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What does "Learning to live with the virus" mean?
- Thread starter Ultraviolence
- Start date
Yep. Society will find a level of risk that the masses agree on. Individuals will determine their own course if possible.
Many, many people will be unable to live outside of whatever "normal" we all agree on, though. Society is choosing for these people.
Except "idk, personal responsibility I guess" is not a new normal. And we don't even know yet, not fully, what basis defines a new normal. We are still learning new things about this virus and how it spreads, who it infects, and what the long-lasting impacts of survival are. A new normal can hardly be defined when we don't know enough, and we certainly shouldn't do it without good information, strict rules, etc. Not just "yeah, go get a tattoo, it's fine" or "yeah, we'll maintain social distancing on planes except oops, this one's full, hope you don't die!"
That's the old normal with an added dash of pretending things are fine.
^^^^
People are spitting on each other (or shooting!) over things like "hey, wear a mask."
We don't have a new normal and we're not learning to live with anything. Some places are better and some places are not and we're just... hoping everything is somehow gonna be okay, magically.
(I'm referring to the US.)
I think the unspoken assumption is that any plan that relies on the general public doing what's right is doomed to failure, so you need government enforcement to ensure compliance, which we also know isn't going to happen.
If we at least had one or the other, I think people would be a lot less cynical, but anyone who's been an American for any length of time knows that "learning to live with the virus" really means, "Fuck it, take your chances and see what happens. Sorry not sorry."
These are the morons we deal with in the US.
The lack of irony in this post.......
It just means the virus isn't going away, we won't be developing a vaccine any time soon, if ever and the world can't stay on lockdown forever. Lockdown for too long and we'll all be sitting in a pyrrhic pile comprised of the ashes of society going "Well at least we reduced the spread of Corona".
So you learn to live with the risk, like you do with every other thing out there that can kill you. People will continue to die from Covid19, there is never going to be a point where it's gone forever, hooray for science, go team humanity. We'll have to settle into a world where Coronavirus is a thing, like all the other deadly viruses out there and trust in the testing/tracing/medical measures that will no doubt be eventually, gradually amassed to deal with it.
So you learn to live with the risk, like you do with every other thing out there that can kill you. People will continue to die from Covid19, there is never going to be a point where it's gone forever, hooray for science, go team humanity. We'll have to settle into a world where Coronavirus is a thing, like all the other deadly viruses out there and trust in the testing/tracing/medical measures that will no doubt be eventually, gradually amassed to deal with it.
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Yeah so I guess I was looking for something a bit more substantial than "People suddeny being careful." I know we are looking at other countries successfully doing this but we are completely ignoring the fact that we've half assed every measure we have taken against the virus in the US.
My final thoughts on this: A lot of people aren't going to respect the guidelines. "Essential workers" who will just go back to being called low skill workers aren't going to call out customers not being careful in a country that already has multiple cases of workers getting fucking shot after doing exactly that. Sigh.
My final thoughts on this: A lot of people aren't going to respect the guidelines. "Essential workers" who will just go back to being called low skill workers aren't going to call out customers not being careful in a country that already has multiple cases of workers getting fucking shot after doing exactly that. Sigh.
So then we just let hospitals overload for the next few years or forever?
To be fair there is going to be a huge number of families who go homeless and who die from not being able to pay medical bills. It's not just about boosting the stock market.
The problem is that we are systematically fundamentally broken.
That would be the safest course of action to preserve human life, most people realize that isn't feasible. That's where the more sane version of "living with the virus" comes from. Limiting the amount of people who can enter specific places, mandating masks in public unless you are actively eating/drinking food, improved/rapid result testing, temperature checks, etc will all become part of that new normal. Yes that will include having to quarantine specific areas of the country if a bad outbreak occurs to help control the spread.
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What you're saying doesn't really mean anything but if this is where we're going then I'm not even really surprised. Good luck to us.
