Why Covid is good actually

[liv]

So we're living through a pandemic, so not surprisingly this sometimes affects my plans. Every time I happen to mention taking any sort of precaution, noting that the price of LFTs has gone up or that the clement weather made eating outside pleasant, a bunch of anons comment to tell me that actually I should be catching Covid more.

Does this happen to other people, and you're just quicker to screen / delete such comments? Or have I picked up several followers who are really invested in me personally getting Covid? It's very evident that people who post from established identities generally agree with me that Covid is bad. Of course, there are plenty of good reasons for being anonymous, anything from can't be bothered to create / log in to a DW account to being on a state level hitlist. And quite possibly people choose to comment anonymously on this topic because they don't want to face opprobrium from me and my friends who think infectious disease is a bad thing. But if I have no idea who you are, what your expertise is, what your relationship is to me, it's harder for me to take your arguments seriously.

I'm going to restate the anon commenting rule I have: if you want to comment anonymously, that's completely fine, but please sign your comment with some kind of identifying name even if it's just "anon1" or a single initial or another throwaway ident. That means I can at least tell which comments come from the same versus different people! I don't want to put anyone at risk, but totally unsigned comments make conversation a bit of a pain. I haven't been super strict about deleting them because I know people forget. But here's your reminder: anon comments need some kind of signature.

ETA People are ignoring this rule, so I've turned on anon comment screening. If you make an anon comment I will unscreen it only if it is signed in some way – nonsense idents are fine but there has to be something.

Anyway, I'm making a thread here where people can put those kinds of comments if you're so moved (either anon or identified, up to you). If you really want to persuade me I should be catching Covid and transmitting it to others, this is the place for your arguments. I note that calling me a scaredy-cat wasn't effective at making me do stupid things when I was eleven, so it's certainly not going to work now. If you want me to increase my exposure to Covid, you need to make a case for why it's actually good. I agree it probably won't kill me on a scale of weeks, but "not immediately deadly" doesn't make this infectious illness desirable.

Going forward, this post is the only place I will accept pro-Covid persuasion. Comments along those lines on any other posts will be deleted and copied to this thread.

Comments

[siderea]

For the record, while I get plenty of anon comments, nobody – anon or otherwise – has ever tried that particular line of argument with me.

FWIW, I would not model the behavior as "really invested in me personally getting Covid". It would be some form of you personally being perceived to be a really worthwhile person to have that argument with. I feel pretty confident that people of such inclinations correctly surmise that starting that with me wouldn't be very satisfactory for them, for any of the goals they might have for such a discussion.

[liv]

Fascinating data point, thank you! You have a much wider reach than I do both in numbers and in range of backgrounds and opinions, so it's very useful to know that nobody is trying to talk you into getting Covid. It might well be that some anons' goals are more to have an argument than to actually persuade me.

[liv]

I have just asked for anon commenters to add some kind of signature so I can keep track of how many different people are in the discussion. It doesn't have to be a DW account or anything that actually links to your permanent or offline identity, but I expect this to be a largely anonymous discussion and I would really appreciate the courtesy of adding an initial, number or nonsense word to your comments.

[shreena]

I think you have framed this in a slightly odd way.

I doubt anyone wants to persuade you to catch covid.

But I don't know very many people at all other than you who are still taking precautions like eating outside. I am not sure I know anyone else but I may be forgetting someone.

I guess I would see it as a judgement call - the downside of precautions Vs the risk of covid. Having had covid and fully recovered, I would much rather take the risk of catching it again rather than take precautions. It doesn't seem like a finely balanced call either to me.

But I really don't care enough about this to argue about it or to try to persuade you, it's entirely up to you what you do.

[liv]

That makes a lot of sense and I don't want to persuade you either. I would rather take precautions than catch Covid again, so I am indeed taking precautions, but that's a matter of personal preference. But surely we'd both rather live in a world where we don't have to either take precautions or catch Covid, right? If eating venues were properly ventilated, both of us could do all the activities enabled by eating indoors, and neither of us would have to put up with catching Covid. Why is having to make that trade-off desirable, even if it's obvious to you that the risk of Covid is worth the benefit?

