We learned that in the zombie apocalypse, there is gonna be people that march right into the horde convinced it wont kill them and that zombies arent real.
Covid was the most terrifying time of my life (i know covid itself is still here). I have a severe health anxiety disorder and a single ache of spot on my body can instantly convince me i have a terminal cancer or illness and i WILL die. After about a year i finally build up all courage to go to the supermarket with my partner, wearing a good fitting mask. We stood at the checkout and this guy asked another guy who wasn’t wearing a mask, and standing waaaay to close to them, to please keep his distance and to please wear a mask. The guy instantly got aggressive and knocked the man out for asking him to please keep distance and wear a mask. I didn’t go anywhere again.
I still struggle with all of this. After 2016 it felt like people got a free pass for conspiracy and fascist shit. I’m from europe but the trump presidency had a big influence here too. So many conspiracies that trump shouted got popular over here and fascist parties got A LOT more popular. Hell, a fascist party won the election here less than a year ago.
I lost a lot of hope and love for humanity. But i also see smart and beautiful humans fight for us every day. Whether its with climate and antifascist protests or through videos i find on social media or the news. And i cant give up hope or stop fighting for them. I cant let those people down. Because if people like that exist, there is hope.
I felt the same way as you. I actually left America because of the crazies. During early covid, during the Delta phase. I had someone yell at me while I walked to my car because I was wearing a mask. Scariest shit I have ever felt.
My only time with covid nearly took me out, and that was with my both vaccinations(both parts of each). Decided after that to continue wearing masks to large public gatherings.
I’ve been through some rough surgeries due to certain medical conditions I have, but nothing compares to the aches of covid while your chest feels like it’s got multiple weights on it and you’re seeing stars with every little small cough. I never want to feel that way again.
Covid awareness? On Lemmy? Getting over a thousand points? It feels like I’m in a dream.
Reminder to everyone that wearing a well fitting n95 mask in public takes very little effort but helps others (who may be immunocompromised, already battling long covid or other conditions, or otherwise vulnerable) and yourself avoid getting sick which can save people from chronic pain, disability, death, and more. Please do what you can to take precautions and prevent the spread of disease!
PS: I recommend 3M’s Aura respirators. I know 3M sucks (understatement) but they do make a good and affordable n95. If you have issues with your glasses fogging up with masks on, this one is for you.
Worked through this myself. Not as a nurse or care assistant, but as an NHS binman. Still saw lots of shit I basically cant talk about (not due to emotion but due to Trust policy as its a bit too specific). Saw doctors, nurses, care assistants walking around like zombies after having worked 18 hours straight. Saw morons walk in and film them thinking there was some major conspiracy. Heard the lungs of patients rattling as they struggled to breath. Two workers I knew died. Heard from colleagues how some other morons had “served legal papers” on the staff (thats not how you get “served” here btw) and then saw it on the BBC 6 oclock news. I also saw the hard work of every delivery driver, supermarket worker.
What did I learn? That some people will fight to save your life, even if you’ve not taken heed of all the advice.
I have a two year old niece now. I’m reminded of when I was a kid in the early 80s and war veterans would come and talk to us about WW2 and Korea. I am thinking it would be good if some of us did the same for these kids in a few years. If we went and talked about what we saw, not the scary/nasty stuff, but the stuff that makes people hopeful for humanity.
I currently live in a province in Canada, that is currently ruled by a government that is governing under what’s basically an MO of Covid and vaccine revenge.
There’s no hope for humanity. Absolutely none. That’s my lesson from Covid. The majority of the people around me, my neighbours, etc, are basically all incapable of logical thought and highly susceptible to disinformation and rogue actors.
Ya that’s the lesson I took from the pandemic as well. At any given moment ~30% of the population is actively working against the best interests of the whole, merely to be contrarian. We don’t have any hope as a species.
I was assaulted by a family member for not giving “IV Ivermectin” to someone with COVID who I had just crash intubated (honestly thought they were going to code, but somehow didn’t) back during the Delta wave.
My view of humanity has gotten pretty pessimistic since COVID. If I had the guts I’d honestly love to go create an insulated community of people who actually think about stuff and want to help each other.
Yeah, covid broke my faith in humanity. When we encounter a real global threat that could wipe us off the face of the planet, we will not rise to the occasion and band together.
Climate change, disease, aliens, asteroids, a super volcanic eruption. Just not gonna happen the way it’s portrayed in movies.
And it’s this weird thing where a decent percentage of humanity was working super hard to save everyone else—did save most everyone else—and a ton of people are just going on about the “Fauci Ouchie” and nanochips.
The general public has no idea how many people we saved with the mRNA vaccines and critical care medicine. They’re blatantly oblivious to it. The death toll would’ve been monumentally worse without a coordinated effort of public health, healthcare, and research. Yet no one has any idea. COVID was simultaneously one of humanity’s greatest unrecognized accomplishments and one of its greatest blunders.
If you’ve ever read or watched The Expanse series I feel like it’s spot on as far as humanity’s response to disasters.
No need to create such a community - there’s one ready-made in Iceland! They even had a vet who was on top of the vaccine* research in the early days.
EDIT: Just looked up that story, and (a) it was in the Faroe Islands not Iceland, and (b) they adapted their salmon-testing labs to detect covid in humans, allowing them to test 5% of the population per day, locally.
My views on humanity fell off a cliff in 2016. I’ve always been pretty cynical but that was rock bottom. Imagine my surprise that there was another cliff to fall off of in 2020. And the worst that happened to me was getting called “genocidal” because I don’t believe “why not, maybe it works” is scientific enough to justify giving everyone ivermectin.