Actual new normal example:
My husband has to go into the office twice a week. He works in a hotspot county (this is terrifying). All employees are required to undergo temperature screens. They must wear masks. Those on the (reduced crew) floor wear other PPE (it's manufacturing). Husband, who works in the office, is part of a skeleton crew running operations. No more than three people are in the fairly large suite of offices at one time. They maintain more than six feet distance. They replaced cubicles with plexiglas walls and removed extra desks in shared spaces. They have sanitizer and disinfectant everywhere and they disinfect regularly.
This takes planning and care and a LOT of thought. Unlike my local farmer's market, where they put up a sign that said "don't come in if you're feeling sick!" and "scold" people who aren't wearing masks or social distancing but otherwise not doing a single thing to protect anyone there.
The "new normal" is not tenable under current capitalistic standards for a lot of businesses. They can't pack workers in, they have to spend money, they may be running fewer workers/less output. And this, I think, is why you will also get lukewarm attempts at enforcement and a lot of handwaving, because it's not cynical to say response is driven by money - it's dead accurate.
My husband has to go into the office twice a week. He works in a hotspot county (this is terrifying). All employees are required to undergo temperature screens. They must wear masks. Those on the (reduced crew) floor wear other PPE (it's manufacturing). Husband, who works in the office, is part of a skeleton crew running operations. No more than three people are in the fairly large suite of offices at one time. They maintain more than six feet distance. They replaced cubicles with plexiglas walls and removed extra desks in shared spaces. They have sanitizer and disinfectant everywhere and they disinfect regularly.
This takes planning and care and a LOT of thought. Unlike my local farmer's market, where they put up a sign that said "don't come in if you're feeling sick!" and "scold" people who aren't wearing masks or social distancing but otherwise not doing a single thing to protect anyone there.
The "new normal" is not tenable under current capitalistic standards for a lot of businesses. They can't pack workers in, they have to spend money, they may be running fewer workers/less output. And this, I think, is why you will also get lukewarm attempts at enforcement and a lot of handwaving, because it's not cynical to say response is driven by money - it's dead accurate.
What if there is never a vaccine for this? There have been no proven vaccines for any coronavirus and only limited evidence that the immuno response lasts for up to 18-24 months.
There may be some promising developments currently but there is no guarantee that we'll find a solution to this.
In most countries around the world, less than 0.5% of their populations have been infected. People have wrongly conflated flattening the curve with getting rid of the virus or limiting the deaths, neither have been the goal. It has always been limiting the impact on healthcare services and not overloading them to ensure that every person can get care in illness, covid related or not. If you overload your systems, that's when you get mass deaths.
It takes a single person to create a new outbreak. Without proven herd immunity and a yearly vaccine ensuring maintenance of that, learning to live with it is a very real reality. Forcing use of PPE, regular testing, contact tracing and social distancing measures are essential. No one can survive multiple year lockdowns, so finding the correct balance is essential, unfortunately many governments will absolutely get it wrong.
There may be some promising developments currently but there is no guarantee that we'll find a solution to this.
In most countries around the world, less than 0.5% of their populations have been infected. People have wrongly conflated flattening the curve with getting rid of the virus or limiting the deaths, neither have been the goal. It has always been limiting the impact on healthcare services and not overloading them to ensure that every person can get care in illness, covid related or not. If you overload your systems, that's when you get mass deaths.
It takes a single person to create a new outbreak. Without proven herd immunity and a yearly vaccine ensuring maintenance of that, learning to live with it is a very real reality. Forcing use of PPE, regular testing, contact tracing and social distancing measures are essential. No one can survive multiple year lockdowns, so finding the correct balance is essential, unfortunately many governments will absolutely get it wrong.
Where I am, hospitals are not overloaded and that is the metric they are using to start reopening some businesses.
I'd recommend the NPR podcast Planet Money episode "Lives vs. The Economy" if you want to understand how these decisions are made. Lockdowns were absolutely the right choice. Still need to consider the second and third order consequences of the lockdowns as well.
Well ideally not, but this is what living with the virus means - measures need to be put in place to effectively identify specifically who has it, who they've been in contact with and then capacity needs to be increased to treat people with the virus. The assumption has to be that with sufficient tracing methods in place hospitals won't get overloaded any more than they do with any other virus.