[pseudomonas]

I'm still taking those precautions. (I have health issues that mean catching covid might be a worse idea than it would be for the average person)

[rosefox]

I no longer make unlocked posts and hadn't previously considered that a benefit of that might be avoiding such nonsense. I'm so sorry people are dumping that on you.

[liv]

Thanks for your support! I'm really trying to figure out why it is that people are so insistent on this topic, but even if I don't get answers, at least I am corralling the repeated dumping into this space.

For me, locked only is the wrong solution, though I'm delighted that it's working so well for you and flattered that I have permission to read some of your filters. I really like having a blog that's basically public, and available to read by people who don't want to make the investment of creating an account and establishing a stable identity and remembering to log in every time. I want to meet new people and interact with people for whom DW isn't their main internet home. I could in fact get 90% of the benefit by posting mostly public but banning anon comments, and I might move to that if anons get sufficiently annoying to outweigh the value I get from interesting perspectives from folk who are not really DW people.

[lnr]

FWIW I don't get many pro-covid (or post-covid, if that's how they'd prefer to think of it) people commenting at me, but I don't post much here anyway, and even less of it about what precautions I'm still taking.

There's no point in me restricting playdates with Matthew's best friend, as they spend lots of time together at school, and are already exposed to each other more regularly. I now no longer only dine outdoors, but if it's an option I still prefer it. However I still mask for short indoor trips like shops. I take a CO2 monitor in other indoor spaces to judge whether to mask continuously or not.

It's definitely a balance now but I take the risks I *have* to take (Matthew being at school) and I take some risks which are higher reward for me (eating out sometimes - eg my work Christmas lunch) but avoid spending risk on boring things like shopping and train journeys or work meetings where they can be done online. Thankfully in person my colleagues are happy to mask and ventilate when I go beep :)

Because if I catch it I *am* more vulnerable than some, but also because having it would be really really inconvenient even if I'm not acutely or chronically ill as a result (and I know several people who are now chronically ill!) - and if I incidentally also reduce my chance of getting the flu that's just a bonus.

[liv]

Interesting you don't get people nagging you to just go out and get Covid. I think you're at least as cautious as me but perhaps as you say you don't talk about it as much.

I think doing your own CO₂ monitoring is great! But really I think all public indoor spaces should be reporting their CO₂ levels, it shouldn't be up to individuals with beeping devices. The other thing is, I don't monitor when I can't do anything about the readings; if I've already committed to taking a train, I'm not going to get off the train and be stranded in the middle of my journey because levels rise. If I'm in a venue where visitors have no control over the ventilation, having a device go beep won't help me. In most such places I mask all the time anyway; possibly my life would be improved by paying attention when CO₂ levels are low and removing my mask in those situations.

As I mentioned to shreena I think it's a real failure of public health that children and adults who are in close contact with them are so highly exposed. If we can't protect children in education we barely even have a society. As you say, school isn't (realistically) avoidable, so there's no point blocking playdates at home.

I am similar to you; I am balancing risk and reward as much as I can. (I don't like work Christmas lunches much so I skipped mine.) The problem is though that lots of people have far less choice about risk than you and I do, not that some people who do have a choice prefer to accept the risks of Covid. Like I am allowed to work mostly from home, but lots of people don't have that privilege, often because their job actually can't be done from home.

And yeah, getting ill is really inconvenient. Even if you don't believe in Long Covid and other post-Covid illness and disability, just Covid on its own is really horrible!

[cosmolinguist]

I'm also talking about eating outdoors in December and not traveling to see my family and stuff, and no one has commented telling me to get covid (or telling me off for "not going back to normal" or however else they'd frame it). Just a data point. I don't have a big reach, but it hasn't even happened once.

