
30s / queer / gender speedrun any%
☽ ◯ ☾
LIVE through the ditches and LAUGH through the witches and LOVE in the back of my DRAGULA
a fun thing to do is box up all your possessions so you can move some furniture around, never actually move the furniture around, and then five months later you desperately need a haircut so you're looking through the boxes and it's just like "what kind of freak owns this shit" and it's you. you're the freak
the thing that's killing me is that i was like "it will be easy to find my clippers when i get started because i grouped like things together when i boxed them up." i started here because i knew there were hairbrushes in there so i thought this was the hair/toiletries/etc box. but it is the camping + harmonica + dollar store wizards box, feat. hairbrushes
The thing about viruses is they are not visible to the naked eye. The thing about public health is that a lot of it just telling people how germ theory works and helping them see what’s invisible by providing information. In the US our government has just given up on public health as a general concept. It wouldn’t even be that hard to get a lot of people taking precautions again if information was actually available to people who aren’t actively seeking it out.
Last weekend someone I went out an outdoors date with asked me why I still mask and when I told them that long COVID affects 30% of people and cases are higher than they ever were in 2020, they were super shocked and immediately got out their phone and bulk bought KN95s off Amazon to wear to work.
Last night I was in a discord VC and someone mentioned being anxious because they have to go to a Christmas gathering with conservative family and mentioned how with 20 people present, at current levels there’s a 50% chance someone is infectious with COVID, and just read out the current case levels and compared them to 2020. Two people on the call immediately started scheduling appointments to get the new vaccine because they hadn’t done it yet. They were asking if getting it Friday was too late or if they should find an earlier appointment.
People don’t want to get COVID, they’re just under the false impression that it’s “over” and “not a big deal anymore” because our government has systemically dismantled our public health infrastructure in the name of keeping the economy going and being able to campaign on “ending the pandemic” despite things being about as bad as they’ve ever been, possibly even worse as the original COVID-19 has gone extinct and so the original vaccines aren’t particularly effective against the current variants circulating.
I feel like a paranoid conspiracy theorist whenever I share the most basic information about current COVID levels with people and only when they explicitly ask me why I still take precautions. But it’s literally not that they don’t care. It’s that they don’t even know. All of the testing infrastructure and easy public information trackers like the NYTimes charts and Johns Hopkins have been dismantled. They just don’t have access to wastewater data because it’s not where they know to see it.
Information is a powerful thing.
In Canada the goverment fully disabled our exposure tracking app, a piece of software which worked on all major smartphones and used bluetooth and public keys to ping exposure data between folks. This entire application was operating on a federal system and as far as I could tell was disabled and shut down simply because they wanted to propogate the appearance of covid being over.
Hell, Apple literally updated their entire phone operating system to support exposure tracking applications in an integrated way. I travel between Chicago and Toronto routinely to visit my wife, and it was extremely useful to have both the Canada tracking app and the Illinois tracking app running at the same time.
[...] over the period of March to July 2021, the app had averted between 6,284 and 10,894 (or 0.44% and 0.76%) of total recorded infections and between 57 and 101 deaths (or 0.004% and 0.01% of COVID-induced fatalities) in the six provinces covered by the study. [...] The study also found that in provinces where there was more widespread adoption of the app, [...] the number of cases and deaths averted were higher than for Canada as a whole. For example, in Newfoundland and Labrador, the number of cases averted was more than 60% of total cases.
- Government evaluation of the app
It's so exhausting how so much time and energy was spent building all these really good tools for tracking pandemic spread, and just all of it is slowly being turned off now. These kind of systems are usually very robust and cost very little to keep going. But the politics of being in an extended pandemic are bad, so we're seeing a lot of willful ignorance from the government now.
it's exhausting and I don't know how to effectively balance "I wish I could be more social again" with "there remains a very significant risk of long-term respiratory damage from this virus which is still highly prevalent"
I've been meaning to go back to Australia to visit friends and family next year for the first time since 2019 and as excited as I am, I'm also fucking terrified because it's going to be the single most risky thing I've done since the pandemic began (I will be going in the lull between what ought to be each regions' peak respiratory illness seasons, but still)
I hate it, I wish we'd taken this seriously at all and not just thrown all sense of public health to the wind and let it become a perpetual source of income for the pharmaceutical companies
since there was a newfoundland and labrador mention, and i live there, i cannot resist chiming in with a little lived experience, which is this: we had no cases for a really long time. zero at times, near zero a lot of other times. cases only started rising when we started reopening. it was largely because we're a small population on a pretty isolated island and so were able to take the "madagascar has closed its ports" approach. but also becauase our provincial government was, for a good long while, really great at preventing spread, people listened and generally masked and avoided crowds and got vaccinated when it became available.
that's all gone now and covid is running rampant and everyone just seems fully shocked when they get sick? even though they're not masking and not reducing contacts. i have had multiple strangers on buses ask why i'm still masking, and then being like "oh, that makes sense, i never thought about it like that" when i mention that i am sitting with a few dozen strangers packed into very close, unventilated quarters for an hour during cold/flu season with covid cases on the rise.
anyway this is all just to say it's been a total mindfuck watching almost an entire population collectively on board with stopping the spread of illness and then immediately pivoting to "oh well, what can you do about it." because we know what we can do about it! we did it! very successfully! but there is no political will to share information now and i honestly can't tell how much of this mess is people too tired of living in an eternal pandemic to care anymore, and how much is people just not having the information they need to know that they should care.