Comment on Spray n Pray
kogasa@programming.dev 2 days agoGenerally the US just did nothing helpful at a federal level and the Republican party took an ideological stance against preventative measures like masks or social distancing, which meant a large portion of the country went out of their way to avoid such measures or even ban businesses and local governments from implementing them. Schools and universities had their funding threatened if they required masks. I was a grad student / TA at the time and the most we could do was put up flyers that said “please consider wearing a mask, it’s not required” and 0 of my students wore them. We had elderly professors retire early because they didn’t want to die over such stupidity.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
I was in the suburbs where we didn’t really get hit until the second or third wave when vaccines were already rolling out, so I didn’t have it that bad.
I think a lot of the disconnect regarding the mask mandates was between urban and suburban/rural populations. The more spaced out people were, the less risk there was, but everywhere was trying to issue blanket policies between urban and rural areas.
Like I get it, people who live in densely populated cities can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t wear a mask. That makes sense, cause they’re used to so many people being crowded together, and they can’t imagine living somewhere more sparsely populated.
But some people live in areas where you can go for a walk and never come within twenty feet of another person, so it’s a little different for them. Not just because of the social distance, but also the risk of passing someone infected is just generally lower in those areas.
And then there was the whole tail-end of the pandemic, when nearly everyone was already vaccinated, there weren’t as many infections and the infections there were weren’t as severe, yet so many places kept mask mandates in place even a year or two later.
At some point, a lot of people just wanted to return to normalcy. A year of social distancing has a substantial impact on people’s mental health, but nobody was considering that in their cost-benefit analysis. It was always “in an excess of caution.” Sometimes an “excess of caution” is just too much caution. At some point, we could have just treated it like the flu.
Society never fully recovered from the pandemic, to be honest. There’s a collective trauma that we all just ignore, but it’s a lot harder to meet people and make new friends than it was before.
kogasa@programming.dev 2 days ago
The calls to return to normalcy came at the height of pandemic related deaths and so we stopped testing, stopped reporting, and pretended the pandemic was over when it wasn’t. I will never forget when a large portion of the population decided the lives of the vulnerable mattered less than “normalcy.”
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Again, I think those calls were coming from suburban and rural populations who weren’t hit as hard and probably could have gotten by with less restrictive measures than what was necessary in urban areas. People from the city don’t really understand that not everyone everywhere is packed together like sardines, but there’s no reason why the same degree of caution would be necessary in areas with a fraction of the population density.
Not everyone who disagreed with how things were handled was a trumper. I guess someone who’s never left the city wouldn’t be able to tell the difference though…
Deconceptualist@leminal.space 2 days ago
You write like you didn’t lose anyone in your life to the pandemic. Must be nice.