how we roll.
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We live in a global community now.
I'll believe we'll start taking action when the planet confirms the fearmongering that certain countries love to infect their citizens with.
That's how facts and logic rolls.
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might want to get your mom tested then
Re: don't worry (Score:3)
The entire point is that these actions are only "self-destructive" due to a pathogen that we have the technology to combat, if we wish. A decision not to do so is effectively based in religion, even if you identify as atheist. This is *not* just how things are, it's something we could change for the betterment of even those who don't engage in behavior you've decided either people should be ashamed of.
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rned back on me? that is some hardcore cope.
i nailed two pretty damn good "your mom" jokes. credit where credits due, it's purile but they hit the spot.
sure feels you both are the ones who are in fact "triggered", you can't stop giving me more free throws!
anyway, im out of good ones so ill just say i am going to go have sexual intercourse with your birth mother again. Zinger!
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If stupidity was a reason to exclude people from being allowed near ICUs, our ICUs would not be overburdened.
Re:don't worry (Score:4, Informative)
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even NBC news has said that something like
Ah, NBC News, that well-known source of high quality information.
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Just wait for the claims that teachers are paedophile groomers passing it to the children they rape. We seem to have regressed when it comes to the safety of LGBTQ+ folk, and apparently random teachers now too.
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Ok I've seen this TLA twice now by AC.
WTF is "MSM"?
Never heard of that one before.
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Given the context I suspect it's an abbreviation for it's "Men who have sex with Men". A term I've seen come up in public health messaging on monkeypox.
AIUI it refers to people who are physically male and have sex with other people who are physically male. So mostly gay men, but also some trans, bisexual, nonbinary etc people.
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The poster is really old... old enough to still use the abbreviations from the newspaper classified adds. Man Seeking Man.
Re:don't worry (Score:5, Informative)
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I miss the rains down in Africa.
You'll find anthrax at the edge of some farmlands, under grouped trees. There's where they used to bury livestock that died of it. The trees are to mark them (and to stay away, since anthrax is very tough and will survive for very long).
WHO is worried about the next big concern... (Score:2)
The Russian defenestration virus...
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Well, I think defenestration applied to incompetent or insane leaders is a very good political tradition. Unfortunately the Russians seem to be doing this entirely wrong...
And anything is walking distance (Score:2)
If you've got the time.
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Not doing that this week.
also.... (Score:4, Interesting)
"We can see the light at the end of the tunnel" -- Robert MacNamara et. al. , referring to some minor EastAsian conflict.
Re:also.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Problem was that it wasn't the end of the tunnel he saw but the headlight of the oncoming train.
Just in time (Score:2)
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You know that we had it pretty much eliminated from circulation? Well, that was until people started pretending that it doesn't exist.
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Yeah, excessive stupidity at work.
Mask shortage (Score:2)
When it is officially declared over, surely that will make the official government advice be "you don't need to wear a mask"?
Will we then see the antivaxxers frantically buying and wearing masks?
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You mean the "Summer of Love" riots that burned cities, had people murdered, saw the rise of Chaz/Chop or whatever it was called...?"
Yeah, I remember those...but if I recall, not that much mask wearing even then when the pandemic was in full gear.
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Any sane person who understood how vaccines work and are developed wouldn't have been rightly skeptical of any such vaccine rushed to market in a year
That is why so many people that understood how vaccines work got the shots. They weren't rightly skeptical of the vaccines.
If you want to give your argument more weight I think you may want to change wouldn't to would in the future.
Dammit (Score:2)
Any way to get the antivax dimwits to cause another flare up? I want to continue my comfy home office, preferably indefinitely.
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Find a good employer. I have done almost complete home-office since 2012, except of course for meetings with customers and relatively rare office meetings.
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Iceland? Of all the places?
What I can read in this study is that younger people get reinfected more often than older people. Which is likely, considering that they also tend to have more contact with other people than older people, both in a professional and leisure environment.
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That's the spirit! More power to you!
