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Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

joshuaweissburg.com

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Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#41

Post by Aeolun »

pixl97 wrote: post #9
whoisjuan wrote: post #4

So he claims that he got it despite practicing all the social distancing protocols, hand-washing, etc. Has anyone calculated what are the probabilities of infection in an area with an active infection cluster while practicing social-distancing and other hygiene measures?

Except the grocery runs. >A had taken a few hikes, grocery store and takeout runs. It is the worst possible place you could go. People touching everything, air not circulating well.

The alternative is starvation though. Hardly compelling.

I guess you can wear gloves? But then you still have to wipe everything you bought down when you get home.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#42

Post by Barrin92 »

I think there's an interesting conversation to be had about the psychological nature of this pandemic. The author of the article is 39 years old, I'm quite surprised by the severity of the experience that he reports.

There was a similar article in the NYT recently by a woman whose husband contracted COVID, had a relatively 'normal' pneumonia, but the article read like a war report out of an Ebola zone, allusions to Chernobyl the TV series, and COVID as a silent killer, and so on.

Now I don't want to diminish the personal experience of anyone, but I'm still surprised how many people in their 40s, 50s, 60s who ought to have had personal experience with tragedy and illness seem to have serious psychological trouble coping with the simple fact that we're for a while living in a pandemic and that life has become somewhat more dangerous.

It's not that I'm personally not worried at all, but there has to be some perspective. Life is more dangerous, but it's always somewhat dangerous. I wonder if it's, in particular, a phenomenon of affluent societies that haven't had to deal with serious stressors in a long time.

If you've ever been to Israel and lived there for a while and you go to a wedding and five minutes later there's a bomb alarm and there's pretty much rockets flying your way all the time, and you observe how resilient people are in coping with danger in their life, observing a lot of cultural response here worries me a lot.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#43

Post by ajross »

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #26
debaserab2 wrote: post #10

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

Which would in fact be good news in a certain way, because either it's as deadly as reported and nowhere near as contagious as your last paragraph suggests, or its far more contagious and widespread but thus nowhere near as deadly as is being seen from case fatality rates derived from known cases. I'm not stating anything new with this really, but your case is likely one of many, many others in which a person felt my…

> Which would in fact be good news in a certain way

This holds for the calculus of personal risk ("I'm sick, will I die?"), but not public risk nor policymaking.

Whatever the "true" severity of this disease is, it's known, experimentally, to be high enough to overwhelm regional hospital capacity. That means that it has to be controlled, because if it isn't then a lot of people will be sick without care, and thus a lot more people will die.

It's true that we don't know the "pessimal peak" of case load. Maybe we'd be looking at a doomsday scenario of only 4M people dead globally, and not the 40M the measured fatality rate would indicate. But... who cares? We won't get that high, because we had to lock down even for the "good news" 4M number.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#44

Post by pm_me_ur_fullz »

debaserab2 wrote: post #10

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

How did you know what your blood oxygen level was? What did you use for that and where did you get it and why did you have it earlier?

Is this something that people with rescue inhalers also typically have?

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#45

Post by ajross »

rashkov wrote: post #23
0x8BADF00D wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a matter of caution, I always keep psychostimulants handy. Particularly: ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, and amphetamine salts. Also keep some other beta receptor agonists, like Ventolin. You never know when it can save your life.

Are those medicines actually advisable for covid?

They aren't life-saving. None of them treat pneumonia, which is what actually requires hospital care. It's possible they might keep a few marginal cases out of the hospital system, and it's not unlikely they'll make managing the disease more tolerable. They... probably wouldn't hurt.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#47

Post by exabrial »

I think the risks shouldn't be downplayed, but the news media, aka advertising industry, frenzy over this pandemic is disgusting. Nobody that contracts this virus should fear death, yet that is what the mainstream media is selling and people are consuming: fear, death, uncertainty.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#48

Post by pm_me_ur_fullz »

> I asked him about his experience, which was very much like mine. This was a different kind of encouragement than my friends and family could provide who did not share my experience.

A little more useful than "it'll be fine"? eh?

I honestly hate the empty empathy from people with no say in the matter. Its cultural and I think it develops into a mental issue of denial. Saying "you'll die if you don't breathe, I don't want that" is good enough, for me. People of some cultures would say that. Are we really worried about the patient losing the will to live without other people's hopium? Is that really a co-morbidity?

Sorry if I sound salty, I just finished doing a bunch of interviews where other people told me it'll be fine and it wasn't and I already knew how random it is. These are binary events.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#49

Post by cowmoo728 »

debaserab2 wrote: post #10

I'm also in CO and had COVID-19 like symptoms about a month ago (fever and GI issues without any other major symptoms for a week progressing into a dry cough/heavy breathing -- completely unlike any other flu I've had). I never got tested due to lack of test kits here in CO at the time and because my symptoms stayed manageable I never saw a health care provider beyond a virtual meeting to get a rescue inhaler. At the…

If I had a blood oxygen of 89% I would have gone to the emergency room immediately. That's 80 year old smoker with emphysema levels. If you were previously healthy that is far more serious than the "light" covid-19 that many people get, assuming the reading was accurate.

Re: Fear and beauty: two weeks living with Covid-19

#50

Post by GhostVII »

exabrial wrote: post #47

I think the risks shouldn't be downplayed, but the news media, aka advertising industry, frenzy over this pandemic is disgusting. Nobody that contracts this virus should fear death, yet that is what the mainstream media is selling and people are consuming: fear, death, uncertainty.

If you are elderly than you should definitely fear death. But yes if you are under 50 it's more likely you will be killed driving to the hospital than by the virus.
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