The Coronavirus Is Here Forever

> We know that dogs, cats, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, white-tailed deer, a gorilla, and a tiger have been found to have been infected with covid-19.

How do we know this? PCR test? At what threshold? Or, antigen test? Is there a guinea pig antigen test for COVID?

I'm suspicious of this reasoning due to the apparently complicated and necessary natural pathway this virus used to become infectious to humans in the first place. This apparently doesn't apply anymore?

> Of diseases that get as widespread as this, with animal reservoirs

The contact with those reservoirs needed to be much more than casual in order for infections to pass. I'm not sure this logic applies to a SARS virus.

Yeah. I basically agree with the article:

> The experience may also prompt people to take all respiratory viruses more seriously, leading to lasting changes in mask wearing and ventilation.

I don't think that mask mandates will continue, but I do think that many more people will choose to wear masks in situations that warrant them. In Asia, it was already pretty common before COVID-19 and even before SARS. Walk around Tokyo on any given day and you'll see people wearing masks (mostly to protect others). I think the West now has some idea why that might be a good thing.

The world has irreversibly changed. There is no getting around that.

Is this really so confusing to most people? I feel like it was pretty clear throughout that the first statement in most cases was: "We expect X is [not] effective based on history, but we aren't certain because this is so new" and the second statement was "Our initial research shows that we were [right / wrong]" followed sometimes by a third statement which is "As more information arrives we were right about Y and wrong about Z".

I agree with you that politicians are afraid to give it to us straight, but I attribute their hesitance not to how they expect the people to respond but how they expect media to respond. You get in a little trouble for being wishy-washy, but you get big trouble for giving a straight, honest well-informed sounding (described this way because its not like the announcers are the ones actually doing the research) detailed response and then finding out some of your details are wrong.

I have been thinking about this a lot, we all hate the way politicians speak (me included) but we made them speak this way because while they may not impress anyone they don't give definitive sound bites that will then be repeated over and over on the news when they happen to be wrong.

I think the answer is yes.

Most of the people setting the remote work/in office policies seemed to be thinking that vaccines offered a path back to normalcy. Delta seems to have blown that idea out of the water.

It is possible that in the endemic covid world, there always remains a significant health risk due to breakthrough cases, especially for folks who are older or have comorbidities. Given that, it seems employers may face difficulty mandating people to work in person.

At this point we almost know too much about the spread of this disease. Never in history have we tested so much for one thing. Never in history have we really worried about asymptomatic cases of anything. This is probably the first time in history that the whole world has the same scary thing as their front-page news.

It's going to be really, really hard for us to shake the mindset that thousands of covid cases === danger. I am sure there are many thousands of cases of many other diseases in my community right now that I will never know or care about.

I'm not trying to detract at all from the seriousness of the pandemic, just saying that going forward we'll have to pay a lot less attention to covid-19 if we want to have mental space for anything else.