[liv]

Yes, helpful datapoint, thank you. I am really angry on behalf of people like your household who are significantly restricting your lives to avoid Covid, and yet you got it anyway, because individual precautions aren't good enough to protect you if there isn't any public health. I'm glad people at least aren't telling you to embrace getting Covid; that might be because your circle is too sensible for that sort of nonsense. I wonder if attitudes to disability also contribute; I'm perceived as "healthy" and lots of the people who think I should be taking more risk give disclaimers like, of course it would be different if you were immune compromised.

[lilacsigil]

I've had this in real life (I'm still taking precautions and I work in my public-facing job with a mask on) but not on DW. People have told me I should "just get it over with".

[used_songs]

I got some of that initially at work, but I was pretty upfront with coworkers and would say things like "I'm trying not to kill my parents" and now they just know me as one of only 3 people there who masks. But I still have kids who mask everyday and seem to appreciate the fans and filters I've added to my classroom.

[ambyr]

I do not experience this, and while it’s true almost everything I post on the Internet is locked (I’ll be honest, I don’t even like commenting on public posts), it’s also true that I am taking substantially more precautions than you are and have many people on my flist who don’t share my level of risk aversion. However, I don’t know that my level of caution is all that obvious from my posts; I blog about what I’m doing, not about all the things I’m not doing, you know?

[mrissa]

Yes, this is where I am too: I post a lot about books and writing, I talk about various things in social media other than my blog, but I hardly ever talk about the level of precautions I'm taking, because it's not up for debate but also not very interesting. It's far more interesting that I found a great recipe for gluten free gingerbread ricciarelli (here, you can have it too! https://joythebaker.com/2021/12/gingerbread-ricciarelli-chewy-italian-almond-flour-cookies/ ) than that I'm not going to restaurants or bars or concerts at this point.

Nobody is trying that with me

[librarygeek]

I live in the USA, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. Most of my trips outside the house is with our shopping hero saint_felony for looking at groceries and I'm double masked. Most people here have given up on masks, except for healthcare facilities. I (50f) have congenital heart disease and another autoimmune condition. I still remember the ventilator from my open heart surgery and wouldn't wish it even on people who actively hurt others. It's nightmare and PTSD material. Our 18 year old has a different autoimmune condition. Teen and I are vaccinated including the bivalent booster in late September. Spouse had all other COVID vaccines, but not a booster since February.

My spouse went to an indoor family wedding in October without us. Yes, he caught COVID, and isolated in the basement away from us. I slept wearing a mask 😷. During the day, the basement door to outside was open and ventilating via a powered fan directed out. He went back to work after a week with masking and ventilating his office. He did NOT come back upstairs until testing negative 2 tests 24 hours apart. Two weeks after COVID negative, he came down with an opportunistic bacterial sinus infection that also cost him several more days of sick time.

Now, I'm trying to determine if he's had a stroke or other neurological damage. Late afternoon into evening, he's got slurred speech, memory, and confusion problems. He's 52 and on high blood pressure and high cholesterol meds already.

Anybody trying to get others to "just get COVID and get it over with" is discounting the amount of long term damage it's doing to so many people. My neighbors have a Xmas this year without the father, who had a sudden fatal heart attack Xmas 2021 and laughed at me for wearing a mask outside before getting vaccinated. After all, COVID isn't that bad!

Re: Nobody is trying that with me

[nineveh_uk]

Late afternoon into evening, he's got slurred speech, memory, and confusion problems

You probably know this, but that's very common with people experiencing Covid that drags on a bit, or Long Covid - like me. For a lot of us, it tracks fairly closely with fatigue and can be improved by pacing, sufficient rest, and sometimes addressing dysfunctional breathing. Assuming your spouse works days, this kicking in around the end of that work day is extremely common, because fatigue hits. It is frustrating and can be stressful, embarrassing, and cause anxiety, all of which inevitably make it worse! I am sick of having to pause in meetings to give myself time to recover to speak coherently. But for most people who weren't ill enough to be hospitalised this brain fog/cognitive fatigue seems to be an annoying symptom rather than a neurological disorder, and to improve over time and with management.

