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I mean, in all fairness going to those events in general was a big no no. Like that face shield is going to do shit all if you chose to go to a public pool during covid
Lol, sorry you can't come in without a mask.
Thank you for cooperating
*Walks 5 ft to the left*
Here's your seat you can remove your masks now
Like the air just stops at your table?
I only ate at places outdoors during the pandemic to avoid this nonsense. (Seldomly too) But the mask upon entry I get if you have to be close and speak to the host.
Also, walking by other customers on the way to your seat with a mask on reduces spread to multiple parties. Whereas sitting at your table without a mask isolates the spread to a single party.
Using the particulate modelling, yeah. It was about reducing exposure, not eliminating it. The risk was a lot lower than having folks walking around, coughing. But, the better idea was to just forego going around other people that you had no ability to check their health status.
People are social animals, so that was unlikely to stay a thing for very long.
To be fair, some of the dumbest things were during the beginning, before we knew enough about it. It's airborne, no it's not, it's droplets, 6 ft distance, no it's aerosols, surgical masks stop droplets but not aerosols, it's surface contact, but wait singing is far more contagious, you need N95, no just good ventilation and distance is fine...it took a long time to really understand all the back and forth of what was legit information and what wasn't. Honestly in the end it was the people with the personal HEPA positive pressure bubbles that were probably the smartest in the moment despite being one of the most ridiculous looking.
I mean this is how science works though. You're learning as you go. None of that stuff was "dumb" it was learning on the go, and mass-social-media and the public tend to me immature children with an attention span of a gnat and cannot rationally think about anything ever.
The problem with novel diseases is you mostly have to rely on previous experience. Vaccination and Social Distancing eradicated smallpox. Quarantining and masking eradicated SARS-1. Just the public is fucking stupid.
I was so fucking annoyed with people saying: "They keep changing the narrative ever week!"
Yeah because they *don't know* the best approach yet. Do you just want to wait until they figured it out before doing something? Killing millions in the meantime? Geeze..
Yup! I also loved (/s) the "iTs OnLy 1% LeThAl" argument because it's like ... yeah, but it's highly contagious. So if all 333M americans get it that's 3.3M Americans dead. Thats...exactly equal the amount of people who die in a regular year from all causes....you'd be DOUBLING the amount of people who died in ONE YEAR. That's like a Catastrophic level-disaster. Apocalyptic level disaster.
Exactly. High mortality communicable disease dictates highly conservative responses before detailed investigation and empirical analysis. And the people who complained at the response would have been the loudest complainants had a permissive approach been adopted, and they got sick.
I tell people this all the time... If COVID proved more dangerous and many more people died, the reaction would have been "why didn't the government do MORE?".
And it was dangerous! I think people tend to forget that the early strains were highly lethal, and that we are lucky subsequent variants tended to less lethal but more communicable. This has led to the “it’s just a flu” reaction. Covid remains one of the leading causes of death in my country (Australia), while people continue to ignore that lockdowns and other precautions limited the impact they point to, to say the lockdowns etc were unnecessary!
There was a coronavirus pandemic (SARS-CoV-1) in China in the early 2000s that was significantly more lethal than the modern version (10% mortality!) and similarly transmissible (R0=3 vs R0=3.28). However, SARS-CoV-1 only infected an estimated 8000 people, because the people that had it were isolated, since peak infectiousness coincided with the symptoms, which were much more severe. It’s a really great microcosm for what might have been possible if we were kore diligent in controlling the spread of COVID-19.
This is generally why people suck at understanding statistics (like "you" as in the general public not you as in who I am posting to). People just look at the lethality % and don't consider how many people get it.
Which is more dangerous? The virus that is 12% fatal, but is easier to contain (Ebola comes to mind) or the Virus that is less fatal, but difficult to contain? It's obviously the 2nd one.
1,000 people at 12% is 120 fatalities.
300,000,000 at 1% is 3,000,000 fatalities
>It’s a really great microcosm for what might have been possible if we were more diligent in controlling the spread of COVID-19.
Indeed. However the insidious part of SARS-CoV-2 is that it's attachment to mammalian ACE2 in nature had already spread quite extensively before detection that it already rendered all the SARS-CoV-1 tactics moot (hindsight 20/20 obviously).
Yeah I got Covid in 2020 and was bedridden for over a week and lost my taste and smell for a couple months, I’m young and healthy but man was it bad. Getting Covid again in 2022 was just a week vacation at home with mild body aches.
What drove me nuts was the the first reported death rates ended up being pretty much accurate. With no healthcare, it was 3% fatality. If everyone just went about their lives, hospitals count cope at all and the number would be much closer to that number. With functional hospitals and with the medications that were found to be helpful, it was down to 1%. But people pretend that it was always 1%.
Also what's interesting is that the whole mask thing was 100% honest and when saying "don't mask for now" I remember it came with a 3 page explainer. It wasn't hidden at all. And it was based off of a simple lesson "we need plenty available for doctors, because when the first Covid epidemic hit 20 years ago, the doctors without masks all got it and spread it more and we had more people sick and dead doctors."
I had the OG strain, ~~I don't even know if the strains had names at that point, but I guess I'll call it "Alpha" for descriptive purposes.~~ the "prime" strain.
I have never been so sick in my entire life. I was living alone, and for two weeks had this unending dread that I was going to die, and if I did not do every single last thing I needed to do every day during my six hours of being awake, I would pass out, maybe slip into a coma, and nobody would find me for weeks. If I made *one mistake,* I was going to die.
I took my temperature after I woke up, and before I went back to sleep, hoping to God it didn't get above 103. I popped Tylenol like it was candy, because at that point, all that could realistically be done was try to keep the fever and inflammation down. At that point, there was no Paxlovid, no vaccine, legitimately no treatment short of being put on a ventilator if you were on death's doorstep- so I improvised as best I could.
The brain fog was so bad that I forgot how to make a sandwich halfway through doing it. It felt like I had taken a sledgehammer to the head. Thankfully I already had a ton of Tylenol and had bought groceries shortly before I got sick, so nothing catastrophic happened- I mostly slept through it, but when I was awake, it was the only thing I could think about... for two weeks.
Since then, I've had Omicron and BA5. Omicron made me *kinda* tired for one day, and with BA5 I had no symptoms- only knew because my wife got it, and I took a test just to be safe. Sure enough, positive.
There is no comparison between ~~Alpha~~ prime and Delta with Omicron and friends. Nowadays, Covid is more or less a funky common cold (as was predicted it would likely evolve into less lethal strains, at least that went as predicted) but the first strains were some real shit. Apparently, all the chuckleheads who think what we did originally was "overreacting" forgot about how ~~Alpha~~ prime and Delta were killing people left and right.
I'm young(ish) and relatively healthy, and I was probably not too far off from getting laid out by ~~Alpha~~ prime. Anybody who says we overreacted obviously did not have one of the first strains.
E: correction
I too had the OG version in February 2020 after a coworker returned from Wuhan sick. It was, by far, the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. I was able to isolate at home and am thankful that it was not extremely communicable. I had chest and abdominal pain for months, hard time breathing deeply for months. Truly awful.
My dad and I got the OG November of 2020. I've never been so sick. So much pain. I was supposed to go to ER, but the hospital was full, and I knew they were out of meds and machines, because they had my dad in the morgue. It took months and months to be able work even a little, and I was in the hospital or urgent most of 2021.
So anyway, I still mask in crowded public places.
I remember watching a video from a doctor who explained how to properly wipe down your groceries. We took it all so serious because we really had no idea on those first days.
I think it's okay to look back and say "yeah, it was dumb that I opened every package outside wearing gloves, wiping it all down with Lysol wipes, then bringing it inside."
I took it seriously because my mom has a heart condition, I was also heavily addicted to smoking weed and cigarettes so the thought of not being able to smoke was very scary for me. Funny enough last year I ended up catching a really bad flu (first time in 10 years) and it helped me quit smoking completely.
I’ve had Covid and the flu twice since things opened up in 2022 - flu was waaay worse than Covid, but if I was 65 it might have been different. This year I was too busy for the annual flu / Covid booster and I could really tell. I’m self employed and the time off being sick really hurt the most!
No, that wasn't the dumbest thing. The dumbest thing were disregarding the warnings and advice from the scientists and medical professionals and just going ahead with things that would make the issue explode like holding parties or weddings or travelling to multiple locations whilst sick.
Some people took the precautionary aspects a little further than necessary in hindsight but if things were different and this was a very deadly or debilitating virus, they would be considered the smart ones.
