It will *always* be better to delay getting Covid because a treatment may always be right around the corner. But you sacrifice so much living while you wait. You need to be looking at the cost of another day lost to fear vs the benefit that another day will bring in treatment options. There’s no way that advocates for trying to delay infection at this point.
You’ve lost nearly 2 years of your life and it hasn’t brought the treatment you feel comfortable with. You’ve lost nearly 1 year vaccinated and even that didn’t make you comfortable getting it. You’re recently boosted (maximum antibody levels->maximum protection against severe disease) and still not comfortable getting Covid. At this point, every day you try to avoid getting Covid is only making you 1 day older, giving you 1 day lower antibody levels and costing you 1 day of normal, fear-free life. And it’s still not going to keep you from getting Covid.
"I just notice that in the worst weeks of the past two years, the number of people that I personally knew with COVID never exceeded more than one per week, and the number was typically zero. Now all of a sudden, I know a dozen. ... If you are not on the East Coast, you may not know what I’m talking about. Yet. But things are absolutely crazy here."
Same with me (also EC), except "one per month", but now, yes, about a dozen, including multiple teenagers, which I hadn't seen before in any of the previous 'waves'. Many more "I am positive" in the social media stream, and more "case alerts" at workplaces and schools. About half the positive folks I know well say they have no symptoms at all and were surprised by the positive result, and the others have mild symptoms that vary a lot: this one has stomach issues, that one headaches, another one fever and cough.
I can't exclude the possibility that people are just a lot more likely to self-test now, especially when encouraged to do so after some potential exposure, but I think the increase in numbers is real.
On the other hand, "with this new variant, even with vaccine boosters, there's little we can do to stop everybody from getting a mild case in a wave that will probably burn itself out quick" may be just the kind of lucky 'exogeneous shock' we need for a reset of social psychology to allow people to suddenly accept endemic seasonality of what is now a tolerably mild virus for which we also now have effective treatments like the antiviral drugs about to be approved by the FDA any day now ... maybe ... we hope.
Really appreciate Zvi's Covid coverage, but I wish his expertise was more legible to the public. It's awkward when friends ask me to explain my source and I find myself saying “Well, he’s really good at Magic: The Gathering...”
I’m really fed up with covid. We traveled to Boston for my wife’s family (not seen in two years), and this whole place is messed up. They won’t even let you go to Mass without a mask. Everything is weird.
We have Christmas with my wife’s grandmother. She is 98, in severe dementia, and likely to die soon anyway. They want to give everyone rapid covid tests before Christmas. Honestly, everyone is triple vaxxed. And if you got it and died, is life worth living at this point. Great grandma can’t remember 5 minutes ago and doctors say she will be dead in months anyway. This is the last Christmas to see her great grandkids. If they have covid, fuck it. Let her have one Christmas with her great grandkids. If there is a 1% chance she does one month earlier, is that so bad. She keeps saying she wants to kill herself. I’m not sure many of the years at the end of life are high QALY. Especially if you stop living.
Life is a series of todays. If you keep putting off today…evidentially you are just dead. Live each day.
A couple months ago I began reading Freddie - instead of buying his book, The Cult of Smart. I keep looking for an honest Liberal, or Leftist, and he seems honest about writing what he believes is the truth. Including his own silly Marxism, tho like Marx with good critiques. His literate prose is a pleasure to read, only slightly verbose (less than Rod Dreher, or Scott Alexander; or A. Sullivan or M. Yglesias )
He is calling out his left fellows for hypocrisy in going after upper class moral superiority.
" if denial of human pleasures is virtuous, I can be more virtuous than my peers. If caution is noble, overcaution must be even nobler."
He also recently had a great note about trusting Harvard, seen in his title:
>> at the end of this process, no matter how you change it, no matter how many statements the schools put out about diversity, no matter how many thumbs you put on all the scales to select for a certain kind of student, at the end of this process are self-serving institutions of limitless greed and an army of apparatchiks who are employed only to protect their interests. That’s it. You can’t make college admissions fair by getting rid of the SAT because colleges admissions can’t be “fair.” <<
It's really important to note that neither college admissions, nor life, nor Covid, are "fair" - and they can't be made "fair". Moral superiority positioning now involves some form of denying or opposing some particular unfairness, and often mislabeling it as injustice.
In this Covid "worry porn" article cited by Arnold, Freddie talks about ... elite emotions based on competition:
"our striving class is made up of people who are raised to compete and who structure their emotional lives around competing with each other. "
This fits with John McWhorter's idea of Woke as a religion, and these Woke fundamentalists as competing for moral purity.
