My current general rules for masking are

1. If I am outdoors in a sparse environment, I do not require myself to wear a mask, but should still try to keep a >6' distance between myself and others. If I am already wearing a mask, whether and when I take it off is up to comfort.
2. If I am indoors but alone in the room, a mask is recommended, as aerosols may still be lingering in the air; but if I figure enough time has passed, and masking is uncomfortable, I'll allow myself to take it off.
3. If I am outdoors in a crowd, or indoors with any number of people (with exemptions for a few specific people), I must wear a mask.

But when it comes to the "sparse" environment vs "crowd" rule... How many grains in a heap, right? I've tried looking into this myself, but the information I find is vague and contradictory, which leads me to feel conflicted in situations where it might be a heap but it's hard to determine.

Source: https://x.com/1goodtern/status/1918723932179358017

XCancel: https://xcancel.com/1goodtern/status/1918723932179358017

Oh hey, look. It's mass immune dysregulation, one of my biggest nightmares.

PLEASE, MASK!

1. It doesn't exist anymore
2. It does exist, but it's just another flu-like virus
3. It's much worse than the flu, but it only affected other people so far, so it won't affect me

ample evidence exists to prove all 3 wrong

oh yea, the exotic chud response which they've conveniently memoryholed:
4) covid is fake and never existed

I want to say that this warning is just a liability thing and it's really probably fine, I probably am getting the right amount of oxygen even if it is a little uncomfortable — but my workplace just gave me some new tasks that involve cutting and lifting decently heavy objects, so I want to make sure that it isn't like genuinely dangerous to wear a mask while I'm doing these things.

All the resources I've found on COVID consciousness through this comm are in English and aimed at people living in Seppoland (USA). Especially now that the Norwegian Institute of Public Health reported about a month ago that "fatality has returned to pre-pandemic levels for all age groups", I'm worried that people in Norway will just brush off COVID consciousness as a "Yankee thing" with no place in this country. What to do?

Alle resursene jeg har funnet gjennom denne gruppen er på engelsk og egentlig for folk som bor i Seppeland (USA). Spesielt nå at FHI sa for én måned siden at "dødeligheten er tilbake til nivået før pandemien for alle aldersgrupper", frykter jeg at folk i Norge vil rett og slett si at koronabevissthet er bare en "USA-greie" som har ingen plass her til lands. Hva skal jeg gjøre?

since getting covid and w a history of head injuries

that's it that's the post my head just fuckin hurts always now and I want to gripe about it online

Anyone who says covid doesn't effect the immune system is a liar. All viruses take a toll on the immune system to some degree, and we can measure it after covid and it can be quite severe. Similar things happen after a flu. For a while after you will be more prone to opportunistic infections, like from bacteria and fungus and other viruses. Except most people only get the flu every several years, while covid can infect you several times a year due to being a coronavirus, being airborne and incredibly contagious, and mutating so quickly due to infecting so many hosts. Of course it's making us sicker.

What they mean is "it's not HIV", but it's also been shown, like other viruses, to persist in parts of people's bodies, and while it's not the same, long covid is effecting a lot of people in a similar way across the world. The pro-infection people are betting that covid was only dangerous because it was new to humanity, when signs are there that's it's still plenty dangerous even after previous exposure and vaccines.

“Dawn Bowdish, Canada Research Chair in Aging & Immunity at McMaster University, says they see immune changes following COVID infections in her lab. But she cautions against singling COVID out as uniquely disruptive.

“In our own work do we see that ‘COVID changes your immune system?’ Yes. But so does absolutely every other thing you’ve ever been exposed to,” she said. “Infections are never good for you.”

Subscribe to Professional Pulse. Receive our free quarterly newsletter featuring stories on workplace, industry and professional trends.

“Virtually every viral respiratory infection has this period where the immune responses needed to deal with the virus leave you compromised to bacterial infections,” she added.

Samira Jeimy, program director of Clinical Immunology and Allergy at Western University, says COVID’s disruptive effects on the immune system are probably driving recent illness surges.