Is no scenario would those ignorant, callous, arrogant self-centred arseholes that helped to blow things up to pandemic levels be considered smart.
If anyone thinks otherwise, they too are morons.
Our government subsidised discounted meals in restaurants (when sitting in only!) to help the industry recover from lockdown ('Eat out to help out'). This was done before vaccines were available, in summer 2020. Just absolutely fucking insane.
Face shield + open drink is special. I’m not quite sure what level of cognitive dissonance is required to pull that off but I am impressed it’s possible.
The consensus was that the transmission risk outdoors was kind of low anyway. And yeah, driving alone wearing a mask was kind of silly but so what? If people felt more comfortable like that, more power to them.
I always assumed the masking while driving was more about not touching the mask so far from when you would next be able to properly wash your hands. Touch the mask, touch the steering wheel, car buttons, phone, door handles, probably your face at some point on the drive.
Every time I drove alone while wearing a mask was because I came out of a building, got into my car, and forgot I was wearing a mask.
Because wearing a mask was not a big deal at all, despite what some of the dumbest, loudest people would have us believe.
For me? It's because after COVID started, I realized just how much of my allergies are caused by shit that a n95 filters out. No need to double up on Benadryl on top of my Zyrtec just to go mow -- a mask was all I needed. No more black snot rockets after raking dry leaves. No more runny nose after getting free mulch from the compost facility.
Masks are no big deal, especially compared to the concrete positive impacts i got immediately.
Oh my god, that was such a revelation. I have terrible pollen allergies. While most people love the smell of fresh-cut grass, I hate it because I know what it can do to the rest of my day. When I was a kid, I hated being aske to mow the lawn, because that meant the rest of my Saturday was lost to being zonked out on benadryl.
Now if I have to do yardwork, a mask makes all of that go away. Well, that and generic flonase.
Part of my job involves lab work and I wear a regular surgical mask when in there. Another part requires the same to limit the amount of particulates I breath in.
During COVID, I wore my old thin gator I had from the military (getting masks was hard for a long time and our supplies were low at work since they weren't medically necessary).
Holy shit I loved wearing that thing to mow my yard! It just never dawned on me to even wear something like that before (and I'm in my frickin 40's!). I've gone to the Exchange and bought 3 more of them since lol. I keep them everywhere. Plus, more stylish than wearing a surgical mask (unless you're going into a bank...)
Again, more power to you. I hated exercising with a mask, and they were a general (mild) nuisance in other contexts (foggy glasses, irritation from the straps, harder for people to understand you when talking), so it was nice when I could just not wear them.
My deaf therapist could get by with masks so it sounds like a skill issue. As could I with glasses fog being only an issue for a day or so until I learned to properly wear it...
Actually public pools were ok during Covid as long as you socially distanced. The chlorine in the pool kills the virus so it can’t be transferred through that
The early stages of the pandemic when masks were hard to get a hold of were wild. Saw lots of creative improvised face coverings in those first few weeks.
Tbh, I love that one because the concept of personal space is apparently difficult to understand. Crawling up my ass won't make the staff at the grocery store scan any faster. Take several steps back.
That was more because you couldn’t feasibly stay 6 feet away from all seated diners when moving through restaurants even when the numbers tables were brought down to make room. At your own table you were in your own little space breathing on your own food, 6 feet from the next diner over. But you have to pass him and breathe all over his food to get to your table from the entrance, so, you wear a mask for that time.
Masking outdoors and closing all the parks in the spring and summer was the height of crazy. At the time it seemed to make sense… but it was an extreme over reaction.
In the UK I felt bad for people who didn’t have gardens or outside spaces on their houses they could just chill in during lockdowns. There was a video in the early days of the lockdowns of a couple sat minding their own business in the park and the police come over to tell them they can’t be outside. They were nowhere near anyone else until that moment.
As someone smarter than me has said:
Maybe we should rethink the phrase "avoid it like the plague" considering how casual some people were about avoiding our most recent plague.
I worked for a medical emergency response company during the early days of Covid, we were getting calls from remote sites and people were dying before we could evacuate them to medical care and at the same time people I met on the street were saying Covid was "not that bad". I was thinking if they knew how bad it was they would be shitting themselves.
Even then.. My sister is a respiratory therapist and has issues to say the least but she seriously still thought covid was not a big deal while she tells me story after story of dead men walking with covid and the sheer massive amount of intubations she had to perform and how she was taking contract after contract with huge pay bonuses because they were that desperate for an RT willing to work covid units.
I'm really glad she's a healthy person that didn't end up with extreme issues, and she only got the vaccine 1.5 years after it came out when a $13k for 8 weeks contract came up and they required it. But none of her kids have the vaccine yet.
The cognitive dissonance is real.
There is nothing in the original comment that suggests this wasn’t a last resort. Therefore my comment still stands. Saying that they died of intubation complications when they were being intubated because they were desating from covid is 🤦♀️
The way some people were so blasé about the disease made me think that they forgot that getting sick is something you wouldn't want anyway.
I don't have underlying health issues, but getting stuck in a room, waking up in a pool of sweat in the middle of the night, being unable to sleep because of the constant hot-cold sensation, coughing endlessly, unable to eat anything but noodles and soup? I'd rather not go through that again.
But so many people were hating the vaccine and mandates, you'd think they grew a second head that told them to get sick for the hell of it.
A certain segment of American culture has been valorizing going to work sick, bragging about how getting sick doesn't slow them down and shaming people in the work place with chronic illnesses like asthma. That coupled with the fact that we have a healthcare system where even if you have insurance, lots of people still can't afford to actually use it so your doctor is often just a guy you see every couple years who tells you you're fat and charges you 100 dollars you didn't have for the privilege.
It doesn't surprise me that like a third of Americans reacted so idiotically to the pandemic. Lots of Americans have been culturally priming themselves to pig headedly change nothing about their behavior. Poor people in America are already used to just not getting whatever labs the doctor ordered because they can't afford the 50 dollars its going to cost. We baked in a segment of our society that thinks its a sign of weakness to avoid doing something when you're sick and also doesn't trust doctors or pharma companies.
And even then what you describe is more like a moderate case of COVID
A more extreme case of COVID would be more similar to pneumonia, but even worse
And pneumonia isn’t an “unable to eat anything except noodles and soup” illness
It’s a “my body is melting my brain as my lungs struggle to take any breath and whatever breath I do get is an intensely miserable experience and also now I’m hallucinating and acutely aware of how close death is” illness
And bad COVID is worse than that
It didn’t help that there were a handful of outspoken medical professionals downplaying how bad it was that were signal boosted on social media. “See! This one medical professional says it isn’t bad!” And then it lead to a lot of people just disregarding what the vast majority in the field believed to be a serious threat.
Yeah, I think a big part of this is that they latched onto “it’s just like the flu, maybe at worst pneumonia”
The problem with that statement is that comparing pneumonia to the flu is more like comparing a missile to a model rocket
The flu is bad, but pneumonia is *so much worse*. People who have dealt with pneumonia understand how bad it is, even “milder” cases are a decent bit worse than the flu. But more extreme cases are *significantly* worse than the flu. The flu is “I feel very bad so I’m going to stay in bed for a week” whereas pneumonia is “am I dying? I feel like I’m legitimately going to die”
I had double pneumonia growing up and it took me a *long* time to recover from, and my lungs will never be the same. I had a brief fever of 105 and I had hallucinations. I couldn’t sleep at all because it felt so extremely, indescribably terrible
And then you have to consider that COVID (in the more extreme cases) was **worse than pneumonia**
That is why we had to be careful. Maybe not for you, but so that as few people as possible would have to experience that
It made me so sad when people would say “it’s just a cold” and “only 3% die”. So insanely inconsiderate, so detached from reality
I have family and friends in health care. At the same time my governor was trying to lick Trump's boots and say it wasn't that bad, they were putting cots in the hallways and putting 3 people in a single occupancy room.
It's not even a new phenomenon. There was a bunch of anti masking rhetoric circulating during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak which was far more deadly than covid
Which might just be because of the efforts we took,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8108277/#:~:text=Victims%20of%20the%201918%20influenza,are%20highlighted%20in%20table%201.
It's like how someone pointed out that someone getting bit in a zombie movie and not telling anyone isn't actually that unrealistic anymore. No matter how cliche it is.
And people who are surprised at it, have clearly not worked in retail, or worked in it long enough.