The only other alternative is lockdown which as we've seen is a delaying solution only. As soon as lockdown begins to lift, the R value starts to increase, cases start to increase - it's an inevitability, realistically the intent can never be to erase Covid19 via lockdown, only delay it's spread to avoid overwhelming medical services, so again; living with the virus.
We may well be able to produce an effective vaccine flu style and then it will just be a statistical thing as to how many die from it annually. Covid19 isn't going away or fading into the background any time soon, but at the same time lockdowns will need to lift or there won't be anything left to reopen.
It's a hell of a situation, but I like to think people are nothing if not adaptable.
I mean with our government and president, it's hard to be adaptable.
In some cases it means some people are okay with a certain amount of people dying because they can't sit comfortably at home and watch netflix any longer.
People want a lot of things, nobody asked for a pandemic.
It's been like 2 months in a lot of places and society is fine, except impatient people whose lust for normalcy when everything is not normal leads them to sacrifice the lives of other so they can go get their hairs cut or go to a sportsball game. If this is the level of sacrifice we're being asked to make, to sit on a couch, and we can't even do that without fearing the collapse of society that's... not great. There's not going to be ashes of society, or at least there doesn't have to be.
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Well I would assume that it means to continue social distancing practices even as governments begin to open, but I think it means die for the economy to others. Regardless, we're going to have to live with it one way or the other.
On a statistical level, it means:
- Not flooding the ICU wards with cases
- Reopening some sections of the economy in a safe, socially distant way (while keeping others shut that are high risk)
In Australia this is possible because most people were responsible and we got on top of the outbreak.
In America, since 20pc of the population appear to be radicalised right wing nuts who won't follow orders, I can understand how this would seem impossible.
- Not flooding the ICU wards with cases
- Reopening some sections of the economy in a safe, socially distant way (while keeping others shut that are high risk)
In Australia this is possible because most people were responsible and we got on top of the outbreak.
In America, since 20pc of the population appear to be radicalised right wing nuts who won't follow orders, I can understand how this would seem impossible.
That you'll probably get it and hopefully you don't die
And when you aren't dead then please go back to work and be grateful you have a job
if you die then thoughts and prayers
it's fucked up and crazy that the USA is going with that strategy
And when you aren't dead then please go back to work and be grateful you have a job
if you die then thoughts and prayers
it's fucked up and crazy that the USA is going with that strategy
I don't know fuck all about this, but I thought the reason no covid vaccines have previously been made was that they slowed enough to just not be needed. So, at least some of the vaccines being worked on now are being built on previous work that just kind of got left to gather dust.
Short of a vaccine, hopefully we can find some forms of treatment that are actually effective. Hopefully we wind up with both. I just can't even imagine a new normal short of those things. 300k dead in the short amount of time we have been dealing with this is a lot to take mentally, and the thought that it could just keep repeating...
I'm just gonna cling to optimism for now. An effective vaccine will be found.
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At best, it's people with hyper-normalcy bias who literally are unable to process that life as we know it has changed.
At worst, it's heartless, misanthropic assholes who care only for themselves.
At worst, it's heartless, misanthropic assholes who care only for themselves.
It means muh liberty and all that fake ass bullshit until you or your significant other is in the hospital it's day 4 and the code alarm is going off while your on the vent and my wife and her team are rushing in to save your sorry ass.
Fuck it all.
Fuck it all.
There was a SARS one in trial. The problem with any corona virus historically is that they've either been extremely deadly (MERS limiting spread) or not highly contagious so there has been no major requirement for a vaccine. That is my point though, we really don't know how truly viable a vaccine is at this point given the extremely limited data set we're working with. There have only been 5 significant corona viruses.
Hopefully regardless of a vaccine we do find a treatment but we also cannot pretend like a vaccine is a guaranteed thing. The good news is that in the vast majority of countries that have not overloaded their healthcare systems, the mortality rate is much lower than was anticipated months ago.