/drive-by. Still masking for obvious reasons.

[used_songs]

I post almost everything under lock and I don't allow anons, so it has never come up in my journal. I have to put up with so many people IRL trying to jeopardize my health and, through me, the health of my parents that I refuse to tolerate their stupidity and selfishness in my journal.

[liv]

You have lots and lots of good reasons to post under lock, and thank you for giving me access to read. I'm sorry you have stupid selfish people putting you at risk in person. In some ways that's less puzzling to me because my behaviour in offline spaces directly affects the people I'm interacting with, but obviously it's more actual risk because the people are breathing on me rather than just disagreeing with my precautions.

One of the things I do find strange about the pro-Covid people is that they seem to think society can be neatly divided into "healthy" and "vulnerable" people. Do they not have parents or friends or community members who are older or disabled or immune suppressed? I would personally prefer not to get ill and take the risk of long-term complications, but I also want to be able to spend time with people who are more at risk than me. I really hope you're able to continue keeping your parents as safe as possible.

[azurelunatic]

I am also still taking most precautions. I risk the occasional indoor meal in the homes of friends, but I do not eat in restaurants with the exception of some places with outdoor options on special occasions. I mask in stores, when I leave my car, and in drive-throughs.

I have not yet had the wish to travel, the budget to travel, and something important enough to travel to. For that eventuality, I have acquired a half-face mask with replaceable cartridges and modified it so I can use a specific size straw with it. I should be fine to take the mask off long enough to take my pills, and I can hydrate and have meal replacement shakes through the straw.

I stopped allowing anon comments back in the LJ days, when I realized that the person who left a nasty comment on an entry was on my friendslist, and I wasn't sure who. I haven't regretted it, but most of my presence is conversation between friendly acquaintances rather than a salon open to the public.

[ewt]

I am interested in details of your mask and modifications, as I am considering doing similar!

[sorcyress]

What the absolute fuck.

I am a tiny journal with no reach, and I suspect that's why I haven't been getting that kind of comment but also _jegus fuck what_?!

Your rule about anon comments needing a signature is a good one, and I may lift it for my own journal.

~Sor

[ewt]

I've not had this on here as my posts are mostly locked, but I get more of it on Twitter than I used to (despite spending much much less time there), and in the past week have had an email exchange with someone pressuring me to get back to normal with various arguments that don't make much sense on further examination.

My household is weirdly by chance privileged to be able to largely avoid risk. We have no children so don't need to worry about sending them to unsafe schools. I have no idea why my spouse hasn't been asked, never mind forced, back to the office yet, but he hasn't, though I think even his colleague with a CEV kid has. My housemate can easily wear an elastomeric respirator for the bits of his work that involve sharing air with other people (mostly trips to the post office), and does so. I struggle a bit more to do the same at church, but I do it anyway because the alternative might be inadvertently killing my spouse and I am not up for that, and honestly most people have been pretty good about it. Maybe privately they think I am having mental health issues, but to my face the worst I get is repeatedly being asked if I want a cup of tea or some food, and repeatedly declining because I do not eat indoors. I have to repeat myself more often and if the weather is mild people who actually want a conversation with me tend to go outdoors. (I do remove the mask for about 8 seconds to receive communion, in one kind only; the celebrant usually wears a cloth mask for distribution. That is my highest risk most weeks. I haven't taken CO2 readings recently but in autumn with the front door closed and back door just cracked they didn't exceed 800ppm, it's a relatively modern building but still quite a big space for the number of people usually present.)

Frankly, I'm also not up for getting and passing on a nasty cold a couple of times a year or more, which is what used to happen. None of us have had a cold since February 2020.

Before we got the elastomeric respirators (in summer 2021 I think) we were mostly using decently-sealing cloth masks with filter inserts and limiting potential exposure and never taking public transport and I think we basically just got lucky, but the elastomerics mean much, much lower risk for incidental things like shopping and travel.