It is completely despicable to attack a healthcare professional because they don’t agree with the conspiracy theory of the day. Let alone a family member. I’m sorry they decided to do that to you.
All this because a lone dimwit didn’t want cloth masks to muss his makeup.
I have a pretty high tolerance for disrespect (either from patients or other specialties) since I work in Emergency Medicine, but COVID was just off the charts.
I nearly got assaulted by another staff member, sort of defended myself from it by just shoving him away and creating distance, and then I ended up on a disciplinary over it. Despite everything he’d seen he still thought he was hard-done by and tried to take it out on myself. I had an exemplary record for nearly 28 years up until then.
I mean I’m better off financially, but to be fair that’s because of the labor shortage Covid created being so bad that the local power plant started hiring part-time entry level.
I mean… yeah… I say “Labor Shortage”, but I mean “The Labor Force Realizing That They’re Working For Too Little For It To Be Worth It!”
But hey I’m poor as fuck, I’ll take what I can get… I’m just grateful I finally escaped retail.
I can’t believe people still adore T@&#! after he has repeatedly grifted them, lied to them, demonstrated time and again he has no empathy and is a horrible human all around.
He grifted us over medical supplies during a pandemic. He damn near ended our democracy and became a dictator. His list of retributions he has declared if he gets elected is terrifying. Racist and classiest as hell.
And they ignore everything and just parrot the " hE iS pRo LIfE!" BS
I have to admit, before Covid i didn’t think people would be joining the war on disease on the side of disease in any meaningful numbers and yet here we are. I think we may be in decline as a civilization, not sure how that kind of brain rot is survivable.
This pretty well sums it up. It’s hard to believe it’s been four years. It used to feel like it’d been ongoing for forever. Now it feels like a dream. What a fucked up thing we went through and how fucked is it that my brain can just sort of “forget”. I guess that’s how we cope. It isn’t evolutionarily advantageous to dwell on the real threats. Only on the stupid social fuckups that happened that embarrassed me.
I truly think there is a component of unprecedented, shared psychological distress (everyone needing to stay inside like solitary confinement) and post-COVID cognitive distortion that makes the entire pandemic feel like some sort of fugue state. I was working in healthcare during it and when I look back at those years it feel like someone that was a dream. I’m in my 30s and no other part of my life feels like that.
Just to say, as a hospital worker, that Covid is still very much around. Its not killing in the same numbers but it does kill many. Many who will be missed by their loved ones. Covid still leads to long covid in some.
It’s amazing how quickly we adapt and forget. But when I stop and think about it life was so different before Covid and it’s just never been the same. My workplace has just never been able to adjust to the staffing shortages and it’s hell.
Why are you talking about it like it’s over? Roughly 30000 people are getting long covid per day, right now. That shit is disabling. We’re still in a pandemic and we’re not taking it seriously, at all.
Are we still pretending the measures they took actually worked? I mean really guys, if you think that we needed more intervention to stop the covid then I dont really know what to tell you.
Well, we took a ton of half measures and performed a lot of safety theater. Big shocker, it didn’t work well. Either way, the point wasn’t to stop the disease entirely, but spread out the cases to “flatten the curve” and reduce load on hospitals, which it did do.
No, it didnt work at all. We literally knew lockdowns didnt work in spring of 2020, it was all a steaming pile of bullshit including flattening the curve.
Apples and oranges. There was a study in spring of 2020 by JP morgan chase that showed the exact thing that anyone that was looking at the data would see, the lockdowns did absolutely nothing. Literally nothing.
Man, a massive corporation whose bottom line would be hugely impacted from a proper lock down said a proper lockdown wouldn’t work? That’s craaaaaaaaazy 🙄
Sigh, fine lets trace the money… Lockdowns caused the largest transfer in wealth to the rich and large corporations in the history of the world. Would a large corporation want lockdowns or not?
The thing is, even now we could totally wipe out COVID and other airborne diseases if we just handed out N95 masks to everyone and they actually wore the fucking things. But counting on voluntary participation is a pipe dream, since people will inevitably take their masks off at home and whatnot.
The measures worked much better on the countries that applied them more throughly. As far as European countries go, Italy got struck the earliest without taking measures and their healthcare system collapsed; Spain took note of the situation, applied extremely harsh measures, and while some regions went through severe problems, we got through it far better than Italy.
I’m comparing very similar countries in terms of culture, economics, geographical region, climate, education and technology, which are in the same market and have freedom of movement towards each other, except during the lockdowns.
What America needed to do was lock down interstate travel but we didn’t do that. We had no real quarantine, and people only broadly respected the mask mandate for a few months.
Because we have rights and if mini-lockdowns dont work, I dont think crazy lockdowns would be justified. Why should I a healthy person not be able to do anything because other people might get sick? Why dont they stay in their house and let the other 90% of the population keep working?
Half-measures are often far less than half-as-effective. Mini-lockdown didn’t work because it wasn’t a real quarantine, isolation was not achieved. Did you know the word quarantine comes from Latin meaning forty days? Because that’s how long ships were kept out of Venice in the late 1300s to make sure nobody on board had the plague. That’s the kind of harsh policy required for success, but the world decided that the immediate economy is worth more than permanent eradication of dangerous pathogens.
So then you agree with me that the lockdowns didnt work? That is really all I am trying to say here, the issue is that people still believe the lockdowns actually worked, and all of the evidence shows literally the exact opposite.
I love how you start with “hey dumfuck” and expect me to actually read the rest. @fosho I hope the hilarity of spelling it dumb as “dum” is not lost on you.