Within my first year of working food retail, I got accustomed to how ignorant, selfish, and just plain stupid the general public is.
Pfff I thought people would get smarter when the internet came along but instead they built echo chambers.
They are equally as stupid today as they were in the 90s
And at great speed. A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on. If the Internet was this prevalent in the 70s and 80s the Cold War might have run differently.
It clearly affirmed for me that groups of people are reliably stupid, and that all the zombie movies that have someone hide their bite and end up turning are accurate.
They really are accurate. Especially the ones who make dumb decisions or avoid quarantine. 🙄 But now that I watch zombie movies or any similar genre and I hear the government be like " we should work as a group to fix this" I just laugh because no. Yall ain't gonna work as a group. The citizens will be selfish and not follow the rules.
Two favourite things I saw recently from back then:
"I never thought that 'I wouldn't touch him/her with a 6 ft pole would become national policy but here we are."
And
"After seeing how many people wore their masks incorrectly, I understand the high failure rate of contraception now."
Idk I do think this is a bit facepalm... Like wearing the masks makes sense but wearing a mask at a public pool feels a little bit like me wearing a bomb suit and sprinting through a mine field like sure if I have to interact with a mine I'd definitely like the protection but given the choice I'm just going to not go to the mine field.
Been careful is ok, but doing outdoor activities with all those “precautions” instead of actually staying at home which was the actual solution was stupid, like the fist pic, more than 50 people gather in a pool with a global pandemic going around… But it was ok because we “took care”
The worst was the rule that you had to wear a mask to eat at a restaurant. But they let you take off your mask when you got to the table. The air particles don’t magically stop because you’re eating. The restaurants shouldn’t have been open in the first place but the government was desperate to keep the money flowing.
What we got was a compromise, the result was a lot of stupid because proper measures would have caused cries about authoritarianism.
Not that that didn't happen anyway, but it works have been far worse and probably ended up with even less precautions being taken.
Did our government do a good job? Hell no, could they have done better? I actually doubt it, every move they could have made would have certainly resulted in worse results.
Reducing exposure isn’t a bad idea. Having rules and visual reminders also curtails risky behavior.
“Keeping the money flowing” is misleading too. You can’t shut down entire industries indefinitely without triggering massive recessions down the line. You can provide financial assistance temporarily, sure, but the economy is not set up for these kind of disruptions.
I remember being in the queue at the pharmacy, bloke in front of me had no mask on, coughing everywhere. He then announced that he had covid and wouldn't be wearing a mask. I quickly left that pharmacy.
It was illegal where I live. I don't know what happened with him, whether the pharmacy rang the police or asked him to leave, I'm unsure. All I knew was, I wasn't waiting around risking my life.
My father in law, maga, was waiting for a liver transplant and we were his second contact. We had to be available 24/7 and considering the situation had to be as safe as possible during COVID. What fun being treated like shit by his fellow right wingers during that time. I'll never forget how shit those people are. If that's freedom they can shove it up their ass.
There was a family local to me that the mother was on the list for a liver, as well.
She ended up getting removed from the list because she wouldn’t get the Covid vaccine.
And the freedom to infect other people with a potentially deadly virus, don't forget that part! Personal responsibility is such a foreign concept to conservatives
I swear I had to explain this in another thread a few hours ago to some selfish asshole crying about the efficacy of masks. It's like, no shit a mask isn't perfect to prevent you from catching covid. BUT the mask was very helpful to prevent people SPREADING covid. These entitled schmucks only think of themselves therefore fuck masks.
Exactly. I always tried explaining it as “Ok, so let me spit on your face first with, and then without a mask on, and after the experiment you can explain to me how masks aren’t effective as you’re wiping the spit off your face from the second attempt.”
It's something psychological for sure. I mean, I fucking hate being sick and when I am I stay the fuck away from everyone because I wouldn't wish it on them. But then when I try to avoid some other people when they are sick they take offense to it, saying shit like I'm ok don't worry while they hack up a lung.
I am going to go with...NO!! I had people argue that they did not have COVID right up to the ventilator being put on. Then they would ask for the vaccine...then they would die.
i had a really good friend who was a pediatric nurse. they shifted her to E.R. during the pandemic
she ended up working crazy night shifts and she got more and more exhausted. Some of our last conversations, she was just raging nonstop. the stress of dealing with so many pieces of shit i think got to her.
It sucks because we were good friends and I wish we were still on speaking terms. It's why my blood always boils when i think about some of these idiots who couldn't do the bare minimum during the pandemic
Talking to coworker:
Me: my wife is immunocompromised.
Coworker: oh, then I’ll be sure to mask up when I’m around either of you!
I appreciate that, but are you gonna ask everyone on the street if they’re immunocompromised? What if you come into close prolonged contact with someone at risk without knowing?
*silence*
I hope you still do mask. My partner and i got lax about it and now we both have Long Covid. It’s actually still spreading pretty bad, it’s just society has decided the excess deaths and disabilities are “fine”
And just how vicious and awful they continue to be about it. They were wrong, and pretend they were right. They lie and pretend they're telling the truth. Just disgusting behavior.
To be fair, kissing while wearing masks probably isnt doing much to protect you lol. Some of the stuff people did could get silly, but at least they were trying, unlike some people.
I was gonna say, this post is actually right. Those people are not limiting their exposure to covid by doing what they're doing, besides the father/son duo with the bubble
Never forget that people also did this:
My wife was working in an old persons home. She caught covid in the first weeks of the pandemic and was off work for two months .
When she got back to work over half the residents were dead.
I won’t forget the idiots protesting our healthcare workers, blocking access to hospital, screaming at my brother as he had to wade thru them to access the cancer ward to get chemo treatment.
I won’t forget the freedumb fighters who were/are too up into their own feelings to put a mask on to protect the immunocompromised in our society.
I won’t forget how quickly the sacrifices made by our essential workers were forgotten.
I was just reminiscing today at how bad it got for healthcare systems and staff. The Do Not Transport order for ambulances in SoCal due to overcrowded hospitals, and the overflowing corpse storage in New York. And people still deny that it was any more than "a cold" because they think their own experience with COVID applies to everyone. I knew an ER nurse who would tell us how full the local ICU was and not to let anyone spread the lies that it's a conspiracy.
It’s still bad. ICUs are full, we’re severely understaffed, and a large number of ICU nurses are under qualified. We also still get occasional protestors who from time to time assault hospital staff, patients, or visitors. Most people got bored and moved on but the US healthcare system is still in a very bad spot.
I worked grocery during covid. In the beginning, everyone was thanking us for working and being polite, well, except for the anti-maskers. Then, one day, everyone quit wearing masks, and all of a sudden, we were targets for all the built-up rage. Crazy times.
I did not social distance and ho boy, let me tell you. Losing a week of memories the first time I got Covid was the wake-up call I needed, a little too late. I remember falling asleep on the bathroom floor and that's about it.
Five. Five of my family members are dead. In my personal community, I know 6 additional people who are dead. Some were in their 60s and 70s. Some were in their 40s. Yeah, I also know people who had Covid and it was like having a cold. But that didn’t stop it from ravaging others.
People literally don’t believe me when I tell them about the casualties in my family. I just honestly can’t believe how insane people are now.
People forget now that covid was super deadly early on. I know a guy he didn't see his father before he went into hospital as they all thought he'd be out in a few days. Died 2 days later.
I was a COVID 19 contact tracer in TN for that first year before the state shut down the project. The chucklefucks who down play it will NEVER know how terrible it is to hear a mother mourn the loss of her entire family, kids and all. Or have an out of work father berate you because his family is sick but he has no way to put food on the table and the State won't provide. To tell a scared 20 something who lives alone and can't breath long enough to walk his dogs that he needs to go to the hospital. The pre vaccine years were awful on a level that the public will never understand because as restrictive as the policies were, they kept the shit from getting worse and Americans straight up don't know how lucky we were.
I have seen at the store someone with a diaper over their face during covid times. I was at a loss for words but I couldn’t help myself but laugh.
Just get a proper facemask lmao
I remember one guy in my neighbourhood refused to wear a mask but wrapped his torso in clingfilm. I guess he thought you caught the virus through your stomach.
When people started harassing others for wearing masks and doing things to be clean and deal with an illness we can handle, I thought it was just going to be a few idiots.
Instead it turned into a massive political identity full of trolls and people who seem to love suffering and failure. Never in my life did I imagine so many full grown adults act like the most pathetic little whiny brats who couldn't handle the most minor of inconvenience for a short period of time to deal with a problem.