And even if none of this was enough to prevent us catching covid, well, it looks like viral load at infection is partly linked to severity. COVID isn't always mild, and mild cases can still cause Long Covid, but if "everyone has to get it eventually" (nonsense) I may as well have the mildest possible case.

[liv]

Ugh, I'm sorry to hear that you're getting people pestering you on Twitter and by direct personal email. I know I'm taking more risks than you are, but I want to be clear that I don't hold the opinion that you should make the same choices I do; I absolutely would work fully from home if I were allowed to. I haven't managed to make elastomeric respirators work, I have really struggled with blocking the exhalation valve and attaching the straps to my head without getting them tangled in my hair. I very much agree with your view that they're a good way to mitigate risk, so I should probably revisit trying.

I'm glad that you've found a reasonably safe way to receive communion and you're able to do church with sufficient masking in general. I'm spending most of my voluntary risk budget on religious services, but minimizing participation in the peripheral social stuff that is so important for building community, because nobody has really come up with a good way to make that happen that doesn't involve food. And most of my ability to contribute to religious life requires people to be able to hear me. I am doing some small-group teaching masked and some on Zoom, but I don't have a good compromise for preaching and leading. Volunteering with distant communities who don't have anyone local who can do what I do is also the main reason why I travel and my main risk exposure outside work.

I appreciate that these compromises make me a physical health risk to you and your household. I'm not cold-free, I haven't managed that since "freedom day" in summer 21, and did once catch Covid. So I'm not going to take it personally if you'd rather not meet up in person. I am still going to wish we had some kind of public health protections in place for the sake of the many many people who can't work from home or stay away from schoolchildren.

[anais_pf]

I only make friends-locked posts, so I don't have ridiculous anonymous people writing ridiculous things such as I should be catching Covid more.

We in my household continue to take serious precautions against catching Covid (again), and we are also protecting other people from infection in case we have nonsymptomatic Covid. We are masking indoors where there are other people, almost never eating in restaurants or attending indoors events, still not hosting our annual traditional parties even though they were only attended by about 8 or 10 friends, home-testing for Covid before visiting relatives, and so on. Having had one bout of Covid, I definitely do not want to ever have it again. Also, what I've read about possible long-term health consequences scares the hell out of me.

[liv]

Oh wow, it's the pancake bunny! Have you had that icon for absolutely ever? It always makes me smile when it shows up.

I hope that your precautions are enough to protect you from further Covid, and I'm sorry it means you're missing out on events and parties.

[bugshaw]

That sounds very frustrating.

For what it's worth, I've not had any comments like that on DW; on other platforms I've had a few but the dynamic has been the other way around:
B: "I went to the shop (with a mask on)."
Audience:

B: "I went to the shop." (with a mask on but I didn't think I needed to mention that)
Audience: "I hope you had a mask on! Covid is still real!"

[liv]

Right, I have definitely had people get angry with me for not taking sufficient precautions. Sometimes justified, sometimes like you I just didn't happen to mention my mitigations. I find that somewhat more understandable; if I take precautions that someone else doesn't bother with, it doesn't really affect them, but if I am reckless, it makes life less safe for others around me. A lot of the time it isn't personal, people are angry and frustrated with the lack of safety in general and include me in sweeping generalizations about evil Covid spreaders.

[oursin]

I don't really post on the subject, except occasional snarky 'they've put the handle back on the Pump/wow, they're now selling bottles of lovely Broad Street Pump water!' posts, which are probably a bit too history of epidemics meta and allusive for the pro-Covidians? I'm being perhaps excessively precautious, which as a retired introvert in relatively comfortable circumstances is not too much of a strain.

[used_songs]

I love a good history of pandemics allusion. :)

[andrewducker]

99% of my anonymous comments were spam, so I switched to only allowing comments from registered users, on the grounds that people could register in about 5 minutes if they wanted to. If I had ever got more than very occasional useful comments from anon commenters then I'd have switched to allowing them.

