My mom said if the first few waves had killed kids then maybe we’d have beaten it by now. Thing is that it did, and it continues to kill kids.
Speaking as a teacher, it wasn’t a surprise seeing our school board spent that first summer reviewing recommendations. Only to send kids back in the fall without any substantial changes. No real protections other than a chronically divorced SRO who’d only be at our building on Wednesdays and who had an office for some reason. That and about 100 books we had to remove from the library.
I don’t think things would much different if it killed the billionaire class’s children. You think Pharaoh gave a shit about Moses killing his kid?
The problem with covid is that its effects are delayed: My relatives don't understand that asymptomatic spread means that they're contagious before they have symptoms, don't understand that even if their covid feels "very mild", they can still get long covid, etc. People don't correlate covid's effects with covid itself because it's not on the timeline they expect for a respiratory virus.
But was he explosive shitting every hour on the hour? I think feeling terrible or even almost dying isn't enough. It needs to be shitting everywhere all the time uncontrollably
i want a reusable mask with replaceable filters but idk which ones work for viruses like covid. but i also worry how other people would react to me looking like a post apocalyptic raider, they freak out enough when i wear a paper or fabric mask. sometimes i kinda wish i lived somewhere with more gun control or a less toxic culture so that i could wear straps and pouches and stuff without people thinking i'm a terrorist, i'm just a dork that wants to dress like a futuristic ninja.
As others have mentioned, law enforcement might be the only solution, but it could just be added fuel for "the goverman wants to silence us." Also considering the fact that a non-trivial section of law enforcement officers are anti-maskers makes this even more difficult considering the fact that close contact with a cop is inevitable in America.
Anti-masking is just another symptom of the whole host of problems that plagues a scientifically illiterate USA.
A lot of these people went out and committed crimes during the pandemic and would not wear masks, even when masks would have helped in evading recognition by security cameras and the police. Pettiness or personal inconvenience or a skewed cost benefit analysis may not be the real problem: they're polarized in a completely opposite direction from us, and at their worst, they actively seek to harm society and the people in it.
From what I have gathered in conversations over the years, during the next pandemic, if and when a biological threat emerges that is severe enough that we will actually have to mandate masks or vaccination or quarantine, that many will start shooting or committing other acts of stochastic terrorism, or interfere with public health in other malicious ways. I've heard enough threats amounting to the same already. A lot of them are far fucking gone, and only going to get worse.
Like mass shootings or other disasters, the rich and their families and children have to be affected. If they’re free from all consequences, there will be no policy.
Just looking at the Wikipedia pages for each pandemic, the Spanish Flu is "generally accepted" to have killed 25 to 50 million people. The Wikipedia page for COVID-19 cites a 2022 The Economist article that estimates 18.2 to 33.5 million death toll for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of course, the world population was probably less than a quarter of what it is now, so a higher percentage defintely died. Probably because of the relatively crappy health care at the time
Simple, fines and arrest. When you make things inconvenient and uncomfortable for a hog, they fall in line. Think about what makes people wear a seatbelt.
Hogs don't think deeply, they just do what they feel. But if their choice becomes painful, they comply.
Things like this that don't have any clear ideology and aren't exactly a huge inconvenience are easy to enforce. But if you have a clear identity and or project that has real material consequences and the state suppresses it, there will be a lot of resistance.
Honestly with how the backlash went I think the well has been poisoned for any future pandemics. I don't think people will take precautions unless it is something visibly disfiguring like leprosy or something.
don't the actual minutiae of how the spanish flu was handled give pretty good lessons on this? from what i remember people posting a few years ago, there were similar kinds of measures put in place by municipalities and similar kinds of responses.
Stitch some quartz crystals to the sides of N95s, add a drop of essential oil, and market the masks as protection from negative energy and airborne vaccines. Rewrite the instructions to be a magic ritual that requires full coverage of the mouth and nose to complete the seal against evil
For the US, you pretty much have to go all-in on calling Covid a Chinese bioweapon, and I'm not talking about speeches, but things like getting the military to wear masks in order to safeguard them from an alleged bioweapon. You need a lot of "top scientists and intelligence officers have proven without a shadow of a doubt Covid came from a Chinese lab as a bioweapon" and US representatives pontificating in the UN on how China needs to pay reparations for loss of life due to Covid. The atmosphere of the country needs to be that of already being at war with China with Covid being a massive Chinese biological attack. In this context, not wearing a mask means trafficking with the enemy that the US is at war with and thus, a sign of betrayal. And even with this, I don't think most GOP presidents could pull it off, let along a Democrat president. But Trump? Yeah, I think he could pull it off.
it could be an airborne and highly contagious fatal hyperherpes that causes your penis to literally burst into flame before killing you and most of the right would still not mask up
: "THE SJW moral[slurs] used reverse psychology on us to help spread China's bioweapon, because they knew damn well we don't let anyone tell us what to do!"
Nothing. They only have their identity. To give that up would be a death just as real as respiratory failure.
The thing that boggles my mind is a conservative favorite was Alex Jones. They all listened to him. He said the gover.ent wousl.make a plague to wipe the people out. They could have been about that life if they wanted. The death drive is strong in these people