COVID has changed me

pheller said:

Making friends right now is very difficult. Making matters worse is some people don't really lead with the right stuff "oh its ok our kids can play together I've had COVID twice it was horrible but I got through it and my kids were fine!"

It is very difficult once you reach a certain age COVID or not :(  I have a 5 year old.  *horrible parent alert*  My interests extend beyond my son *gasp*.  I have found very very few people with interests that overlap my own by a reasonable amount and approximately zero that also have kids.  So I have to have friends with kids so my son can play with them and other friends without kids so I can go do fun things.  I don't fully connect with either group, but I definitely connect more with the latter.

If anyone goes through a generational event, regardless of type or circumstance, and it doesn't change their perspective, what they do or where their focus is, then there's likely something wrong with them. 

Events and circumstances such as these are supposed change us, shape us and drive us to evolve processes or else we'll be doomed to evolve otherwise. I said in the thread started in January, prior to the long one, that everyone is fasinated by evolution until it happens to their own species. Changes in behavior and socialogy can be a large portion of that make up. 

914Driver said:

I miss being able to lick my fingers to moisten the super thin grocery store plastic bags for fruit.  I just put tongue prints on my mask.

Take bag from the roll. Walk past the vegetables that get routinely sprayed with water and touch a puddle on the cooler. Instant moist finger perfect for opening the bag and you don't spread your spit on the produce you move out of the way to get what you want. 

I realized this years ago

I know I'm not completely to blame and sorry if I worried anyone, but I've replayed the week a thousand times in my mind and there were things I missed that may have made a difference.  I can't fix it now and am as ok with it as I can be but as failures go it's a pretty big one. 

I guess I'm one of those "it's no big deal" people, but then any COVID19-related changes don't really stand out among huge changes in my life since late last year - moving away and leaving my cars behind, and therefore my only hobby that commonly involved other people, and since I've been financially scraping my ass off the floor, I wouldn't have been able to do much anything that COVID19-related restrictions would've prevented me from doing anyway.

I think one thing that's changed for sure is that the even slimmer job prospects are making me stick to a job I probably would've left otherwise - a ridiculously fast-paced, high-stress job where working fast enough means not even thinking about anything but the tasks being machine-gunned at you for a whole work day at a time. I probably would've pulled the parachute on this and settled for something lower-paying with a healthier work/life balance in ordinary circumstances.

Also I was lucky the pandemic didn't interfere with a funeral, wedding etc, that must be hard.

Man this is a fascinating thread. Regional and cultural variances are interesting. 

I never understood or liked the handshake thing. I don't think it was always a thing for this country anyhow. And I remember learning in high school that slapping someone with your glove long ago led to a duel because gloves were filthy germ ridden death cloths. So a slap meant someone WAS actually trying to kill you.

I don't talk to people as much when out as some people reacted a bit too weirded out by me talking to them in my mask. I tend to give space when out. It used to get me weird looks but now everyone sees it as normal. 

I have gotten more involved with my family (funny enough) now that I have to use WhatsApp and groupme and meet and zoom to interact.

I think for me, the biggest change has been having no commute and naturally evolving to using that time to enjoy cooking again.

To Wally and all those that have had a harder time. I feel for you. I can't imagine the journey you have had to experience. I hope you can find tele therapy or tele friends to help long term.

It appears we have at least another 18-24 months before the social things that this thread is focused on normalize. Will masks seem invisible to us then? Will dealing with shopkeepers always occur 2m away. Will the take out culture set in place? 

It is an interesting time.

SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to Toyman01 (Moderately Supportive Dude) :

Nice!

(But I haven't seen that at any other WalMart)

I'll be darned. It happened right here in the city I'm in last night

In lieu of a handshake I've broken out that Japanese culture bow a few times. It works in showing respect to the person, interaction and current climate. 

It's also led to interesting conversations about how the culture that is one of the least socially distant in the world has the most socially distant greeting. 

18-24 months? nope. full on nope.

