The mystery of "Himmmm"

I am so fucking over this plague thing. More accurately, I am so fucking over everybody being paranoid of this plague thing. Leaving the house isn't giving me panic attacks because of covid, it's because of all the goddamned people.

Look. I understand why people are afraid. When covid goes bad, it can go really bad, like 'intensive care with invasive ventilation' bad. It's just that this amount of fear is incompatible with also getting on with your life in any meaningful way, not to mention it's out of proportion with reality. Hospitalization rates of people with a confirmed case of COVID-19 (so, not counting people who never bothered to get tested, or people who have been exposed and fought the virus off, or people who have never been exposed) is about 82 per 100,000, or 0.082%. Condoms, when used properly, have about a 2% failure rate. If you trust in condoms to keep you childfree, you can trust reasonable, non-paranoid precautions to keep you from dying of covid.

If you catch covid, and you're an otherwise healthy non-elderly person, your experience is overwhelmingly likely to be like the one I had with chicken pox. I was born in 1981, so my prime years as a disease vector were before the varicella zoster vaccine. I caught chicken pox when I was 8 or 9. It blew. I was off school for two weeks, and I spent every moment of that itching like a motherfucker. But, like 59,999 out of 60,000 chicken pox sufferers, I got over it, and I'm still here. This doesn't mean that it's pointless to try to avoid catching it, and it definitely doesn't argue in favor of holding "chicken pox parties" so you can give it to other people on purpose. That's just idiocy. But it does mean that going to Howard Hughes-esque lengths in order to avoid ever coming into contact with it is maybe a little bit of an overreaction.

"Flatten the curve" was never meant to keep us all from catching COVID-19. The novel coronavirus is now endemic in the human population. Everyone is going to get this. Probably not every few months, like rhinovirus-driven colds, but more like pre-vaccine influenza, where if you had common sense and a bit of luck, you'd have a sucky few weeks once or twice a decade. The idea behind "flatten the curve" was to keep everyone from catching it at the same time, so that the number of cases that did need hospitalization never exceeded the number of available hospital beds. Believe it or not the news did explain that part, in tiny words, but everyone seems to have forgotten.

I had to hike into the next town over to pick up some stuff the other day. One of my roommates gawped in horror when I mentioned that I only wear a mask when around people. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts requires face coverings when indoors or when maintaining a distance of at least six feet from other people is impractical. That's fair; those are the circumstances under which cloth masks impede the spread of droplet-borne viral illnesses, be they COVID-19 or some other crap you've picked up. I had a mask, because I was going to talk to another human, and a good chunk of my route went through a populated area where I was likely to meet other people on the sidewalk. But a good chunk of my route also went through parks and quiet suburbs. I was outdoors, a place with notoriously good ventilation, and it was easy to stay 10+ feet away from the few people I saw. Under those conditions, masks have no effect. As long as you handle them by the ear pieces -- because you have been breathing damp schmutz all over the face part -- you can in fact take them off to cool down and breathe, and re-set them when you see people approaching again.

Said roommate wears a mask from the instant she exits the front door to the very moment she gets back in. Even when walking the dog in our wide-open neighborhood, where there is so little traffic you can dodge the other dog-walkers and joggers by walking down the middle of the street if you want. The neighbor kids bike and play games in the road all the time. You can wear a mask under those conditions if you want to, but I can't. I already have a hard enough time not being able to breathe when exerting myself in hot, humid weather. At that point, it's not doing anything physical. Its sole purpose is to act as a talisman to allay your own anxiety about all things covid. Not just anxieties about catching it, but anxieties about not displaying the correct amount of conformity and community-mindedness. I'm not really surprised; virtue signalling is something of a local sport. But that is what's going on. 

Another roommate has taken to disinfecting all the groceries. He started out using wipes but then we ran out, so now he's just got a spray bottle of Clorox and water sitting on the kitchen windowsill. I have politely gone along with this for the most part, but I also intercept my own deliveries, lest he get it into his head to bleach my raw produce. Dr Fauci does not bleach his groceries; I know, because Colbert was a wiseass and asked him on national TV. It's possible to get covid from contaminated surfaces in the same way it's possible to get herpes from a toilet seat, in the sense that it doesn't contradict any known laws of physics, but it's so unlikely that if you can actually demonstrate that it happened you will get written up as a case study. And frankly it doesn't matter what kind of terrifying things are on the outside of your packages as long as you wash your hands.

For those of you who do not have a psychiatric diagnosis, this is what's called an anxiety spiral. Something makes you anxious and you start to see it in terms of risks to your safety, so naturally your response is to start thinking about how to avoid it. You make a plan. But then you start noticing that your plan may not reduce that risk to zero, or may present risks of its own, so you make a second-order plan to plaster over those. But then that plan has holes, so then you need a third-order plan, and so on and so forth quite literally ad infinitum if you can keep it up that long, or until you decompensate rather spectacularly if you can't. The less reliable, concrete information you have about what's going to happen, the worse it gets. If you let it continue to the point of pathology -- which I am starting to see among the general population -- you eventually dig yourself in so deep that you can't get groceries without involving a contingency plan in case of nuclear first-strike from Canada. This, understandably, fucks up your life. I've seen this both first-hand in my own brain, and in being raised by a woman who suffered from such a massive unacknowledged anxiety disorder that she blocked off the front windows of the house for fear that someone walking down the street outside might see that she had the living room lights on.

Your risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2, now that it exists, is not zero. It will never be zero. A vaccine will not bring it down to zero. Technically, your risk of contracting smallpox is also not zero, because there are still a few vials of it lying around somewhere. Your risk of unintentionally spreading it -- which is what the cloth masks are meant to do; if it's not an N95 mask it does nothing to keep you from catching it -- is therefore also not zero. But there comes a point where it is low enough, and you have to just accept that it exists as part of the background chance that you might get run over by a car or fall in the shower or discover an anaphylactic allergy the hard way or keel over from an undetected aneurysm or any of the other ways you can die without warning.

The BLM protesters are doing it right, I think. That's an important thing that has to get done, so they're doing it. They're spending hours in a large crowd of people, so they try to keep a 6' distance and wear a mask, because that's not always feasible. You can't let your fear immobilize you, and there is a finite level to which you can let that fear prompt you to make yourself uncomfortable. Risk tolerance differs from person to person. My housemates are welcome to freak out over the idea of taking the trash out without a mask; I'm not, and I'm not putting one on to spend two minutes out in the side yard at midnight.

And anyone who froths over "kids these days" referring to it as "the 'rona" can cool their jets. This is basically a pandemic tradition. You get a shot every year so you don't catch "the 'flu" -- which, yes, was how it was typographically styled in 1917-19 -- so shut the fuck up.