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Generally estimates for average flu deaths worldwide are 650,000 a year. [who.int]
So in a world where covid does not exist the flu would have killed around 1.4m in the same around 30 month timespan that covid has existed.
A lower mortality rate only goes so far when a disease is exponentially more contagious.
The flu generally has an r0 of between 1-2. The Delta variant had an r0 of between 5-8 Omicron has an r0 of as high as 18(!)
Re:Numbers.... (Score:5, Informative)
Here is an article from earlier this year, at least a little more current. We will probably see more numbers in the winter when case loads pick up. I think with the infection numbers and case counts there's not a good reason to think the current Omicron is significantly less infections than previous ones, there's no real reason to think it is, but the natural range is pretty wide so it could be lower currently in the summer and pick up in the winter with people gathering indoors more.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
The high transmissibility of the Omicron variant is a major cause of global concern. Since the advent of Omicron, it has rapidly replaced Delta as the dominant strain worldwide. In the US, Delta accounted for 99% of new cases on December 4, 2021; however, Omicron accounted for more than 95% by January 8, 2022.35 The basic reproduction number (R0) of the Delta variant was between 3.2 and 8.36 The transmissibility of the Omicron variant is ~3.2 times that of Delta, and the doubling time is approximately three days.37,38 Generally, BA.2 is ~1.4 times more transmissible than BA.1,39,40 with a transmission rate of ~13.4% among household contacts, whereas that of BA.1 was 10.3%41 (Fig. 1c).
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For sure, it will be really interesting to see how the numbers shake out now that the BA.5 booster is going into arms. I think the high r0 was partly due to how well it evaded the earlier vaccines.
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1% down. 99 pandemics to go.
Re:Numbers.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The case fatality rate for influenza is somewhere between 0.1% and 0.2%, so yes... COVID-19 is anywhere from 5x to 10x as deadly as the flu. There's also Long COVID, which has affected millions more; there's no analogous "Long Influenza".
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there's no analogous "Long Influenza".
Long influenza does exist bbc [bbc.com]. Obviously Covid infected a crazy amount of people in 2 years and induced way more psychological problem so we can expect more psychosomatic and somatic long covid.
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Interesting; didn't know about long flu. Thanks.
Re:Numbers.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Bah, facts! _Real_ deniers do not do facts!
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Greed.
You could have summed it all up, with one word.
To your point, there is no such thing as COVID "facts" or statistics. There is only the fact that the Disease of Greed has infected mankind for thousands of years, and we will most likely end our species right here on this dying rock, forever addicted to it.
But we'll continue to do that human thing, and ASS-U-ME we're better than that.
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I live in Canada. We have universal health care funded by the government. A hospital does not get any benefit to "declare COVID". So I trust our numbers, at least.
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I noticed you posed the question without providing the flu data to do an actual comparison with. How many people actually get tested when they suspect they have the flu to make sure that they actually do?
There has been very extensive testing of people for COVID even if they didn't have symptoms. You weren't allowed to participate in many activities until you had a negative test so a significant portion of the population were tested for COVID. If there was similar testing for the flu each year I would suspec
Re:Stupid in a few ways (Score:5, Insightful)
You say it like it's a bad thing. It's only civilised to go around with a mask when you have the sniffles, especially in closed public areas where you could spread it. Maybe future generations will regard us, who grew up going around bare-faced when we had a contagious disease, with the same disdain we reserve for the court of Versailles, where the nobles casually shat on the floor because there were no toilets.
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You say it like it's a bad thing. It's only civilised to go around with a mask when you have the sniffles, especially in closed public areas where you could spread it. Maybe future generations will regard us, who grew up going around bare-faced when we had a contagious disease, with the same disdain we reserve for the court of Versailles, where the nobles casually shat on the floor because there were no toilets.
But you might not know when you first become contagious, or might be patient number one of a new pandemic - and we don't want to be compared to those French shitters. The truly responsible will be wearing contamination suits, respirators that isolate your oxygen source, and full body condoms - it would be criminal to do otherwise and infect your lovers
Just joking - you do not harm anything by adopting a N95 or respirator for the rest of your life. But your idea that humanity is going to look at us as u
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your idea that humanity is going to look at us as unsanitary troglodytes
While it is true that wearing a mask for a long period is unsanitary, when I se someone with a mask I more just feel sorry for them and the mental prison they have built and locked themselves in.