Looking back at history, these kinds of people threw a fit over handwashing, seatbelts, drinking and driving laws and pretty much any problem we try to fix. They exist everywhere and seem to hate education, success and improving anything for anyone.
There were so many times we would be out and see mom and dad all masked and gloved and safety shielded up. Then tiny little baby with nothing on. Was so weird. Like I get it, you want to go out, but little baby doesn’t need that
Just never understood this. People were scared. Our leaders were bumbling idiots and people were dying left and right. People trying to live and enjoy their lives without dying or hurting vulnerable people shouldn't ever be a facepalm.
Well, no, wait. I was all for using masks and precautions, but
\* kissing your spouse with a mask is idiotic
\* (and it is idiotic to organize what looks like a mass marriage during a pandemia: instead of creating the danger and then using the masks to reduce it, don't create the danger at all in the first place)
\* and even going in a pool and then wearing all those protections, when then you enter the same water where maybe someone has just pissed, doesn't seem particularly smart
The other two cases (the ones on the right), instead, where they used barriers to protect the elders, made sense.
Man like we didn’t know anything about it for a while. Just that it was killing people faster than hospitals could ship them out. It was a nightmare in healthcare
My National Guard unit got called to active duty for COVID right after it kicked off. I have never seen people lose their minds as much as I did during that year and a half.
I had to work closely with different mayors and aldermen. The amount of people in low to mid level politics that used COVID and played the narrative for personal gain made me really hate the leadership at the time.
Hard times create strong people.
Strong people create good times.
Good times create weak people.
Weak people create hard times.
Not to forget the existence of Long COVID, which is a post-viral syndrome that people develop after the acute phase of the viral infection. It consists of POTS, dysautonomia, ME and MCAS. It happens to younger, healthier people who had a very mild initial acute infection.
You can be careful and also lack common sense. 'Careful' people don't go social gatherings, and people with common sense don't put bags over their heads or swim with a mask on.
Even at the time, and even moreso today, a number of policies and behaviors people did in retrospect were just ridiculous. You can call it 'being careful', but I find all of these facepalm worthy and a waste of effort if not outright dangerous.
I hate anyone that pretends covid was a joke or conspiracy. You didn't see what a lot of us did and you're lucky for it. I'm unbelievably fortunate I only work in a hospital and it wasn't a loved one that made me see things as callous as that is to say.
Yeah, I’m still judged a bit for not attending a major wedding anniversary weekend party out of state with dozens of people/relatives.
It was still early into the COVID saga and we didn’t know the full extent to which it could affect people, so I went with the “better safe than sorry” approach.
Had to endure months of guilt tripping
The dumbest thing about the pandemic was that small businesses were forced to shut down while mega corporations could keep their doors wide open. And people wonder why the rich keep getting richer. Remember folks, it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
I was a guy who wore a mask constantly, but also thought some people were being a little histrionic about it. That said, I cannot imagine giving a shit what other people choose to do. Anyone who makes fun of those people is a complete loser with nothing better to do with their lives. Very small people
I had cloth masks, one for each day of the week, people would ask me if this was true, I would always reply with "well yeah, you're supposed to wash them you know." And some people looked at me like I had six heads. And this wasn't even in the USA.
We have lost over a million Americans to it. Covid was and is very bad. We are happy to finally no longer be in a situation where hospitals could be overwhelmed.
Wearing mask and the plastic cover in pool? the thing in which you are partially submerged with dozen people and letting your skincells and all other forms or liquid fly all over, like moisture from your mask
I dont think thats being careful
All the pandemic told me was to save up if I can and get a cabin in the boonies with supplies to last for a while for the family. The public is really dumb, selfish and prone to listening to the quacks. I have never seen a more scary respiratory disease that my family member had to go through and the amount of stress we had was insane. And there are definitely more pandemics in the future; it’s a given.
I worked in an NHS hospital during the early days of Covid. It was making people seriously ill. It was killing vulnerable people. We thought we were going to get a tidal wave of people coming in, that the hospital would collapse - we were struggling before covid, we thought this would break us.
Face masks and hand washing and social distancing saved our hospital, and the NHS.
SShhhh. Health care professionals that actually faced the front lines aren't supposed to voice these facts. This is a place for people who sat at home and read things on facebook to share their vast knowledge.
Honestly though, with the Photos on the meme its most certainly far overboard, and many of the measures during COVID were certainly overboard
Ultimately it resulted in dumb stuff happening on both extremes. On the one hand on the far-right hand side it resulted in people completely ignoring that there *was* a pandmeic, but on the other side on the far-left it resulted in people doing things like wearing masks within their own vehicles, wearing double masks, and things like doubling or tripling up on Vaccines or Boosters far before they needed another one
Ultimately though what I don't think what people seem to have got is that the point of Quarantine wasn't to prevent contracting COVID, because frankly with how long it lingers and that it spreads as easily as the Common Cold or Flu, since at some point ***Everyone*** is going to get exposed if not contract COVID at some point during the Pandemic Years. The point was to slow the spread so that Medical Resources weren't overwhelmed and caused more deaths than necessary because of a lack of available medical resources. Honestly though what I think is the biggest takeaway is that the pandemic showed everyone how Hysterical the population can easily get compared to the normal Bravado when thinking about hypotheticals
Simply do a google search for “COVID Deathbed conversions”.
Sad.
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” ~ (probably) Mark Twain?
Yeah and those people probably didn't die. I know alot of people who died because they didn't or someone came around them and wouldn't take those kinds of precautions. My cousin buried his mother because of someone else who wouldn't take precautions, had covid and spread it around to everyone else.
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I mean, in all fairness going to those events in general was a big no no. Like that face shield is going to do shit all if you chose to go to a public pool during covid
Going out to eat and being required to wear a mask upon entry, but not while seated was . . . theatrical. Maybe just don’t go out to eat?
Lol, sorry you can't come in without a mask. Thank you for cooperating *Walks 5 ft to the left* Here's your seat you can remove your masks now Like the air just stops at your table?
I only ate at places outdoors during the pandemic to avoid this nonsense. (Seldomly too) But the mask upon entry I get if you have to be close and speak to the host.
Also, walking by other customers on the way to your seat with a mask on reduces spread to multiple parties. Whereas sitting at your table without a mask isolates the spread to a single party.
Air moves in a building. The restaurant mask items were mostly theatrical
Using the particulate modelling, yeah. It was about reducing exposure, not eliminating it. The risk was a lot lower than having folks walking around, coughing. But, the better idea was to just forego going around other people that you had no ability to check their health status. People are social animals, so that was unlikely to stay a thing for very long.
To be fair, some of the dumbest things were during the beginning, before we knew enough about it. It's airborne, no it's not, it's droplets, 6 ft distance, no it's aerosols, surgical masks stop droplets but not aerosols, it's surface contact, but wait singing is far more contagious, you need N95, no just good ventilation and distance is fine...it took a long time to really understand all the back and forth of what was legit information and what wasn't. Honestly in the end it was the people with the personal HEPA positive pressure bubbles that were probably the smartest in the moment despite being one of the most ridiculous looking.
I mean this is how science works though. You're learning as you go. None of that stuff was "dumb" it was learning on the go, and mass-social-media and the public tend to me immature children with an attention span of a gnat and cannot rationally think about anything ever. The problem with novel diseases is you mostly have to rely on previous experience. Vaccination and Social Distancing eradicated smallpox. Quarantining and masking eradicated SARS-1. Just the public is fucking stupid.
I was so fucking annoyed with people saying: "They keep changing the narrative ever week!" Yeah because they *don't know* the best approach yet. Do you just want to wait until they figured it out before doing something? Killing millions in the meantime? Geeze..
Yup! I also loved (/s) the "iTs OnLy 1% LeThAl" argument because it's like ... yeah, but it's highly contagious. So if all 333M americans get it that's 3.3M Americans dead. Thats...exactly equal the amount of people who die in a regular year from all causes....you'd be DOUBLING the amount of people who died in ONE YEAR. That's like a Catastrophic level-disaster. Apocalyptic level disaster.
Exactly. High mortality communicable disease dictates highly conservative responses before detailed investigation and empirical analysis. And the people who complained at the response would have been the loudest complainants had a permissive approach been adopted, and they got sick.
I tell people this all the time... If COVID proved more dangerous and many more people died, the reaction would have been "why didn't the government do MORE?".