[finding_helena]

I have gotten to where I don't take a ton of precautions most places (to be elaborated momentarily), because I feel like a certain level of Covid is life now and is going to be life from now on, and I don't want to wear masks all the time forever, nor insist that my children do so. I used to be super strict about this stuff, but I can't keep it up forever. (We did a year+ of school at home, which was dreadful for everyone concerned, didn't see friends or go anywhere for a really long time, etc.)

At work (I now work in a hospital), we are required to wear masks in patient-facing areas, but can take them off when we are in areas where no patients will ever go. This latter applies to central pharmacy, where I spend a significant amount of my time. My coworkers were terrible at masking even when we were theoretically required to do so. But vaccines are required at our work, and basically required at church. I wear a mask at work, or church, or when friends are over, at times when I or another of my family members have/maybe have/are getting over a respiratory illness. If we're all healthy, my mask use at work is kind of sporadic. I'm much more likely to wear it at the beginning and end of my shift when we overlap with first or second shift, in the interests of limiting the number of people I'm exposed to.

We don't insist the kids mask for school anymore unless they are having symptoms. We don't eat out much (we rarely did before anyway) and we don't often go to busy indoor venues like concerts or large parties (not something we did before much either). But my husband and I do usually mask when we go to stuff like school plays and concerts. We don't take transit other than the kids taking school buses (we never did anyway, transit really isn't a thing where we live, and we haven't flown anywhere in ages).

Writing all this out, I see we could be a little more careful than we currently are with fairly minimal hassle or inconvenience. That said, we've gotten multiple respiratory bugs this fall, which I suspect are an artifact of our kindergartener being in a group setting without masks for the first time in his life, but consistently tested negative for Covid. But the one time we did all get Covid (all except me, anyway), I suspect it tracked back to the day I forgot to send the then-preschooler to school in a mask. Thankfully it was pretty mild. My husband had the worst case out of all of them, and he thought it was a moderately annoying cold until he tested positive for Covid.

I don't buy the "We're all going to get Covid anyway so go ahead and catch it" rhetoric. I don't think there's any benefit to you, or to another person, of slacking off what precautions you take with the intention of catching Covid. I do think it's going to get us all sooner or later and this is just part of life now, but decreasing your personal risk of it isn't bad.

[switterbeet]

FWIW, me and my partner's level of precautions continue to be masking in any indoor setting that isn't our home, with the exceptions of 1) when I'm alone at my work office 2) dinner/visits to family where everyone's done a COVID test prior to that (maybe 3-4 times/year).

It's working well for us and I have way less daily anxiety about COVID BECAUSE I take precautions I'm relatively confident in. As it stands, there've been at least a dozen times over the past year where someone I was around texted me the following day that, turns out, they're sick and I was able to go, "Oh, that's too bad, but I'm not really worried because I was masked the whole time."

This is a weird analogy, but I found when I went vegetarian as a teenager I experienced a lot of similar, "C'mon, just eat meat! Where will you get your protein? OMG, I could never do that." sort of rhetoric that is eerily similar to the "C'mon, COVID's over. Just get it already and move on. We can't mask forever." rhetoric that's going on.

I think that people can be profoundly uncomfortable and upset by other people making different choices than them, especially choices that have some perceived spectre of moral superiority and/or willpower. It makes sense then to try to encourage conformity as it alleviates that discomfort when the person either conforms or can be re-cast as "over-reacting", "irrational", "extreme" etc. I believe very firmly that most people are pretty emotionally/mentally exhausted and traumatized from living through a pandemic for the past 3 years, so this reaction could very much be coming from a place of hurt, so I try to keep this in mind when hearing it.

[(Anonymous)]

I believe very firmly that most people are pretty emotionally/mentally exhausted and traumatized from living through a pandemic for the past 3 years, so this reaction could very much be coming from a place of hurt, so I try to keep this in mind when hearing it.