So just pity really.
The best thing about masks is that it has allowed me to realize just how beautiful many women's eyes are. So there is that, I suppose.
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You say it like it's a bad thing. It's only civilised to go around with a mask when you have the sniffles, especially in closed public areas where you could spread it. Maybe future generations will regard us, who grew up going around bare-faced when we had a contagious disease, with the same disdain we reserve for the court of Versailles, where the nobles casually shat on the floor because there were no toilets.
Many people feel repulsed by sick people, this makes evolutionary sense since it's a good way to avoid disease.
For this reason, sick people tend to underplay or conceal their sickness, because having other people feel repulsed by you isn't a great feeling.
For this second reason, I expect the correlation between people feeling sick and people wearing masks isn't nearly as high as it should be.
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I think it depends more on society. Because mask culture in Asia is pretty much ingrained these days - people wore ma
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Plus masks hide most of your facial expressions, so you don't have to worry about looking like an idiot because you remembered some funny thing that happened 20 years ago and can't suppress a grin.
Screws up most facial recognition too.
I think many people's objections to wearing masks stem from them buying the cheapest ones they can find. For a few cents more you can get masks that are comfortable and which have a good seal around your nose, so that they don't steam up your glasses.
Re:We know better now (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, just ignore the massive drop in flu cases that happened when most Americans were wearing masks https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season... [cdc.gov] though. That's clearly fake news.
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Re:We know better now (Score:4, Informative)
Masks have been proven to reduce the spread of disease by a number of studies.
Here's a simple explanation of how they work [twimg.com].
I hope that makes sense.
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With regards to spread the largest study ever conducted related to masking concluded cloth masks don't work and medical masks only work for those over 50.
Citation? Because it would be quite remarkable if a mask could tell how old you are. That's... well, amazingly improbable — so improbable that we can say with near certainty that there's a data error involved somehow.
Unlikely to ever be anything definitive on masking due to unwillingness to conduct sufficiently powered prospective RCTs.
You'll never get a viable randomized trial, because the people who agree to wear masks won't be random. The best you can hope for is a case-control study.
There were a ton of studies throughout the pandemic looking at masking. Most suffered from the same problems of inability to isolate confounding variables and imposition of NPIs based on conditions that skewed outcomes. There is far better evidence for social distancing than masking.
I think it goes without saying that people wearing masks are also most likely to distance. It also probably goes without saying tha
Re:We know better now (Score:4, Insightful)
Kids were still in school, which is where the flu really spreads, and lots of jobs where people are required were still happening, the flu dropped to close to zero here.
Re:Stupid in a few ways (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully! We need to keep mask culture permanent as a defense against the growing ubiquity of surveillance.
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And soon, masks will have serial numbers printed on the outside, or RFID tags embedded in them.
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In one sense that's a non-sequitur: people are not good at risk assessment, so the precautions that the crowd takes are a terrible measure of the severity of a risk. In another sense it seems backwards: if everyone wore masks as and when recommended by epidemiologists, the pandemic would likely have been shorter.
Re:Stupid in a few ways (Score:5, Insightful)
I fear it will be permanent.
Why "fear" that some people might choose to keep wearing a mask? Masks being socially acceptable also can produce a much milder flu season, whatever your thoughts on COVID may be.
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Well, it can be harmful to society due to the fact that we as people, use reading facial reactions and movements a LOT in our communications with each other.
There's already studies showing that kids wearing masks and having masks worn around them, hiding facial cues has hurt them developmentally.
Your facial expressions say a lot
Re:Stupid in a few ways (Score:5, Insightful)
If covering yourself is a mark of slavery, then I presume you walk around in the nude?
