Everyone around me is veryyy sick but I’ve been fine so far wearing my Zimi N95. Sadly have to cohabit with my family and I’m just having relatives come over via plane and go to restaurants… I hope I’ll be fine it’s very stressful and I wish people took Covid seriously. Got harassed for masking in a hospital by the staff recently… :/
Still masking whenever I’m indoors in public and in my house whenever anyone in my family shows any signs of sickness. Knock on wood, can’t recall the last time I even had a cold, maybe it’s been years? Of course I’ll be getting explosive diarrhea tomorrow as I write this…
At my last job, I was asked about my mask once every few months. It never escalated into a major problem. At my current job, I’m around a few dozen completely new people every day, not a single one has a said a word about my mask and I think I’m on week seven or so now. Plenty of people have colds in the summer, which no one seems to consider suspicious, and my boss’s two neighbors just died within a day of each other because of heart trouble (long story short), and they were about ten years younger than their life expectancy. She’s the same age and can’t utter a sentence without taking a deep breath first.
I’m more worried for asymptomatic cases considering my family is completely covid denialists, even if we have disabled people by covid, also yikes that was definitely covid in the heart attacks
Still masking as always, kinda nervous about mask tan lines as my adoptive family doesnt know I mask (theyre anti vax anti mask)
Also I was in a park the other day and saw like 9 people masking i think
That’s always nice to see!! I saw like 3 people with an N95 yesterday :3 makes me feel not alone
Still masking but Covid really is way down in most places (https://pmc19.com/ ). OTOH there’s other bad stuff out there, like explosive diarrhea. Tickborne diseases are booming too, though masking doesn’t help with that.
I’m not that big on pop music but lately I’ve been obsessing about a particular performer who has been doing stadium shows. I’ve become dismayed that those shows exist at all. They have to be scheduled way in advance, and cancelling or rescheduling one is a humongous disruption. So lots of times, the headliner has to show up and sing even if they’re sick as hell. That’s in addition to the audience members all getting each other (and the performer) sick. This particular guy is young and healthy but still seems to get sick a lot, and I can understand why. Glenn Gould (famous eccentric piano player who at some point quit doing live performances and only made recordings) probably had the right idea.
IKEA now has an affordable ($35 USD) air quality monitor that measures CO2 among other things: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/alpstuga-air-quality-sensor-smart-70609396/
I don’t have one yet, but plan to get one.
is it actually down or did we stop checking? several years ago already my state was down to only a couple wastewater facilities testing and neither of them was in the nearby metro area.
It’s down overall, but rising. That being said, wastewater is a horrible indicator for risk assessment and for people to be pulling back on their precautions because it really doesn’t tell you what’s happening outside of the areas being monitored let alone the distribution of cases within a monitored area.
Note that white outlined counties are “estimated,” that means they’re unmonitored and the only other data that can be used to estimate are tests that largely aren’t being done. As someone who lives in the middle of no man’s land of monitoring, we’re playing very fast and loose with our assumptions. Especially, since we’re basically just waiting for immunity to wear off from the last wave or a new dominant variant to visit a couple of super-spreader events. I could be in the middle of a mini surge from some July 4th celebration and there’d be no data to indicate it.
yeah i figure there would be a bump from july 4th. i’m in a very low but i have no idea who’s collecting data, we weren’t on whatever site i looked at last. kinda gave up on monitoring the monitoring 'cause it went to shit and i’d still mask everywhere and not go out for anything but work and groceries regardless of what it said.
My country never stopped measuring wastewater and there hasn’t been a spike this year and numbers are lower than they have ever been
I was visiting in central Florida a couple weeks ago, in a relatively blue area, and had 3 interactions about my n95 in a week. 2 were positive, but the 3rd one in between was some rando that tried to bait me with a “nice mask” and when I just said thanks and continued walking, he started yelling “Go Covid!” at me.
What’s surprising is that I live in a generally red area of Florida and people mostly don’t fuck with me. If anything they’ll avoid me rather than acknowledge the mask. Visit a blue area and it becomes a thing.🤷
I’m not in the US (thankfully), people here just mostly use the “I thought the pandemic passed look at this bozo” type of rhetoric… while having debilitating autoimmune issues lol
The regional hospital local to me hasn’t had a positive test since April.
No detectable levels in wastewater, despite continued testing at the same frequency. The only disease that had a detectable level was parvovirus.
Here they have never even tested wastewater lol last tests were done in 2022 before mask mandates were lifted and everyone collectively forgot about covid so I sadly dont even have any data to go by other than anecdotal that everyone is very sick
Still masking because spouse has health issues out the wazoo, including asthma. I go plenty of places for my newer job & have only gotten direct responses to it twice over the past 1.5 years. One was an old guy with no filter who understood my reasoning once I explained. The other was maybe in his 30s who caught me on a bad day so I kinda bit his head off, but I don’t feel all that bad about doing so.
I know many will make comments behind my back, but I mentally do the same about them when I see the looks I get from them so it’s all good. I’m doing what I need to for me and mine, and TFB if they don’t like it because they’re judgemental jerks who don’t use their brains.
Here in urban California I sometimes see other people masking, and nobody ever has hassled me about my own masking. In less urban places though, I get some comments. I just say I prefer wearing it and that’s been enough.
Harassed for masking at a hospital is wild, hopefully all will go well with your relatives!
Dealing with some long covid symptoms right now, been awhile since I’ve had such a bad flare up. I always freak out every time the lymph nodes in my neck and head start going haywire but my clinician has never found anything serious.
Sorry to hear that comrade
I have a disabled family member because of covid and yet they refuse to believe it and just said they prefer dying than masking… I dont get people
Still masking everywhere enclosed and/or crowded. I’m having difficulty finding info about covid rates, all my searches come up with dashboards that haven’t been updated since the state of national emergency ended in '23. A month or two ago, there was an article claiming rates had dropped to summer 2021 levels for the first time, and I want to see what the data has been like since, if there is any.
Not happening in the USA under this administration. All the budgets have been funneled to ICE and/or Trump’s shady deals that ultimately line his own pockets.
I had been under the impression there was still a sparse network of wastewater monitors who were operating without federal funding.
It’s been quite a while since I saw such a report, not sure if they have the money, access to labs they need, etc. - many seem to have dropped as low below the radar as they can get, which might mean they’re still collecting the data (or just samples), but they’re not going to draw attention to themselves until it’s more safe to do so.
For my country the wastewater monitoring went to “not detected” in June. Haven’t seen that since 2020. The monitoring is now on some summer break so will see come autumn what happens next.
But I feel like we might be getting gaslit somehow and it no longer shows up in the testing or something.
Nobody around me has been sick in some time though so feeling a bit more ok.
Might be a lot of asymptomatic cases too. It sucks to not have reliable hard data and only act at this point out of fear of getting infected, people that immediately saw “low cases” and are like “wow its finally over!” are way too optimistic about this and I’ve seen a push about this in LC spaces
True. But those would show in the wastewater still and it has not gone to “no virus” even once in the last 6 years, one summer there was a short lull of “detected, but in small amounts”, but it didn’t last.
We have a network of testing sites and this going to zero has now happened across the board everywhere in the country.
No reason to assume it’s over though. In the summer of 2020 it got completely eradicated from this country and then tourism brought in a new (worse) wave come autumn.