“Other viruses cause immune dysregulation,” Jeimy said. “I don’t know why we’re in such denial that COVID can do it as well.”

“There’s still a pervasive belief that all of this is because of an ‘immunity [debt],’ which is hard to believe,” she said..

Raywat Deonandan, a University of Ottawa epidemiologist, said he is also “quite open” to the immunity theft hypothesis.

“We’re seeing rises in respiratory infections of all kinds,” he said. “And there’s probably something behind that.”

Hell yeah! Covid time baby! First time (I know of) getting it, tragic that my mask helps other people more than it helps me! Does anyone have the up to date post about what to do if you get covid? I saw the post from ReadFanon here https://hexbear.net/comment/5684032 and was wondering if anyone had up to date guidance. Thanks!

apparently there are some new companys trying to make more portable positive pressure versions of the iron lung

saw homozygoat talk about it on the gremloe stream - probably some execs investing in ironlungfutures re: polio cases

Because Masking is Communism, and Communism is Cool. Duh.

I recently got some transparent masks, but I'm now realizing that they probably aren't nearly effective enough at catching finer aerosols. To solve this, I could either buy some conventional respirators which obscure my mouth, or I could buy an Omnimask, which is patented by a white-owned for-profit corpo in Seppoland with strong ties to the military (and is also expensive as fuck!)

Put another way, I can do nothing and be Deaf-friendly and good about boycotting Seppos, but bad about COVID; or I can be good about COVID and boycotting Seppos, but bad about Deaf-friendliness; or I can be good about both COVID and Deaf-friendliness, but funnel my money straight into the Septic Army. Dô-shi-fuckin'-yô.

I hate this Catch-22-ass Hydra's heads in a whack-a-mole game situation 'cause it literally just doesn't have to be this way. The Omnimask could've been open design manufactured affordably by many different manufacturers around the world, in which case I wouldn't have to choose which marginalized group to fuck over — but Capitalist Innovation™ simply had different plans in store for us.

Edit: If anybody knows of transparent masks as good as the Omnimask, which are more ethical and hopefully also cheaper, please share them.

Despite the terror, the early weeks of the pandemic contained perhaps more hope than I've felt in the subsequent five years. It became more apparent than ever where the weak links in capital's chain were located. Millions of people realized that their jobs were bullshit. The massive decrease in commuter vehicles proved that there were actually ways we could alter society to combat climate change. Powerful people started talking about universal basic income and universal healthcare.

Then it seems like the 1% got together on Zoom or whatever and put an end to all of that. There was a drumbeat of "it's patriotic to let grandma die." (Was Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick the first to say it out loud?) Teachers' unions became villains for wanting to prevent children and workers from spreading the plague. The people whose jobs couldn't go remote were given the title "essential workers" but never got sick days. In the months and years that followed, the Democrats nominated their most anti-healthcare candidate, who went on to crush a strike that threatened to give supply chain workers sick days. The CDC took its isolation recommendations from Delta Airlines, and masks became rarer and rarer. And worse, and worse, and worse, and millions of people are dead or disabled and we're further into fascism and farther from universal healthcare than we were five years ago.

I'm looking for books or longform essays about this switch, because the change happened very quickly - before the George Floyd uprising, even. Today too much of this is lost in the memory hole, but I wonder if studying the days in which the discourse changed can give us clues about where we should direct our organizing efforts.

My comment: the count for deaths from COVID is at 35+ million, and long COVID is 400 million.

Article text:

It’s been five years, and more than 20 million deaths globally. The first official case was in December 2019. The World Health Organization designated Covid-19 a public health emergency at the end of January 2020, the U.S. government declared it a national emergency on March 13, and every single state ordered or recommended schools close at some point between March 16 and March 27. What followed was trauma: years of mass mortality, inescapable infection and deep disruption, even to the lives of the relatively safe.