Not in my case. I don’t do traumatised, and my view on vegetarians is, if animals don’t want to be eaten, why are they made of food?

+++BRAHMS4+++

Slightly off-topic

[ewt]

A different dynamic I've noticed is that some people I know were noticeably anxious, very careful in terms of wearing masks (though not necessarily all that well fitted) and hand santising and surface cleansing for ages, eventually caught covid anyway because one-way masking only reduces risk but can't eliminate it entirely and surface cleansing is not really relevant, felt pretty bad for a couple of weeks, and... have now abandoned most precautions. It's as if they think it is chicken pox and once you get it you're not going to get it again -- even though I know they also know people who have had four or more confirmed covid infections.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Nothing I can find suggests that reinfection is a fantastic idea, and I don't think one's experience of having covid once, however mild, is a good indicator of what it might be like the next time. But I think for some people, the experience of having contracted (despite being "careful") and then survived COVID reassures them that it isn't so bad and prompts them to readjust their risk assessment accordingly.

I guess it's sortof the opposite of my response to not getting (and inevitably passing on to my spouse) a bad cold three or so times a year, which is roughly "Wait, you mean this was kindof optional this whole time and we definitely could have reduced it significantly by opening some windows, filtering air when that isn't practical, paying people to stay home when they're sick, and wearing masks on public transport? Why on earth aren't we doing this?!"

It isn't that I don't understand that such interventions have costs; of course they do, and the benefits are less easy to quantify as well as being borne by different people than would have to pay for e.g. HEPA filtration in classrooms. It's more that I think the benefits are so obvious, and so much more widespread than just COVID, that I think a society that doesn't even try to put them into place is broken somehow.

But the only way I know to fix it is to keep on visibly being the person who is taking lots of precautions, asking for changes to make spaces safer and setting boundaries around which risks I am willing to take, and also not getting airborne illnesses.

I think most of the pushback I receive isn't so much from people thinking I am wrong to be cautious or that I personally should "just get covid already", but from them feeling that my caution, my advocacy for safer conditions for everyone, my continued insistence that we could collectively do better than this, is somehow calling them out or accusing them in some way.

I do try hard not to imply that anyone making different decisions than I do about personal risk tolerance is wrong; that's simply not the case. I do also think people who are responsible for e.g. hosting group events, or workplace health and safety, or community activities that happen indoors, should be advocating for safer air in those contexts; and I think the narrative that covid is "all over now" or "mild, just like 'flu" makes that very difficult to do. Regulations around air quality might make it easier. People could say "yes, annoying isn't it, but these are the rules and I have to comply!" and get on with it, instead of having to have a difficult conversation they aren't well equipped for about balancing risks with people who don't want to think about it. That's what eventually happened with the smoking ban, and seatbelts, and a number of food safety laws. I worry that the lack of willingness to even attempt guidelines (there used to be some government air quality guidelines online, recommending CO2 levels under 800ppm! They were taken down, I forget exactly when) is indicative of a wider dysfunction in governance, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

Re: Slightly off-topic

[(Anonymous)]

It's more that I think the benefits are so obvious, and so much more widespread than just COVID, that I think a society that doesn't even try to put them into place is broken somehow.

The benefits are not getting a mild illness once or twice a year, which is a trivial benefit; the costs are restructuring the entire way we act and relate to each other in public, which is a huge cost.

A really broken society would be one which is so terrified of even mild discomfort that it regulates the private lives of its citizens to the nth degree in order to try to remove as much risk as possible, even if the consequences of the risk are trivial. That’s not a society that can cross oceans to discover new continents.

The cost/benefit analysis clearly does not support new regulations; but the worst thing of introducing new regulations would not be the misspent resources, it would be the damage of adopting risk aversion as a guiding societal philosophy.

+++BRAHMS4+++

[blue_mai]

Recent piece by George Monbiot and I was reminded of this post, in case of interest:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/26/covid-roulette-clean-air-ventilation-long-covid