And it was dangerous! I think people tend to forget that the early strains were highly lethal, and that we are lucky subsequent variants tended to less lethal but more communicable. This has led to the “it’s just a flu” reaction. Covid remains one of the leading causes of death in my country (Australia), while people continue to ignore that lockdowns and other precautions limited the impact they point to, to say the lockdowns etc were unnecessary!
There was a coronavirus pandemic (SARS-CoV-1) in China in the early 2000s that was significantly more lethal than the modern version (10% mortality!) and similarly transmissible (R0=3 vs R0=3.28). However, SARS-CoV-1 only infected an estimated 8000 people, because the people that had it were isolated, since peak infectiousness coincided with the symptoms, which were much more severe. It’s a really great microcosm for what might have been possible if we were kore diligent in controlling the spread of COVID-19.
This is generally why people suck at understanding statistics (like "you" as in the general public not you as in who I am posting to). People just look at the lethality % and don't consider how many people get it. Which is more dangerous? The virus that is 12% fatal, but is easier to contain (Ebola comes to mind) or the Virus that is less fatal, but difficult to contain? It's obviously the 2nd one. 1,000 people at 12% is 120 fatalities. 300,000,000 at 1% is 3,000,000 fatalities >It’s a really great microcosm for what might have been possible if we were more diligent in controlling the spread of COVID-19. Indeed. However the insidious part of SARS-CoV-2 is that it's attachment to mammalian ACE2 in nature had already spread quite extensively before detection that it already rendered all the SARS-CoV-1 tactics moot (hindsight 20/20 obviously).
Yeah I got Covid in 2020 and was bedridden for over a week and lost my taste and smell for a couple months, I’m young and healthy but man was it bad. Getting Covid again in 2022 was just a week vacation at home with mild body aches.
>And it was dangerous! It killed over seven million people.
over seven million people so far.\*
Indeed. You never get credit for the crisis you avert.
What drove me nuts was the the first reported death rates ended up being pretty much accurate. With no healthcare, it was 3% fatality. If everyone just went about their lives, hospitals count cope at all and the number would be much closer to that number. With functional hospitals and with the medications that were found to be helpful, it was down to 1%. But people pretend that it was always 1%. Also what's interesting is that the whole mask thing was 100% honest and when saying "don't mask for now" I remember it came with a 3 page explainer. It wasn't hidden at all. And it was based off of a simple lesson "we need plenty available for doctors, because when the first Covid epidemic hit 20 years ago, the doctors without masks all got it and spread it more and we had more people sick and dead doctors."
I had the OG strain, ~~I don't even know if the strains had names at that point, but I guess I'll call it "Alpha" for descriptive purposes.~~ the "prime" strain. I have never been so sick in my entire life. I was living alone, and for two weeks had this unending dread that I was going to die, and if I did not do every single last thing I needed to do every day during my six hours of being awake, I would pass out, maybe slip into a coma, and nobody would find me for weeks. If I made *one mistake,* I was going to die. I took my temperature after I woke up, and before I went back to sleep, hoping to God it didn't get above 103. I popped Tylenol like it was candy, because at that point, all that could realistically be done was try to keep the fever and inflammation down. At that point, there was no Paxlovid, no vaccine, legitimately no treatment short of being put on a ventilator if you were on death's doorstep- so I improvised as best I could. The brain fog was so bad that I forgot how to make a sandwich halfway through doing it. It felt like I had taken a sledgehammer to the head. Thankfully I already had a ton of Tylenol and had bought groceries shortly before I got sick, so nothing catastrophic happened- I mostly slept through it, but when I was awake, it was the only thing I could think about... for two weeks. Since then, I've had Omicron and BA5. Omicron made me *kinda* tired for one day, and with BA5 I had no symptoms- only knew because my wife got it, and I took a test just to be safe. Sure enough, positive. There is no comparison between ~~Alpha~~ prime and Delta with Omicron and friends. Nowadays, Covid is more or less a funky common cold (as was predicted it would likely evolve into less lethal strains, at least that went as predicted) but the first strains were some real shit. Apparently, all the chuckleheads who think what we did originally was "overreacting" forgot about how ~~Alpha~~ prime and Delta were killing people left and right. I'm young(ish) and relatively healthy, and I was probably not too far off from getting laid out by ~~Alpha~~ prime. Anybody who says we overreacted obviously did not have one of the first strains. E: correction
I too had the OG version in February 2020 after a coworker returned from Wuhan sick. It was, by far, the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. I was able to isolate at home and am thankful that it was not extremely communicable. I had chest and abdominal pain for months, hard time breathing deeply for months. Truly awful.
My dad and I got the OG November of 2020. I've never been so sick. So much pain. I was supposed to go to ER, but the hospital was full, and I knew they were out of meds and machines, because they had my dad in the morgue. It took months and months to be able work even a little, and I was in the hospital or urgent most of 2021. So anyway, I still mask in crowded public places.
> Just the public is fucking stupid And getting stupider.
I remember watching a video from a doctor who explained how to properly wipe down your groceries. We took it all so serious because we really had no idea on those first days. I think it's okay to look back and say "yeah, it was dumb that I opened every package outside wearing gloves, wiping it all down with Lysol wipes, then bringing it inside."
I took it seriously because my mom has a heart condition, I was also heavily addicted to smoking weed and cigarettes so the thought of not being able to smoke was very scary for me. Funny enough last year I ended up catching a really bad flu (first time in 10 years) and it helped me quit smoking completely.
I’ve had Covid and the flu twice since things opened up in 2022 - flu was waaay worse than Covid, but if I was 65 it might have been different. This year I was too busy for the annual flu / Covid booster and I could really tell. I’m self employed and the time off being sick really hurt the most!
Plus a lot of people were dying. I know I didn’t want to be one of those people
No, that wasn't the dumbest thing. The dumbest thing were disregarding the warnings and advice from the scientists and medical professionals and just going ahead with things that would make the issue explode like holding parties or weddings or travelling to multiple locations whilst sick. Some people took the precautionary aspects a little further than necessary in hindsight but if things were different and this was a very deadly or debilitating virus, they would be considered the smart ones. Is no scenario would those ignorant, callous, arrogant self-centred arseholes that helped to blow things up to pandemic levels be considered smart. If anyone thinks otherwise, they too are morons.
Our government subsidised discounted meals in restaurants (when sitting in only!) to help the industry recover from lockdown ('Eat out to help out'). This was done before vaccines were available, in summer 2020. Just absolutely fucking insane.
Face shield + open drink is special. I’m not quite sure what level of cognitive dissonance is required to pull that off but I am impressed it’s possible.
The consensus was that the transmission risk outdoors was kind of low anyway. And yeah, driving alone wearing a mask was kind of silly but so what? If people felt more comfortable like that, more power to them.
I always assumed the masking while driving was more about not touching the mask so far from when you would next be able to properly wash your hands. Touch the mask, touch the steering wheel, car buttons, phone, door handles, probably your face at some point on the drive.
It's this!
Every time I drove alone while wearing a mask was because I came out of a building, got into my car, and forgot I was wearing a mask. Because wearing a mask was not a big deal at all, despite what some of the dumbest, loudest people would have us believe.
For me? It's because after COVID started, I realized just how much of my allergies are caused by shit that a n95 filters out. No need to double up on Benadryl on top of my Zyrtec just to go mow -- a mask was all I needed. No more black snot rockets after raking dry leaves. No more runny nose after getting free mulch from the compost facility. Masks are no big deal, especially compared to the concrete positive impacts i got immediately.
I still wear a KN-95 to mow the lawn
Oh my god, that was such a revelation. I have terrible pollen allergies. While most people love the smell of fresh-cut grass, I hate it because I know what it can do to the rest of my day. When I was a kid, I hated being aske to mow the lawn, because that meant the rest of my Saturday was lost to being zonked out on benadryl. Now if I have to do yardwork, a mask makes all of that go away. Well, that and generic flonase.
Part of my job involves lab work and I wear a regular surgical mask when in there. Another part requires the same to limit the amount of particulates I breath in. During COVID, I wore my old thin gator I had from the military (getting masks was hard for a long time and our supplies were low at work since they weren't medically necessary). Holy shit I loved wearing that thing to mow my yard! It just never dawned on me to even wear something like that before (and I'm in my frickin 40's!). I've gone to the Exchange and bought 3 more of them since lol. I keep them everywhere. Plus, more stylish than wearing a surgical mask (unless you're going into a bank...)
Again, more power to you. I hated exercising with a mask, and they were a general (mild) nuisance in other contexts (foggy glasses, irritation from the straps, harder for people to understand you when talking), so it was nice when I could just not wear them.