Next week I’ll be publishing an essay reflecting on where that world-historical whirlwind eventually left us, focused less on the emergency itself than on all the ways, both obvious and subtle, an unthinkable — even unbelievable — mortality event transformed our world. But today I just want to remind us where things started, half a decade ago now.

My first hint came via Twitter on Dec. 31, 2019, when I saw the health and medicine journalist Helen Branswell warning of “unexplained pneumonias” in China. The plot beats that would follow were, in certain ways, familiar enough, Hollywood and science fiction having taught us all about global health emergencies and what might be done to stop them. But although I could easily imagine a pandemic unfolding onscreen, I couldn’t really believe we’d end up living through one, so deep were my intuitions that plagues were — at least in the wealthy world — a thing of the past. Whatever I’d heard from scientists about the risks of this or that future outbreak, I was living firmly in epidemiological denial.

Two months later, in the first days of March, I found myself having dinner with an old friend who told me that he and his father had recently made a casual bet about how many Americans would ultimately die of the disease. His father had bet the total would be under 100,000; my friend had guessed more. “What do you think?” he asked me. I grimaced a little. “I’d take the over at a million,” I said.

I was reminded of this all recently when reading about a similar bet that the writer and podcaster Sam Harris said he made with his former friend Elon Musk at the beginning of the pandemic. (It’s ugly but perhaps illuminating to realize how many responded to the scary news by gambling on it.) Musk’s intuition was that the whole thing would just go away. On March 19, 2020, he tweeted that “on current trends,” the country was headed to no new cases sometime by the end of April, and he bet Harris that the outbreak would produce fewer than 35,000 cases in total. When the official count of Covid deaths passed 35,000 in April, Harris wrote to Musk to ask, cheekily, whether this meant he’d won the bet. Musk did not respond. In fact, to read Harris’s retelling of it, that was the end of their friendship and the moment he watched his old comrade disappear into a kind of alternate reality.

Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths with a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million.

In other words, the alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else. That includes Anthony Fauci, who in March 2020 predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths and was called hysterical for it. The same was true of the British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose Imperial College model suggested that the disease might ultimately infect more than 80 percent of Americans and kill 2.2 million of us. Thankfully, the country was vaccinated en masse long before 80 percent were infected, but as early as March 2020 Donald Trump and Deborah Birx (who helped run the White House’s Covid response) appeared to be referring to Ferguson’s figure to claim credit for avoiding more than two million deaths — a success they explicitly attributed to shelter-in-place guidelines, business closings and travel restrictions.

Five years later, though the world has been scarred by all that death and illness, it is considered hysterical to narrate the history of the pandemic by focusing on it. Covid minimizers and vaccine skeptics now run the country’s health agencies, but the backlash isn’t just on the right. Many states have tied the hands of public health authorities in dealing with future pandemic threats, and mask bans have been put in place in states as blue as New York. Everyone has a gripe with how the pandemic was handled, and many of them are legitimate. But our memories are so warped by denial, suppression and sublimation that Covid revisionism no longer even qualifies as news. When I come across an exchange like this one from last weekend, in which Woody Harrelson called Fauci evil on Joe Rogan’s show, or this one from last year, in which Rogan and Tony Hinchcliffe casually attributed a rise in excess and all-cause mortality to the aftereffects of vaccination, I don’t even really flinch.

To be clear, their suggestion is spurious. (Ironically, the vaccines are the reason we can even entertain such speculation.) In some countries where vaccination was closer to universal than here, such as Britain, shots effectively brought an end to the pandemic emergency. And as I wrote two years ago, total mortality through the pandemic has tracked so closely with known Covid waves — spiking when cases were also spiking, subsiding when the disease was also in retreat — it was disingenuous to pretend the “unexplained” death was driven primarily by something other than the disease itself. American contrarians have often pointed to Sweden to suggest a lighter-touch alternative was possible, but even the architect of that policy, who owes his global stature to the story of Swedish exceptionalism, has spent the fifth anniversary emphasizing, among other lessons, how similar his country’s approach was to the rest of the world.