Freddie's next note, in a reply to lefty critics, asks, what do the Woke folk want him to DO?:
"You’re talking about this as a matter of individual choice, but we have a responsibility to the community!"
Near the end of this post he concludes:
>> Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s book The Sum of Small Things lays out the essential psychology brilliantly. As she demonstrates, changing norms among bourgie liberals has made conspicuous consumption crass, declassee. But the urge to compete, to win, trumps all. So our striving castes have developed all manner of other signals through which they subtly assert their superior virtue, their superior lives. Covid now fills such a role. With Covid, you never need an excuse to assert your superior seriousness, never need to wait for the right moment to insist that you’re doing it better than all of your peers. You can just openly tell the world “I am more responsible than you,”<<
I hate that bullshit, but I've never been on the left. Freddie IS on the left, but also hates and calls out the hypocritical claims of moral superiority - which are also part of leftist BLM, and climate alarmism, and even anti-capitalism (the axis Freddie remains on-board with).
He's on tract to make $200k this year with substack - and most of his posts are free. Most transparent pundit I've read (is Scott A better?)
I think this is the right strategy. My wife and kids are all at relatively low risk, buy I often see my elderly parents, whose chance of getting seriously ill even with all three shots is non-trivial. The omicron strain seems more highly contagious than the priors, so I'm going to be cautious.
To me, cautious means living life pretty much as normal (going to stores or out to eat or maybe to the movies), but wearing a mask and getting tested before I see my parents. My teenagers go out with their friends. I live in some fear of another lockdown, that would really suck.
What DeBoer is describing is accurate of a lot of people, I think. Whereas I just make my decision about what I should be doing, many people can't help but to tell everyone else what decisions they should be making too. Especially if that decision comes with the backing of some "authoritative" source. Their decisions are based on and become inserted into the public discourse.
Which, of course, means it's dumbed down to the point where anyone can understand it. Thus, having a conversation more nuanced than "Vaccine good!" or "vaccine bad!" will get you downvoted or tuned out of most discussions. This has happened to me a couple times, from both the left and the right.
The right doesn't want to anyone to suggest anything, for fear that it becomes mandatory. The left wants to blame everything on the unvaccinated, even when the data shows that for some populations, COVID is still quite dangerous for the vaccinated. It's weird.
It will *always* be better to delay getting Covid because a treatment may always be right around the corner. But you sacrifice so much living while you wait. You need to be looking at the cost of another day lost to fear vs the benefit that another day will bring in treatment options. There’s no way that advocates for trying to delay infection at this point.
You’ve lost nearly 2 years of your life and it hasn’t brought the treatment you feel comfortable with. You’ve lost nearly 1 year vaccinated and even that didn’t make you comfortable getting it. You’re recently boosted (maximum antibody levels->maximum protection against severe disease) and still not comfortable getting Covid. At this point, every day you try to avoid getting Covid is only making you 1 day older, giving you 1 day lower antibody levels and costing you 1 day of normal, fear-free life. And it’s still not going to keep you from getting Covid.
"I just notice that in the worst weeks of the past two years, the number of people that I personally knew with COVID never exceeded more than one per week, and the number was typically zero. Now all of a sudden, I know a dozen. ... If you are not on the East Coast, you may not know what I’m talking about. Yet. But things are absolutely crazy here."
Same with me (also EC), except "one per month", but now, yes, about a dozen, including multiple teenagers, which I hadn't seen before in any of the previous 'waves'. Many more "I am positive" in the social media stream, and more "case alerts" at workplaces and schools. About half the positive folks I know well say they have no symptoms at all and were surprised by the positive result, and the others have mild symptoms that vary a lot: this one has stomach issues, that one headaches, another one fever and cough.
I can't exclude the possibility that people are just a lot more likely to self-test now, especially when encouraged to do so after some potential exposure, but I think the increase in numbers is real.
On the other hand, "with this new variant, even with vaccine boosters, there's little we can do to stop everybody from getting a mild case in a wave that will probably burn itself out quick" may be just the kind of lucky 'exogeneous shock' we need for a reset of social psychology to allow people to suddenly accept endemic seasonality of what is now a tolerably mild virus for which we also now have effective treatments like the antiviral drugs about to be approved by the FDA any day now ... maybe ... we hope.
Really appreciate Zvi's Covid coverage, but I wish his expertise was more legible to the public. It's awkward when friends ask me to explain my source and I find myself saying “Well, he’s really good at Magic: The Gathering...”
I think your fear is based on your age.
I’m really fed up with covid. We traveled to Boston for my wife’s family (not seen in two years), and this whole place is messed up. They won’t even let you go to Mass without a mask. Everything is weird.
