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Notes -
Lived experience comes to the fore here though -- roughly everyone has by now experienced covid for themselves, and for many people it was in fact just another flu. (not even a particularly bad one, for me & mine)
When you are confronted by an environment where it's become clear that doctors, governments, and media have been lying to you more or less constantly for the past few years, lived experience is perhaps the only thing that you truly can know about covid -- and if you yourself shrugged covid off in a couple of days, the logical conclusion seems to be 'this was NBD'. Which if one thinks about it too much can lead to some unpleasant & uncharitable conclusions as to why the aforementioned liars made such a big deal about it.
It's reactive contrarianism at its core. If they were lying about this (masks don't work at the beginning but are important later, or whatever) then the whole thing must be a lie. No.
Original recipe COVID killed a lot of people and fucked up plenty of young and healthy types, but people get hit with COVID remix years later after multiple vaccines and think "oh this must be the only way it be." There's also a lack of understanding of the role of flu vaccines in keeping old people from croaking every year which impairs intuitive comparisons.
The no big deal attitude also requires a lot of conspiratorial thinking that I don't think people realize they are doing. I remember when we pulled outpatient physicians with no critical background to staff ICUs. I remember when we bagged patients by hand. I remember people dying of a heart attack in the ED waiting room because triage was busted. We had pictures of full units, portable morgues. I watched colleagues die due to lack of PPE.
People blow this off.
Everyone just chooses to forget these things when they look back because most people were just locked in their homes on semi-vacation while older family members occasionally died.
It was a disaster. The public health aspect of it was also a disaster, and from the beginning I was screaming at everyone who would listen that this would be the biggest reason why - you'd get basically holocaust revisionism, and everyone would blow off the next one.
You seem sincere, but to give the devil his due -- why should I believe you? My covid experience was 'wake up feeling like shit, find that the horses are out, drag myself through fixing the fence for a couple hours then go back to bed -- sore throat but more or less fine the next day, 100% better by start of day 4'. I do know people that had it somewhat worse than this, but nobody died or came close to it. (for reference, like most of my friends I am solidly middle aged, and my previous-gen relatives are early boomers if not older)
Naively, it seems surprising that nearly everyone I know had this deadly disease, and many of them barely noticed it, and nobody even went to the hospital. If medical authorities hadn't lied about everything else, I might assume that their figures are accurate -- but that is not the world we live in.
I am far from alone in this situation -- I fully realize the conspiratorial thinking required here, but if I accept only evidence that I'm 100% sure of veracity-wise, that is what I am left with.
Yeah your circumstances aren't conducive, but for me with older but still living relatives.....it cut through a lot of em (and that's independent of healthcare involvement.
It's moon landing grade conspiracy theory work. Death rates, mortality figures and so on are stupidly hard to fake.
Ya know what lets use an example. COVID skepticism like the gay communities relationship with AIDs, especially these days. Did it kill a fuckton of people in the past. Yep. Does it seem like that to young gay people now? Nope. The meds are great. They don't take it seriously. As a result all kinds of STDs are going around like crazy and you end up being the one person whose organs won't let you take meds and it's death and everyone forgets about you.
But for most AIDs isn't real anymore.
What do you mean? I'm mid genX, my peers are spread from around 40-60 and my (still living) parents and aunties and uncles and shit are like 75-85. I've got one grandpa still trucking in his late 90s. You are not talking to some zoomer here.
If covid is not a serious threat to my middle-aged (charitably; some of us are passing our prime) peers nor my Boomer+ relatives, who's circumstances exactly would be conducive?
I'm not saying that I quite believe this to be the case, but if again if I trust only what I can directly observe (which is becoming both more sensible and more common these days) -- that is what I'm left with.
Huh.
Do you live somewhere very rural or like Florida or something? (can decline to answer b/c opsec).
I'm kind of shocked you haven't run into more.
Rural-ish Canada -- lots of friends & family in the big city though. I don't even know anybody who lost a relative to this. One guy at work (which is remote and had a lot of people in hard-hit areas) had a dad get pretty sick, but he recovered AFAIK.
Virtually everybody got sick at some point though, so I'm not sure that location makes much difference? I don't recall any attempts to correlate infection severity with population density.
Like I said, I'm not quite prepared to believe that the whole thing was made up, but these experiences are just not consistent with a generational plague. And I can't really blame people who are prepared to connect those dots, given the verifiable lies that ~everyone believes due to government reporting/propaganda yet I know to be 100% false. (basically anything to do with the truckers, for starters)
It doesn't need to be a generational plague to overload the medical system, which it did to some extent. If we ever get a generational plague again we are absolutely fucked.
Rural probably does it though, most of the people who had a bad experience were in the city - likely due to close proximity etc, which probably also is why it's way more of a blue tribe concern.
So be it -- if the medical system wants me to care about it, it needs to not jerk me around. Sorry-notsorry.
You think that proximity makes infection severity worse? Frequency, sure -- but I don't think I've heard anyone assert that IFR is worse in cities before.
If the generational pandemic only kills people in the city (not including my relatives there apparently, who were fine) I am ambivalent at best. Most of our current national issues are driven by overcrowded cities, and 'plague' might be close enough to 'natural attrition' for me...
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