Love in the Time of COVID-19

(Warning, Fox News link)

What’s being called a “Mom Code” aimed at keeping Utah schoolchildren from being tested for the coronavirus and now is raising alarm, according to a new report.

KUTV reports interviewing people who say there are groups of parents who are refusing to allow their kids to be tested for COVID-19 in an attempt to keep schools open and avoid quarantines.

“Parents are saying, ‘Let’s not test,’ just so they don’t have to worry about shutting down the sports teams,” Genevra Prothero a parent in the Davis School District told the station in a report Friday. “I think that it is absolutely a disgrace.”

[…]

Utah set a record Thursday with 1,500 confirmed coronavirus cases. The state has a positivity rate of more than 15%.

[…]

“I personal [sic] think getting tested is selfish,” reads another. “Because of the fact that they contact trace everyone so one person leads to 30 people that have to quarantine or worse, programs like athletics etc. are shut down. It’s mass hysteria cause one person came in contact with another person that had the sniffles and ran to get tested! Stop the testing Stop the Contact tracing,” read another post.

Utah’s hospitals are talking about needing to start triage of cases that need ICU beds and prioritizing them for younger and healthier cases rather than cases that are more likely to die, and all these jerks can think about is whether little Timmy will be able to go out and play a game.

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Apparently Putin’s vaccines are a bust.

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Plan B: Send wave after wave of our own people until we find out if they have a preset kill limit.

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A cold is a coronavirus, and the same thing happens with them.

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Millions of vaccines have to be made, and distributed. Best case scenario–It could take the better part of a year.

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Heard through a reliable grapevine that my job expects us to WfH until next July.

I’ve gotten clearance to work from the data center anytime I need to and actually have been for the last two weeks. (There is only so much room in my home office for the hardware we are piloting) but, really, outside of that, I’m supposed to WfH.

I might give in and go mad over the winter. I’m already dealing with cabin fever and the snow hasn’t accumulated yet.

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My comment was a snarky rebuttal to Putin claiming to have at least two working vaccines available. I didn’t mean to discredit anything real.

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We made a decision. This year our goal is clear: Stay Alive. But I get shy people want the sports. The sports kids get first crack at scholarship funds. The problem is, no one in the government is messaging that this year we are prioritizing Staying Alive and sports interferes with that focus.

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And extrapolating from what we know of vaccines for the common cold…

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Looks like a good summary of the risks, based on various possible factors.

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For how much we all make fun of the model of the “rational consumer”, it turns out that a substantial number of the populace is fairly rational. Like, hm, maybe I don’t go to a bar when cases are blowing up.

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The stunning attack on the security guard is just the latest in a string of violent encounters over masks, The Washington Post notes. In September, an 80-year-old man died of blunt force trauma to the head after being shoved by a maskless man during a dispute over masks in a New York bar. In August, a Michigan man died after being stabbed by another customer at a Quality Dairy store, who refused to wear a mask when confronted by a grocery store employee.

In July, police in California charged a grocery-store security guard and his wife with murder after a fight with a maskless customer. The same month, a maskless woman in New Jersey broke another woman’s leg at a Staples during a mask altercation. And in May, the security guard of a Family Dollar store in Michigan was killed after telling a customer that her child had to wear a mask to enter the store.

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The lack of a mask mandate at the very beginning of the public’s knowledge of COVID-19 is the toothpaste that can’t be put back into the tube. And we can’t even wipe it up and start over.

I see a lot of folks wearing masks, but I also see a lot of signs supporting the current POTUS (there was a group of folks at the intersection of 11 Mile & Gratiot in Roseville today in support of him - it’s been quite windy from the north and COLD). Frankly, I don’t want to take any but the very least risks of catching the virus. Seeing my mother on a ventilator before my brother and I made the decision to take her off because she was already dead every other way is still strong in my mind.

And we can’t fix it. A vaccine is too late for those who died; I keep trying to convince myself that there are no “preventable” deaths, that the manner in which one dies is one’s fate. However, in the case of the pandemic, that ain’t workin’ for me. Not when those-in-power had the knowledge and could’ve taken action. I can type no more, as I am starting to seethe.

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Ya think?

The mask mandate needs to be backed up with violation being a federal crime, five years in special prison with only other antimaskers. If we’re lucky, maybe many of the prisoners will be out on parole. For funerals. Theirs.

/partly s

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Well, it’s official. My company is WfH until June 30, 2021.

And unofficially, It looks like my office is going away as we won’t be renewing the lease (in 2023…so no mad rush)

I think the fact that people are (largely) working well at home has changed some people’s minds who would NEVER budge on more than the token one day a week. I do wonder about long term and how that will impact hiring. It’s one thing to transition to a remote workforce when they all know each other mostly, but now suddenly you’ll have new hires you may never meet face to face except over video.

Roll with it. At least I won’t have to drive in the snow unless I want to.

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