We have Christmas with my wife’s grandmother. She is 98, in severe dementia, and likely to die soon anyway. They want to give everyone rapid covid tests before Christmas. Honestly, everyone is triple vaxxed. And if you got it and died, is life worth living at this point. Great grandma can’t remember 5 minutes ago and doctors say she will be dead in months anyway. This is the last Christmas to see her great grandkids. If they have covid, fuck it. Let her have one Christmas with her great grandkids. If there is a 1% chance she does one month earlier, is that so bad. She keeps saying she wants to kill herself. I’m not sure many of the years at the end of life are high QALY. Especially if you stop living.
Life is a series of todays. If you keep putting off today…evidentially you are just dead. Live each day.
A couple months ago I began reading Freddie - instead of buying his book, The Cult of Smart. I keep looking for an honest Liberal, or Leftist, and he seems honest about writing what he believes is the truth. Including his own silly Marxism, tho like Marx with good critiques. His literate prose is a pleasure to read, only slightly verbose (less than Rod Dreher, or Scott Alexander; or A. Sullivan or M. Yglesias )
He is calling out his left fellows for hypocrisy in going after upper class moral superiority.
" if denial of human pleasures is virtuous, I can be more virtuous than my peers. If caution is noble, overcaution must be even nobler."
He also recently had a great note about trusting Harvard, seen in his title:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-the-fuck-do-you-trust-harvard
>> at the end of this process, no matter how you change it, no matter how many statements the schools put out about diversity, no matter how many thumbs you put on all the scales to select for a certain kind of student, at the end of this process are self-serving institutions of limitless greed and an army of apparatchiks who are employed only to protect their interests. That’s it. You can’t make college admissions fair by getting rid of the SAT because colleges admissions can’t be “fair.” <<
It's really important to note that neither college admissions, nor life, nor Covid, are "fair" - and they can't be made "fair". Moral superiority positioning now involves some form of denying or opposing some particular unfairness, and often mislabeling it as injustice.
In this Covid "worry porn" article cited by Arnold, Freddie talks about ... elite emotions based on competition:
"our striving class is made up of people who are raised to compete and who structure their emotional lives around competing with each other. "
This fits with John McWhorter's idea of Woke as a religion, and these Woke fundamentalists as competing for moral purity.
Freddie's next note, in a reply to lefty critics, asks, what do the Woke folk want him to DO?:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/social-responsibility-to-do-what
"You’re talking about this as a matter of individual choice, but we have a responsibility to the community!"
Near the end of this post he concludes:
>> Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s book The Sum of Small Things lays out the essential psychology brilliantly. As she demonstrates, changing norms among bourgie liberals has made conspicuous consumption crass, declassee. But the urge to compete, to win, trumps all. So our striving castes have developed all manner of other signals through which they subtly assert their superior virtue, their superior lives. Covid now fills such a role. With Covid, you never need an excuse to assert your superior seriousness, never need to wait for the right moment to insist that you’re doing it better than all of your peers. You can just openly tell the world “I am more responsible than you,”<<
I hate that bullshit, but I've never been on the left. Freddie IS on the left, but also hates and calls out the hypocritical claims of moral superiority - which are also part of leftist BLM, and climate alarmism, and even anti-capitalism (the axis Freddie remains on-board with).
He's on tract to make $200k this year with substack - and most of his posts are free. Most transparent pundit I've read (is Scott A better?)
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/state-of-the-newsletter-december
I think this is the right strategy. My wife and kids are all at relatively low risk, buy I often see my elderly parents, whose chance of getting seriously ill even with all three shots is non-trivial. The omicron strain seems more highly contagious than the priors, so I'm going to be cautious.
To me, cautious means living life pretty much as normal (going to stores or out to eat or maybe to the movies), but wearing a mask and getting tested before I see my parents. My teenagers go out with their friends. I live in some fear of another lockdown, that would really suck.
What DeBoer is describing is accurate of a lot of people, I think. Whereas I just make my decision about what I should be doing, many people can't help but to tell everyone else what decisions they should be making too. Especially if that decision comes with the backing of some "authoritative" source. Their decisions are based on and become inserted into the public discourse.
Which, of course, means it's dumbed down to the point where anyone can understand it. Thus, having a conversation more nuanced than "Vaccine good!" or "vaccine bad!" will get you downvoted or tuned out of most discussions. This has happened to me a couple times, from both the left and the right.
The right doesn't want to anyone to suggest anything, for fear that it becomes mandatory. The left wants to blame everything on the unvaccinated, even when the data shows that for some populations, COVID is still quite dangerous for the vaccinated. It's weird.