If someone is more comfortable wearing a mask, then more power to them. If we can have milder flu seasons because a critical mass of people mask up particularly during flu season, great. If I can walk in the cold more comfortably with a mask, awesome. Hell, if I'm spared someone prone to say and spray, fantastic.
"Enslaving yourself" to a mask is an incredibly asinine concept. A choice to wear a mask is no more enslaving yourself than putting on some pants.
I don't know what science you ascribe to that masks don't work at all. The average mask may not be perfect, but it is a mitigation against various diseases.
Re:Stupid in a few ways (Score:5, Insightful)
Enslaved? Dude, could you please drop the persecution complex? It looks ridiculous.
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Having to cover yourself is a mark of slavery.
Welp found the militant nudist. At least the upcoming colder weather will put a temporary damper on your proclivities.
Mask culture (was Re:Stupid in a few ways) (Score:5, Interesting)
I still wear a mask in public. I'm often the only one in a given setting. My rationale is: The inconvenience is slight; the possible upside is significant; and as a great side benefit I haven't had a cold or the flu since I started wearing a mask.
Honestly, just being able to avoid colds is reason enough for me.
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A false economy. You need to expose your body to colds and flu so your immune system stays up to date. About 1 in 100 wear a mask in Australia and I’ve not known anyone who has had covid in my circle for 4 months.
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I'm sure I get enough exposure to colds and flu at home and with a small circle of friends when I don't mask. But masking in crowded places can't hurt and might help. I do use KN95 masks.
Maybe when COVID is really gone, I'll stop, but where I live, the COVID-19 wastewater readings are much higher than they were at the beginning of the pandemic when there were truly draconian public health measures imposed.
Anyway... it's my choice. It doesn't hurt anyone else and I don't give people a hard time for not
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N95 masks can't stop all viruses, but they stop a lot of them, hence... reducing viral load.
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Yes that's right, N95 masks [wikipedia.org] do allow 5% of airborne particles through (it's in the name), which is still enough to reduce that viral load dramatically - certainly far better than nothing, which is 20x worse. And most airborne covid is not free-floating virii but in liquid droplets, which are much more easily filtered by these masks.
Yes, people can and do catch covid despite wearing a mask, because (surprise!) they're not 100% perfect. That does not at all mean they don't work, because there's plenty of scie [cdc.gov]
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1) For most people, Covid has not been a thing for quite a while now.
This. I was all about masking and immunization while it was initially needed. However, intelligent people got their immunization and boosters, and can now go about life in a manner like we did before. We avoided the issues of death and long Covid.
Those of us who for political reasons remain unvaccinated are heavily encouraged to die, or worse, to have theie bodies ravaged by the long version. Most of us now support and encourage that in the willfully unvaccinated. Anyone who purposely causes a killing v
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The evidence we have suggests the vaccines don't help all that much against Long COVID. Although the science on Long COVID is pretty limited in general.
The vaccines have been shown to prevent serious cases. Ddo you have cites that people who just get slight or asymptomatic Covid develop long Covid?
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The vaccines have been shown to prevent serious cases. Ddo you have cites that people who just get slight or asymptomatic Covid develop long Covid?
Long covid from asymptomatic infection has been well known for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Re:Stupid in a few ways (Score:5, Insightful)
However Mask Culture has become so ingrained in some people I fear it will be permanent.
I love masks, I have not had so much as a sniffle in over 2 years. If that wasn't enough reason, my lovely fiancee has a compromised immune system, so I am unwilling to risk her.
Places I wear my mask:
Public transportation.
Shopping.
Masks work, and I will continue to wear mine as appropriate.
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Masks, and ion generators. I had an ion generator on my desk at work for 8 years and never got a cold or any other virus going round the office. The year I stopped having one I got a cold.
Okay, anecdotes are not data, but there have been some independents tests showing that that Sharp Plasmacluster ion generators do kill bacteria, and they claim they kill viruses as well, so I'll keep my anti-leopard rock on my desk.
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Masks, and ion generators. I had an ion generator on my desk at work for 8 years and never got a cold or any other virus going round the office. The year I stopped having one I got a cold.
Ion generators are snake oil bullshit that create ozone a harmful air pollutant.