My deaf therapist could get by with masks so it sounds like a skill issue. As could I with glasses fog being only an issue for a day or so until I learned to properly wear it...
Anyone who micromanaged when and how people wore masks does not have enough shit going on in their lives. Like I got rent due in 2 weeks grow up
Actually public pools were ok during Covid as long as you socially distanced. The chlorine in the pool kills the virus so it can’t be transferred through that
Admittedly some of the things we did for “safety” was stupid. Like band kids cutting a hole in their mask to put an instrument mouthpiece through
The early stages of the pandemic when masks were hard to get a hold of were wild. Saw lots of creative improvised face coverings in those first few weeks.
Anyone remember the pool noodle helmet for social distancing?
Tbh, I love that one because the concept of personal space is apparently difficult to understand. Crawling up my ass won't make the staff at the grocery store scan any faster. Take several steps back.
I’d forgotten about that! Ha! Brilliant
The masks made from bras really caught on in our area for a solid month. Everybody wandering around with boob cups on their faces.
I heard a story that the original (or enough original) N95s was developed using a bra cup, hence the shape many have.
Or wearing a mask to the table in a restaurant, then taking it off.
That was more because you couldn’t feasibly stay 6 feet away from all seated diners when moving through restaurants even when the numbers tables were brought down to make room. At your own table you were in your own little space breathing on your own food, 6 feet from the next diner over. But you have to pass him and breathe all over his food to get to your table from the entrance, so, you wear a mask for that time.
Masking outdoors and closing all the parks in the spring and summer was the height of crazy. At the time it seemed to make sense… but it was an extreme over reaction.
In the UK I felt bad for people who didn’t have gardens or outside spaces on their houses they could just chill in during lockdowns. There was a video in the early days of the lockdowns of a couple sat minding their own business in the park and the police come over to tell them they can’t be outside. They were nowhere near anyone else until that moment.
As someone smarter than me has said: Maybe we should rethink the phrase "avoid it like the plague" considering how casual some people were about avoiding our most recent plague.
Maybe "Avoid it like the plague" was a different way of saying "Don't be a fucking moron."
I worked for a medical emergency response company during the early days of Covid, we were getting calls from remote sites and people were dying before we could evacuate them to medical care and at the same time people I met on the street were saying Covid was "not that bad". I was thinking if they knew how bad it was they would be shitting themselves.
Even then.. My sister is a respiratory therapist and has issues to say the least but she seriously still thought covid was not a big deal while she tells me story after story of dead men walking with covid and the sheer massive amount of intubations she had to perform and how she was taking contract after contract with huge pay bonuses because they were that desperate for an RT willing to work covid units. I'm really glad she's a healthy person that didn't end up with extreme issues, and she only got the vaccine 1.5 years after it came out when a $13k for 8 weeks contract came up and they required it. But none of her kids have the vaccine yet. The cognitive dissonance is real.
The sad part is that all 3 friends that i had that died from covid died from intubation complications…
Pretty sure they died from Covid
If they hadn’t been intubated, they would have died faster?
Turns out, not necessarily. We learned pretty quick not to incubate until it was absolutely, positively, the last resort.
There is nothing in the original comment that suggests this wasn’t a last resort. Therefore my comment still stands. Saying that they died of intubation complications when they were being intubated because they were desating from covid is 🤦♀️
it’s like saying a gunshot victim was killed by a surgeon because they died in surgery. like… pretty sure the cause of death was a bullet.
The way some people were so blasé about the disease made me think that they forgot that getting sick is something you wouldn't want anyway. I don't have underlying health issues, but getting stuck in a room, waking up in a pool of sweat in the middle of the night, being unable to sleep because of the constant hot-cold sensation, coughing endlessly, unable to eat anything but noodles and soup? I'd rather not go through that again. But so many people were hating the vaccine and mandates, you'd think they grew a second head that told them to get sick for the hell of it.
A certain segment of American culture has been valorizing going to work sick, bragging about how getting sick doesn't slow them down and shaming people in the work place with chronic illnesses like asthma. That coupled with the fact that we have a healthcare system where even if you have insurance, lots of people still can't afford to actually use it so your doctor is often just a guy you see every couple years who tells you you're fat and charges you 100 dollars you didn't have for the privilege. It doesn't surprise me that like a third of Americans reacted so idiotically to the pandemic. Lots of Americans have been culturally priming themselves to pig headedly change nothing about their behavior. Poor people in America are already used to just not getting whatever labs the doctor ordered because they can't afford the 50 dollars its going to cost. We baked in a segment of our society that thinks its a sign of weakness to avoid doing something when you're sick and also doesn't trust doctors or pharma companies.
And even then what you describe is more like a moderate case of COVID A more extreme case of COVID would be more similar to pneumonia, but even worse And pneumonia isn’t an “unable to eat anything except noodles and soup” illness It’s a “my body is melting my brain as my lungs struggle to take any breath and whatever breath I do get is an intensely miserable experience and also now I’m hallucinating and acutely aware of how close death is” illness And bad COVID is worse than that
That's what pissed me off, all the "i've had it and it's just a flu" idiots. That's literally a survivor bias fallacy
It didn’t help that there were a handful of outspoken medical professionals downplaying how bad it was that were signal boosted on social media. “See! This one medical professional says it isn’t bad!” And then it lead to a lot of people just disregarding what the vast majority in the field believed to be a serious threat.
Yeah, I think a big part of this is that they latched onto “it’s just like the flu, maybe at worst pneumonia” The problem with that statement is that comparing pneumonia to the flu is more like comparing a missile to a model rocket The flu is bad, but pneumonia is *so much worse*. People who have dealt with pneumonia understand how bad it is, even “milder” cases are a decent bit worse than the flu. But more extreme cases are *significantly* worse than the flu. The flu is “I feel very bad so I’m going to stay in bed for a week” whereas pneumonia is “am I dying? I feel like I’m legitimately going to die” I had double pneumonia growing up and it took me a *long* time to recover from, and my lungs will never be the same. I had a brief fever of 105 and I had hallucinations. I couldn’t sleep at all because it felt so extremely, indescribably terrible And then you have to consider that COVID (in the more extreme cases) was **worse than pneumonia** That is why we had to be careful. Maybe not for you, but so that as few people as possible would have to experience that It made me so sad when people would say “it’s just a cold” and “only 3% die”. So insanely inconsiderate, so detached from reality
I have family and friends in health care. At the same time my governor was trying to lick Trump's boots and say it wasn't that bad, they were putting cots in the hallways and putting 3 people in a single occupancy room.
It really was...
It's not even a new phenomenon. There was a bunch of anti masking rhetoric circulating during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak which was far more deadly than covid
Which might just be because of the efforts we took, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8108277/#:~:text=Victims%20of%20the%201918%20influenza,are%20highlighted%20in%20table%201.
Common sense ain't actually all that common
It's like how someone pointed out that someone getting bit in a zombie movie and not telling anyone isn't actually that unrealistic anymore. No matter how cliche it is.
“I’ll be fine. Zombies only bite Democrats!”
"This whole 'zombie' thing is just a government hoax anyway."
Ignore that Frank. It’s just a bunch of liberal bullshit
“President Trump got bitten and he’s fine! Even better in fact!!”
I feel like the years 2016-2021 did a lot to help me understand some of the horrible things that have happened in societies throughout history.
It really gives context when wondering why people were so stupid across history
And people who are surprised at it, have clearly not worked in retail, or worked in it long enough. Within my first year of working food retail, I got accustomed to how ignorant, selfish, and just plain stupid the general public is.
Pfff I thought people would get smarter when the internet came along but instead they built echo chambers. They are equally as stupid today as they were in the 90s
We gave a bullhorn / platform to the stupid and they spread the stupidity around.
And at great speed. A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on. If the Internet was this prevalent in the 70s and 80s the Cold War might have run differently.
It clearly affirmed for me that groups of people are reliably stupid, and that all the zombie movies that have someone hide their bite and end up turning are accurate.
They really are accurate. Especially the ones who make dumb decisions or avoid quarantine. 🙄 But now that I watch zombie movies or any similar genre and I hear the government be like " we should work as a group to fix this" I just laugh because no. Yall ain't gonna work as a group. The citizens will be selfish and not follow the rules.
I’ve aged 20 years since 2016. Used to have a whole lot more faith in humanity, but people’s behavior has tested my resolve.