In reply to bobzilla :

I'm prepared for that. At my age I expect to be wearing face masks until I retire. I wear gloves since what I do is hands on.  
    In some respects I'm great full. I used to get flu or pneumonia several times a season (6 my worst year and twice it was double pneumonia)  it's normal for me to have at least a couple of colds a month during the first few months of school. I'd just tough it out and not miss any work.  So far this year I haven't had a single cough. Yeh!!!!!! 

yeah, nope. 

bobzilla said:

18-24 months? nope. full on nope.

That timing is for when we would start to see what will stick as cultural changes. Not referring to the amount of time we will be dealing with restrictions or the illness itself. Social/cultural anthropology scientists seem to think that 18-24 months from now is when they can start to document what mannerisms will have taken hold or disappeared. 

Does that explain my meaning better? 

What I find interesting is the complete lack (zero, zip, zilch, nada) of emphasis from people about whether they're going to be riding herd their elected officials (and all the myriad alphabet soup agencies) about whether and how government (at all levels) is going to learn from this clusterberkeley and prepare for the next pandemic.  Have you heard a single gummint official of any kind make a promise or claim to use the last year as a learning experience and not have it happen again?  Have you heard anyone proudly claim their agency has done something specific to prepare for the next pandemic?  Form a committee or a planning group?  Change budget expenditures to start laying in critical supplies?  Change the reaction plan?  They'll bitch and moan about how they'll need to increase their budgets to do so, but I'd like to know why they were caught with their pants down and so completely unprepared for this one.   I know that's arguing about who left the barn door open after the horse got out, but their freaking job is to make sure the horse doesn't get out and to be ready if it does...  If the net result is that people start paying attention to what their elected officials are (or aren't) doing then at least we can call it an expensive wake-up call.

<rant off>

I'm trapped in America and can't skip across the border to visit family. I dread anything major happening over there.

I skipped my golf league this summer and I haven't registered for my oldtimers hockey league either.

I've spent more time in the garage.

Haven't been to a restaurant since March, but our A&W is having a banner year.

I haven't been to the gym since March and it shows, but I'll be helping the economy by buying 2 or 3 pairs of new, larger jeans.

Our Christmas shopping is almost done and we never left the house.

The FedEx driver likes my Challenge build.

I'm curious, how do you stop a virus from happening? We havent been able to stop the common cold and flu for centuries. Those that pop in and talk about how 200k people have died that shouldn't have are talking out of the wrong orifice. You aren't going to completely stop any sickness. Period. There was NO option for 0 dead here. 

The next question is how do we determine if the measures we took were helpful or hurtful? How do you seperate it from the politics at this point and how do we get an unbiased account?

bobzilla said:

I'm curious, how do you stop a virus from happening? We havent been able to stop the common cold and flu for centuries. Those that pop in and talk about how 200k people have died that shouldn't have are talking out of the wrong orifice. You aren't going to completely stop any sickness. Period. There was NO option for 0 dead here. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan 

686 deaths per 1M people is a whole lot higher than 0.3.  You could call it zero and I wouldn't argue.

I hope people, business, agencies, etc. are working to be better prepared for what happens next.  Honestly, what I want to write a few nastygrams about is schooling.  Not that they were unprepared in March, but that in October they are still unprepared, as is almost every school system around the country.  All of them are doing things differently, there seems to be little sharing of information, collaboration, a unified approach, etc.  Its embarrassing.

In reply to Advan046 :

I have been lucky enough to find a good therapist, and so many of my friends, family, and coworkers have been great. I am really doing better than so many others right now, better than I imagined possible. I have bad days but they come so infrequently now.  I am aware of just how fortunate I was to have a life many never do even if it was for far too short a time. Even at the end it could have gone so much worse, it was one of the few things she really worried about.