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However Mask Culture has become so ingrained in some people I fear it will be permanent.
Literally one of the few win of this illness. We can wear a mask if we don't want to get or spread random winter illness at the office without looking weird.
Re:Stupid in a few ways (Score:5, Insightful)
1) For most people, Covid has not been a thing for quite a while now.
Yea but COVID doesn't care what you believe SuperKendall, infamous Slashdot troll who many here would argue never considered it "a thing" in the first place.
3) If Covid were really close to being over
But here's the thing. The WHO didn't say COVID was close to being over. They said the pandemic is close to being over. You don't need to wipe out a virus for it to cease being a pandemic, which is what the announcement is about. It does take a basic understanding of English terms though.
However Mask Culture has become so ingrained in some people I fear it will be permanent.
Why do you fear this? Are you that petrified of people's style choices? What next, flared jeans give you a seizure? Why don't you fear things that actually affect you rather than caring about what other people do?
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Why do you fear this? Are you that petrified of people's style choices? What next, flared jeans give you a seizure? Why don't you fear things that actually affect you rather than caring about what other people do?
Isnt he a self proclaimed libertarian too? What a hoot the way he's getting into others business here.
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1) For most people, Covid has not been a thing for quite a while now.
For the morons, yes. For people with an actual clue the risk of Long COVID is quite real. May be as much as 15%. Of course the stupid will deny this until affected themselves and then probably claim it is something else.
2) Going forward, you know that every year we'll have new Covid shots Lin the same way we have flu shots. So Covid will not be "over" for maybe several years, if ever.
Not quite. If the infection rate is low enough, it will not be a pandemic anymore. The flu is usually not a pandemic, even if it keeps being around. As to COVID shots, if they manage to make a general enough one, it will probably simple be added to the regular flu shot. One of the avian flu
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For the morons, yes. For people with an actual clue the risk of Long COVID is quite real. May be as much as 15%. Of course the stupid will deny this until affected themselves and then probably claim it is something else.
Is it intelligent to assume it's possible to spend ones entire life successfully dodging infection by one of the most infectious respiratory viruses known to man?
If you believe electing not to waste ones time chasing a fools errand makes one a "moron" this is certainly your right.
Not quite. If the infection rate is low enough, it will not be a pandemic anymore.
Not happening anytime in the foreseeable future.
The flu is usually not a pandemic, even if it keeps being around.
A technicality due to seasonality otherwise it very much would be. Despite assumptions to the contrary sars2 is not known to be a seasonal virus.
As to COVID shots, if they manage to make a general enough one, it will probably simple be added to the regular flu shot. One of the avian flu variants is already in there, I believe.
Those working on the assumption yearl
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You are correct.. and so are the WHO. Covid (SARS-COV-2) has moved from the pandemic stage to the endemic stage.
We have all been exposed. Most of us have been vaccinated. Many of us have had covid. We have developed some resistance to what was a NOVEL virus (meaning one we had not previously experienced). It is still gonna kill some people, but most of us will get over it if we catch it.
We are not going to get rid of Covid, anymore than we have gotten rid of Influenza. Shots may (if we guess the right
Re:Stupid in a few ways (Score:5, Interesting)
I see masks on about one in ten to twenty at the grocery store, and people still keep their distance if possible. Also, masks are required at medical facilities of any sort, doctors office, dentist, eye center, etc. It does seem to be at the discretion of the workplace, though.
Honestly, I'm sort of glad masks have been de-stigmatized. They've been a common-sense precaution in Asia when you're feeling slightly under the weather and don't want to spread your own personal plague to others. I'm not saying I want any mask mandates, of course, but a common-sense middle ground doesn't seem too bad. Then again, I never really felt like having to wear a mask indoors was some sort of tyrannical plot by the ruling class, or whatever.