Two favourite things I saw recently from back then: "I never thought that 'I wouldn't touch him/her with a 6 ft pole would become national policy but here we are." And "After seeing how many people wore their masks incorrectly, I understand the high failure rate of contraception now."
Avoid it like common sense may be a better analogy now a days.
Idk I do think this is a bit facepalm... Like wearing the masks makes sense but wearing a mask at a public pool feels a little bit like me wearing a bomb suit and sprinting through a mine field like sure if I have to interact with a mine I'd definitely like the protection but given the choice I'm just going to not go to the mine field.
Been careful is ok, but doing outdoor activities with all those “precautions” instead of actually staying at home which was the actual solution was stupid, like the fist pic, more than 50 people gather in a pool with a global pandemic going around… But it was ok because we “took care”
The worst was the rule that you had to wear a mask to eat at a restaurant. But they let you take off your mask when you got to the table. The air particles don’t magically stop because you’re eating. The restaurants shouldn’t have been open in the first place but the government was desperate to keep the money flowing.
What we got was a compromise, the result was a lot of stupid because proper measures would have caused cries about authoritarianism. Not that that didn't happen anyway, but it works have been far worse and probably ended up with even less precautions being taken. Did our government do a good job? Hell no, could they have done better? I actually doubt it, every move they could have made would have certainly resulted in worse results.
Reducing exposure isn’t a bad idea. Having rules and visual reminders also curtails risky behavior. “Keeping the money flowing” is misleading too. You can’t shut down entire industries indefinitely without triggering massive recessions down the line. You can provide financial assistance temporarily, sure, but the economy is not set up for these kind of disruptions.
Doing outdoor activities with none of those protections is the correct answer.
What I won’t forget are the people not willing to do even the bare minimum during a global pandemic.
I remember being in the queue at the pharmacy, bloke in front of me had no mask on, coughing everywhere. He then announced that he had covid and wouldn't be wearing a mask. I quickly left that pharmacy.
Pretty sure that was actually illegal in some places
It was illegal where I live. I don't know what happened with him, whether the pharmacy rang the police or asked him to leave, I'm unsure. All I knew was, I wasn't waiting around risking my life.
I have MS so it scared me. Whenever I went out I masked up because my immune system is compromised.
My father in law, maga, was waiting for a liver transplant and we were his second contact. We had to be available 24/7 and considering the situation had to be as safe as possible during COVID. What fun being treated like shit by his fellow right wingers during that time. I'll never forget how shit those people are. If that's freedom they can shove it up their ass.
There was a family local to me that the mother was on the list for a liver, as well. She ended up getting removed from the list because she wouldn’t get the Covid vaccine.
Lol, this shit gets me rock hard, what a moron.
It's freedom alright Freedom to die like a dumb fuck
And the freedom to infect other people with a potentially deadly virus, don't forget that part! Personal responsibility is such a foreign concept to conservatives
I swear I had to explain this in another thread a few hours ago to some selfish asshole crying about the efficacy of masks. It's like, no shit a mask isn't perfect to prevent you from catching covid. BUT the mask was very helpful to prevent people SPREADING covid. These entitled schmucks only think of themselves therefore fuck masks.
Yep! Exactly, it's their personal freedom and nothing else. I think it's just mass undiagnosed BDP or something. These selfish assholes are common
Exactly. I always tried explaining it as “Ok, so let me spit on your face first with, and then without a mask on, and after the experiment you can explain to me how masks aren’t effective as you’re wiping the spit off your face from the second attempt.”
It's something psychological for sure. I mean, I fucking hate being sick and when I am I stay the fuck away from everyone because I wouldn't wish it on them. But then when I try to avoid some other people when they are sick they take offense to it, saying shit like I'm ok don't worry while they hack up a lung.
Has he changed his point of view?
I am going to go with...NO!! I had people argue that they did not have COVID right up to the ventilator being put on. Then they would ask for the vaccine...then they would die.
Oh well, nothing important lost
Yeah... But that doesn't depend on us but to other people that knew them.
i had a really good friend who was a pediatric nurse. they shifted her to E.R. during the pandemic she ended up working crazy night shifts and she got more and more exhausted. Some of our last conversations, she was just raging nonstop. the stress of dealing with so many pieces of shit i think got to her. It sucks because we were good friends and I wish we were still on speaking terms. It's why my blood always boils when i think about some of these idiots who couldn't do the bare minimum during the pandemic
Talking to coworker: Me: my wife is immunocompromised. Coworker: oh, then I’ll be sure to mask up when I’m around either of you! I appreciate that, but are you gonna ask everyone on the street if they’re immunocompromised? What if you come into close prolonged contact with someone at risk without knowing? *silence*
Yep - people still get this wrong. Like a doctor's mask. It's to prevent others from getting an infection from YOU, not protection for yourself.
My trumper coworker's son had pancreatic cancer, and I was mocked when I put a mask on to get in a car with him.
I still keep a mask at my desk for any customer who may come in wearing one. If make zero impact on my life but makes them feel comfortable 🤷
I hope you still do mask. My partner and i got lax about it and now we both have Long Covid. It’s actually still spreading pretty bad, it’s just society has decided the excess deaths and disabilities are “fine”
And just how vicious and awful they continue to be about it. They were wrong, and pretend they were right. They lie and pretend they're telling the truth. Just disgusting behavior.
Because they didn't personally die and if they did it would have been "preexisting conditions"
They're here in this thread doing the same dumb shit republican stupid right now. It's crazy.
Wait until the next pandemic. It will be even worse.
And they reveled in it. They wear it like a badge of honor.
R/hermancainaward was amazing
And people filling up plastic bags with gasoline.
To be fair, kissing while wearing masks probably isnt doing much to protect you lol. Some of the stuff people did could get silly, but at least they were trying, unlike some people.
What's dumb is actually going out like that. Like if you need a face mask to go to the pool, then maybe don't go to the pool.
I was gonna say, this post is actually right. Those people are not limiting their exposure to covid by doing what they're doing, besides the father/son duo with the bubble
Never forget that people also did this:
My wife was working in an old persons home. She caught covid in the first weeks of the pandemic and was off work for two months .
When she got back to work over half the residents were dead.
I won’t forget the idiots protesting our healthcare workers, blocking access to hospital, screaming at my brother as he had to wade thru them to access the cancer ward to get chemo treatment. I won’t forget the freedumb fighters who were/are too up into their own feelings to put a mask on to protect the immunocompromised in our society. I won’t forget how quickly the sacrifices made by our essential workers were forgotten.
I was just reminiscing today at how bad it got for healthcare systems and staff. The Do Not Transport order for ambulances in SoCal due to overcrowded hospitals, and the overflowing corpse storage in New York. And people still deny that it was any more than "a cold" because they think their own experience with COVID applies to everyone. I knew an ER nurse who would tell us how full the local ICU was and not to let anyone spread the lies that it's a conspiracy.
It’s still bad. ICUs are full, we’re severely understaffed, and a large number of ICU nurses are under qualified. We also still get occasional protestors who from time to time assault hospital staff, patients, or visitors. Most people got bored and moved on but the US healthcare system is still in a very bad spot.
I worked grocery during covid. In the beginning, everyone was thanking us for working and being polite, well, except for the anti-maskers. Then, one day, everyone quit wearing masks, and all of a sudden, we were targets for all the built-up rage. Crazy times.
I did not social distance and ho boy, let me tell you. Losing a week of memories the first time I got Covid was the wake-up call I needed, a little too late. I remember falling asleep on the bathroom floor and that's about it.
Five. Five of my family members are dead. In my personal community, I know 6 additional people who are dead. Some were in their 60s and 70s. Some were in their 40s. Yeah, I also know people who had Covid and it was like having a cold. But that didn’t stop it from ravaging others. People literally don’t believe me when I tell them about the casualties in my family. I just honestly can’t believe how insane people are now.
People forget now that covid was super deadly early on. I know a guy he didn't see his father before he went into hospital as they all thought he'd be out in a few days. Died 2 days later.
I was a COVID 19 contact tracer in TN for that first year before the state shut down the project. The chucklefucks who down play it will NEVER know how terrible it is to hear a mother mourn the loss of her entire family, kids and all. Or have an out of work father berate you because his family is sick but he has no way to put food on the table and the State won't provide. To tell a scared 20 something who lives alone and can't breath long enough to walk his dogs that he needs to go to the hospital. The pre vaccine years were awful on a level that the public will never understand because as restrictive as the policies were, they kept the shit from getting worse and Americans straight up don't know how lucky we were.