The pandemic response wasn’t perfect. But the pandemic itself was real, and punishing. Above all, it revealed our vulnerability — biological, social and political. And in the aftermath of the emergency, Americans have largely looked away, choosing to see the experience less in terms of death and illness than in terms of social hysteria and even public health overreach. For many, the main lesson was that in the world of humans, as in the world of microbes, it’s dog eat dog out there.

But the consequences and aftershocks were also more subtle and diffuse: It wasn’t easy to live in isolation and in fear, often largely online and surrounded by exceptional illness and mortality, as we watched aspects of the world and our own lives we’d long taken for granted be withdrawn or torn apart. And it isn’t easy to get over all that, however eager we thought we were to return to normal. We lived through as many deaths as some of the worst-case scenarios predicted, and without an initial spasm of inspiring solidarity and miraculous biomedical intervention, it could have been worse. But when we came out the other side — 1.5 million fewer of us — we were, as a country, exhausted, resentful, deluded and distrustful. A huge amount of the world in which we now reside was formed in that crucible. I will write more about that next week.****

By the two year point:

This meta-analysis shows the presence of post-COVID symptoms in 30% of patients two-years after COVID-19. Fatigue, cognitive disorders, and pain were the most prevalent post-COVID symptoms. Psychological disturbances as well as sleep problems were still present two-years after COVID-19.

“This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

I don't know how upset I should be because I'm not sure if this can actually play out. I'm actually unsure what the health and labour rules are here. I'm looking into getting a doctor's note and talking to lawyers friends. I'm just fuming upset now. Why the fuck do you care that I mask?

Highlights

•    Cognitive engagement induced distinct prefrontal haemodynamic patterns post COVID-19.
•    40% of the undergraduate students reported brain fog due to COVID-19.
•    37 % of the undergraduates exhibited impaired cognition up to 17 months post-infection.
•    Brain fog appeared to affect the distinct prefrontal haemodynamic patterns.

Abstract

To date, 770 million people worldwide have contracted COVID-19, with many reporting long-term “brain fog”. Concerningly, young adults are both overrepresented in COVID-19 infection rates and may be especially vulnerable to prolonged cognitive impairments following infection. This calls for focused research on this population to better understand the mechanisms underlying cognitive impairment post-COVID-19. Addressing gaps in the literature, the current study investigated differences in neuropsychological performance and cerebral haemodynamic activity following COVID-19 infection in undergraduate students. 94 undergraduates (age in years: M = 20.58, SD = 3.33, range = 18 to 46; 89 % female) at the University of Otago reported their COVID-19 infection history before completing a neuropsychological battery while wearing a multichannel near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) device to record prefrontal haemodynamics. We observed that 40 % retrospectively self-reported cognitive impairment (brain fog) due to COVID-19 and 37 % exhibited objective evidence of cognitive impairment (assessed via computerised testing), with some suggestion that executive functioning may have been particularly affected; however, group-level analyses indicated preserved cognitive performance post COVID-19, which may in part reflect varying compensatory abilities. The NIRS data revealed novel evidence that previously infected students exhibited distinct prefrontal haemodynamic patterns during cognitive engagement, reminiscent of those observed in adults four decades older, and this appeared to be especially true if they reported experiencing brain fog due to COVID-19. These results provide new insights into the potential neuropathogenic mechanisms influencing cognitive impairment following COVID-19.

The new study provides the most compelling data yet to suggest that excess mortality rates from chronic illnesses and other natural causes were actually driven by COVID-19 infections.

For the study, Stokes, Paglino, and colleagues utilized novel statistical methods to analyze monthly data on natural-cause deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths for 3,127 counties over the first 30 months of the pandemic, from March 2020 to August 2022. They estimated that 1.2 million excess natural-cause deaths occurred in US counties during this time period, and found that roughly 163,000 of these deaths did not have COVID-19 listed at all on the death certificates.

Now if we could get an estimate of how much chronic illness covid is causing...