ProDarwin said:

bobzilla said:

I'm curious, how do you stop a virus from happening? We havent been able to stop the common cold and flu for centuries. Those that pop in and talk about how 200k people have died that shouldn't have are talking out of the wrong orifice. You aren't going to completely stop any sickness. Period. There was NO option for 0 dead here. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan 

686 deaths per 1M people is a whole lot higher than 0.3.  You could call it zero and I wouldn't argue.

 

I hate to sound pedantic here, but that's still 220k+ deaths for a country our size. So...... ??? And again, an island nation that can literally isolate. They don't have 6k miles of active borders. Besides, we were told that shutting down borders was racist or something so we cant do that either.

bobzilla said:

I hate to sound pedantic here, but that's still 220k+ deaths for a country our size. So...... ??? And again, an island nation that can literally isolate. They don't have 6k miles of active borders. Besides, we were told that shutting down borders was racist or something so we cant do that either.

Despite disagreeing with all of that, I'm not going to argue it, that wasn't the point.  You asked: Is stopping a virus even possible?  No, not 100%.  Can you get close?  Yes.  If we had the same death rate as Taiwan, there would be 105 total deaths so far in the US. 

Maybe we can't do everything as they did, but we can certainly learn from it.

You can't fully stop a virus like this. If it were more deadly, like Ebola, it is pretty easy to stop, but this one is too variable. 

You can, however, prevent the spread of disinformation and use caution and listen to the scientists. Instead, we had this. You can send me to the patio if you want. If you wanted to take it a step further, you could have used simple contact tracing. But nope, that is an infringement of rights, Economy be damned. 

The worst part is, we were prepared and could have made this all unimaginable. But I guess this part of the swamp needed to be drained.

Send me to the patio, hit me with the banhammer. Please leave this up though. 

Please stop. This is unproductive. It's why the other thread was shut down. 
 

I started this to try to be a little transparent, and an encouragement. 
 

Arguing about "shoulda, coulda" will never be an encouragement. And there will never be agreement or changed hearts. It's just finger pointing.

My fingers are pointed squarely at me. I have changed. Not all of it is good. I am responsible.
 

Thank you. 

In reply to stroker :

All I can tell you is that as a Federal Employee we are, in my agency, using special authority granted through the state of Emergency to hire people specifically to start figuring that out. For our little agency it is focused on our mission continuity and how our expertise in wildlife science could have better helped. 

Some of these Pandemic Jobs are to do the day jobs of the permanent Feds. Then Permanent FEDS can join the task force to figure out lessons learned and apply them for this upcoming flu season. Others are directly working on the response and root causing the past issues. 

I figured I would let you know this hiring program was announced in the spring. So if you want you can check USAJOBS. 

Back to the OP topic. I have been remotely located from my work unit for years now. But it has actually been better for me to get closer to my co-workers now given that they aren't having as many "water cooler" conversations. Instead they are sharing with the whole unit via online meetings or group chats. So I feel more included.

In reply to ProDarwin :

sorry, you weren't very clear with the numbers. I see 686/1M I'm going to assume that it's total population. I'm guessing the 1M is positive cases? Also keep in mind they only tested 160k of their 23M population(.0001% of their pop). We have tested just shy of 80M of our 330M (24% of our pop) population. Once again, statistics suck because everyone is doing it differently. This is what I'm trying to point out. How do we determine what is accurate?

bobzilla said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

sorry, you weren't very clear with the numbers. I see 686/1M I'm going to assume that it's total population. I'm guessing the 1M is positive cases? Also keep in mind they only tested 160k of their 23M population(.0001% of their pop). We have tested just shy of 80M of our 330M (24% of our pop) population. Once again, statistics suck because everyone is doing it differently. This is what I'm trying to point out. How do we determine what is accurate?

US:  686 deaths per 1M population,  Taiwan: 0.3 deaths per 1M population

They tested less because they didn't need to test more.  Robust contact tracing = you only test those at risk, which was very few due to their response.

I don't care much if this thread goes off topic a bit (all of them do), but I don't want to see it locked so I wont take this any further.  This could easily take a turn toward patio territory.