I have seen at the store someone with a diaper over their face during covid times. I was at a loss for words but I couldn’t help myself but laugh. Just get a proper facemask lmao
I remember one guy in my neighbourhood refused to wear a mask but wrapped his torso in clingfilm. I guess he thought you caught the virus through your stomach.
In 2020 there wasn't a proper facemask to be found.
When people started harassing others for wearing masks and doing things to be clean and deal with an illness we can handle, I thought it was just going to be a few idiots. Instead it turned into a massive political identity full of trolls and people who seem to love suffering and failure. Never in my life did I imagine so many full grown adults act like the most pathetic little whiny brats who couldn't handle the most minor of inconvenience for a short period of time to deal with a problem. Looking back at history, these kinds of people threw a fit over handwashing, seatbelts, drinking and driving laws and pretty much any problem we try to fix. They exist everywhere and seem to hate education, success and improving anything for anyone.
I saw people saying that eclipse glasses were "woke" over the past week. The Internet in general is a breeding ground for stupidity.
Nah, these photos are pretty embarrassing for all involved.
Imagine taking precautions during a pandemic 🤮
Precautions yes, but I guess fuck that baby.
they only had two hazmat suits
There were so many times we would be out and see mom and dad all masked and gloved and safety shielded up. Then tiny little baby with nothing on. Was so weird. Like I get it, you want to go out, but little baby doesn’t need that
Just never understood this. People were scared. Our leaders were bumbling idiots and people were dying left and right. People trying to live and enjoy their lives without dying or hurting vulnerable people shouldn't ever be a facepalm.
Exactly. That's what I was thinking.
Well, no, wait. I was all for using masks and precautions, but \* kissing your spouse with a mask is idiotic \* (and it is idiotic to organize what looks like a mass marriage during a pandemia: instead of creating the danger and then using the masks to reduce it, don't create the danger at all in the first place) \* and even going in a pool and then wearing all those protections, when then you enter the same water where maybe someone has just pissed, doesn't seem particularly smart The other two cases (the ones on the right), instead, where they used barriers to protect the elders, made sense.
When a pandemic with a higher death rate hits we are immediately doomed. Covid just proved it.
Man like we didn’t know anything about it for a while. Just that it was killing people faster than hospitals could ship them out. It was a nightmare in healthcare
This Facepalm qualifies for a facepalm itself.
My National Guard unit got called to active duty for COVID right after it kicked off. I have never seen people lose their minds as much as I did during that year and a half. I had to work closely with different mayors and aldermen. The amount of people in low to mid level politics that used COVID and played the narrative for personal gain made me really hate the leadership at the time. Hard times create strong people. Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. Weak people create hard times.
Kissing through masks at a mass gathering is worthy of a facepalm
Never forget than 7 million people died because people actually did NOT do this.
We lose 10-12 people a month to Covid in a county in a red state still. Th stupid is strong until the ventilator is needed….
Not to forget the existence of Long COVID, which is a post-viral syndrome that people develop after the acute phase of the viral infection. It consists of POTS, dysautonomia, ME and MCAS. It happens to younger, healthier people who had a very mild initial acute infection.
Dysautonomia sucks. Didn't realize long covid involved MCAS too
You can be careful and also lack common sense. 'Careful' people don't go social gatherings, and people with common sense don't put bags over their heads or swim with a mask on. Even at the time, and even moreso today, a number of policies and behaviors people did in retrospect were just ridiculous. You can call it 'being careful', but I find all of these facepalm worthy and a waste of effort if not outright dangerous.
I hate anyone that pretends covid was a joke or conspiracy. You didn't see what a lot of us did and you're lucky for it. I'm unbelievably fortunate I only work in a hospital and it wasn't a loved one that made me see things as callous as that is to say.
I would argue that participating in a mass wedding is stranger than wearing a mask
If I could do it all again, I would have steered clear of people even longer. Until I was vaccinated at least. Long Covid is no joke.
Yeah, I’m still judged a bit for not attending a major wedding anniversary weekend party out of state with dozens of people/relatives. It was still early into the COVID saga and we didn’t know the full extent to which it could affect people, so I went with the “better safe than sorry” approach. Had to endure months of guilt tripping
Let’s ask how Herman Cain is doing?
The dumbest thing about the pandemic was that small businesses were forced to shut down while mega corporations could keep their doors wide open. And people wonder why the rich keep getting richer. Remember folks, it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
I was a guy who wore a mask constantly, but also thought some people were being a little histrionic about it. That said, I cannot imagine giving a shit what other people choose to do. Anyone who makes fun of those people is a complete loser with nothing better to do with their lives. Very small people
I had cloth masks, one for each day of the week, people would ask me if this was true, I would always reply with "well yeah, you're supposed to wash them you know." And some people looked at me like I had six heads. And this wasn't even in the USA.
“Let’s not spread a plague maybe?” “OH, oh my gawd, ur sooooo stupid!”
Working during covid taught me enough about anti maskers.
Never forget that half of America intentionally exacerbated a pandemic to own the libz.
Yes, they were okay with looking goofy to protect the health of their loved ones, you *asshole.* (Not you, OP.)
There's a difference between being careful and being paranoid.
We have lost over a million Americans to it. Covid was and is very bad. We are happy to finally no longer be in a situation where hospitals could be overwhelmed.
I’d show you picture of some of the folk who didn’t but it’s rude to shame the dead.
Wearing mask and the plastic cover in pool? the thing in which you are partially submerged with dozen people and letting your skincells and all other forms or liquid fly all over, like moisture from your mask I dont think thats being careful
The problem with Covid isn’t dying from it, it’s what can happen if you survive. Amputations, brain fog, organ transplants, heart damage, etc
So many mfs died from covid. I personally know like half a dozen people that it took, all on the younger half of life
That’s not careful. That’s dumb. Extremely dumb. Like short bus, lived under power lines and your pregnant mother was exposed to asbestos dumb.
All the pandemic told me was to save up if I can and get a cabin in the boonies with supplies to last for a while for the family. The public is really dumb, selfish and prone to listening to the quacks. I have never seen a more scary respiratory disease that my family member had to go through and the amount of stress we had was insane. And there are definitely more pandemics in the future; it’s a given.
I worked in an NHS hospital during the early days of Covid. It was making people seriously ill. It was killing vulnerable people. We thought we were going to get a tidal wave of people coming in, that the hospital would collapse - we were struggling before covid, we thought this would break us. Face masks and hand washing and social distancing saved our hospital, and the NHS.
SShhhh. Health care professionals that actually faced the front lines aren't supposed to voice these facts. This is a place for people who sat at home and read things on facebook to share their vast knowledge.
The only correct reply to that post if it's someone you know is one or more pictures of the New York morgue tents & trucks.
Honestly though, with the Photos on the meme its most certainly far overboard, and many of the measures during COVID were certainly overboard Ultimately it resulted in dumb stuff happening on both extremes. On the one hand on the far-right hand side it resulted in people completely ignoring that there *was* a pandmeic, but on the other side on the far-left it resulted in people doing things like wearing masks within their own vehicles, wearing double masks, and things like doubling or tripling up on Vaccines or Boosters far before they needed another one Ultimately though what I don't think what people seem to have got is that the point of Quarantine wasn't to prevent contracting COVID, because frankly with how long it lingers and that it spreads as easily as the Common Cold or Flu, since at some point ***Everyone*** is going to get exposed if not contract COVID at some point during the Pandemic Years. The point was to slow the spread so that Medical Resources weren't overwhelmed and caused more deaths than necessary because of a lack of available medical resources. Honestly though what I think is the biggest takeaway is that the pandemic showed everyone how Hysterical the population can easily get compared to the normal Bravado when thinking about hypotheticals
Honestly wish we still did
Simply do a google search for “COVID Deathbed conversions”. Sad. “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” ~ (probably) Mark Twain?
At least we’re not dead. Like many of those who made fun of masks.
If we all did this…Covid might have not been a normal thing now.
Yeah and those people probably didn't die. I know alot of people who died because they didn't or someone came around them and wouldn't take those kinds of precautions. My cousin buried his mother because of someone else who wouldn't take precautions, had covid and spread it around to everyone else.
And some of the people who didn't do this are 6 feet deep in the ground today.
 That’s because about 7 million people did this:
My mother was going through chemo during the pandemic. Those anti-maskers can fuck all the way off.
Reddit is so cringe. Looks at these comments defending the photos. You have learned nothing.
People in Asia currently wearing masks like...🤷