What I see most is the reluctance of tech workers who were working remotely to come piling back into the office full time, since the omicron variant spreads so rapidly. Sure, it's probably just flu-like symptoms at this point, but why risk getting sick at all? The flu is bad enough. People have realized that coming into an office is all upsides for the company, and all downsides for the worker, with no difference in real productivity. For myself, I'm comfortable here at home and don't spend an hour each day stuck in traffic, burning gasoline and my life energy unnecessarily.
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Wow...interesting.
Might I ask where you live? I've not seen that kind of masking in quite a long time.
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I'm in central-coastal california. The mask ratio seems about accurate. Mostly elderly people or asian tourists.
I think you are correct about why people don't want to go back to the office: it's because they don't want to!
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I'm in the greater Seattle area - we call where I live the Eastside, . Basically, it's where Microsoft, Nintendo, and others are headquartered. It's a mix of middle class blue collar and white collar tech/other workers.
During the mask mandates, pretty much everyone complied without much complaint. Or at least, I really didn't see anyone who refused to comply openly. I think maybe part of that was some of the first Covid deaths in the country were right in our backyards. Part of the other reason is that
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Grocery Store? No masks. Rarely see anyone wearing a mask.
Doctor's office? No masks.
Dentist's office? No masks.
Endodontist's office? Masks.
YMMV.
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But we've been largely back to normal as an area for well over a year now, you look around and you see no signs of a pandemic with the exception of some places till having plexiglass up at the cashier counters.
Those will be permanent, for reasons having nothing to do with the pandemic. Customers can be disgusting, and it's good to have something in between.
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But we've been largely back to normal as an area for well over a year now, you look around and you see no signs of a pandemic with the exception of some places till having plexiglass up at the cashier counters.
Those will be permanent, for reasons having nothing to do with the pandemic. Customers can be disgusting, and it's good to have something in between.
Oh my yes, the Pandemic has illustrated how many people have swinelike levels of personal hygiene.
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Agree to that. Unreservedly. And if it causes a few less sick days, all the better.
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were you not one of those asshat's that was shrugging it off, citing car accidents kill more people when all this started?
either way go fuck yourself
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More thanks to the dimwits who think that antiparasitic medication and other miracle cures are more suitable to combat a disease than that pesky science thing they don't understand.
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I see a lot of political debate over abortion lately,
I'm no political scientist, but this just MAY have something to do with that right being recently removed, or in the process of being removed, for half our populace. But again, what do I know.
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I'm no political scientist, but this just MAY have something to do with that right being recently removed, or in the process of being removed, for half our populace. But again, what do I know.
A right was restored by SCOTUS with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the right of states to set their own laws on aborting pregnancies. The opinion didn't remove a right, they found the right didn't exist in the first place, a distinction that I believe is quite important. This restores the ability for people to set their own laws on this matter by democratic means in their respective states, be that by representative democracy in electing people to vote on laws, by public referendum, or other means allowed b
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A right was restored by SCOTUS with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the right of states to set their own laws on aborting pregnancies. The opinion didn't remove a right, they found the right didn't exist in the first place, a distinction that I believe is quite important.
I'm sure your word twisting will be a relief to all the women who just got their rights sent back to the 1950s.
Even though this was a recent SCOTUS case there is still an unusual level of attention placed on the issue of abortion. We've had SCOTUS decisions on some very controversial issues before that did not get the same kind of attention. We've had some big cases on abortion before that didn't kick up this kind of political dust.
The other cases didn't "kick up as much dust" because they weren't as significant.
and this does not impact half the population.
If your "half the population" is meaning "the women that live in states where it's still legal" then my response is "legal for now". The polling on this is absolutely consistent, the majority of the country supports access to pre-viability abortion. That doesn't stop the vocal minority from shoving their unpopular
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To make abortion illegal requires a majority vote, or that's how I suspect it works in most states.
The politicians that want to restrict abortion refuse to put it to an actual ballot measure because they know they would get their ass handed to them. (See Kentucky) They'll pass excessively restrictive laws through Congress to appease the loudest of the loud donors, but it's plainly obvious (based on any poling I could find) that the general populace they represent does not support such laws.
Just so that my position is 100% clear: I do not support 100% unfettered access to abortion at any point in a pregn