Yikes.

Most likely had it in early 2020. Most likely as there were no tests (or vaccines) then. Was sick for about 6 weeks. So, yeah, it sucked.

Had 3 Pfizer shots, still alive, did not grow flippers. Haven't caught it since.

I wonder how many nanobots are circulating through your blood stream right now, dictating your every move!?!?!?

Don't you know?! The vaccine turns you into Bill Gates!

Not a clone, no. If you take it, you will literally morph into the CEO of microsoft.

Still waiting for my superpowers or at least a cool, gruesome death but nothing. Might get another one in autumn.

Cool. I can use the cash.

Just tested positive for Covid this morning. This'll be my second go-around with it, as I got it in March 2020 the same week everything began shutting down here in the US. Fully vaccinated, so I just need to wait for the symptoms to go away and hear back from my job about what their Covid policy is. At least this is giving me a break from literally everything for a little bit.

I got a nasty head cold a couple weeks ago, and thought I might have finally caught it. I was actually looking forward to canceling all of my upcoming plans. Alas, I tested negative, and luckily it cleared up rather quickly. I do think that I need to not make any plans next month though - it's time for a break.

I hope you recover quickly!

In other exciting news, we now have a monkey pox pandemic. Great!

So far, it only seems to spread through heavy contact with an infected individual. I wouldn't call it a pandemic.

I really wish that's the case but countries around here are all starting to buy pox vaccines. The initial response by the government here was that were weren't going to be many cases, today they announced the number of cases is blowing up and it's way worse than expected. Sounds familiar.

Ya know I think I'm just gonna keep my pandemic routine running for a little bit longer. Just. In Case.

The positive thing is that monkey pox isn't a new viral disease and that there are processes in place to deal with it. And after two years of Covid and 11 billion vaccinations world wide, I surely hope there's enough infrastructure in place to deal with it if it turns into something big.

This is something that we will unfortunately get used to. As more and more uninhabited areas are being destroyed and developed by humans, more and more new pathogens are being released into the human population. When virologists said about the Covid pandemic that it's better to get used to as "the new normal", they weren't kidding or being hyperbolic. The only way to stop it is to stop deforestation.

From what I understand, you need much heavier contact to get monkey pox; and small pox medication and vaccines are highly effective against it. Many people will be already immunized against it. That doesn't mean governments shouldn't be ready, of course.

Jokes on me I guess, I got COVID. Fuck.

I hope you're feeling alright.

At least you're getting the "Corona Lite" strand.

That first wave that ripped through the country seems to have been a lot more potent.

My throat is killing me. I don't even know what to do about it anymore. I can't even drink water. I don't even have any other symptoms anymore, the fever is down and even though I haven't slept in two days I'm not tired. It's just this excruciating pain every time I swallow anything. Fuck this shit.

Dunno if it'll help your case, but I read that some people found extra relief after taking antihistamine.

That really sucks. A friend of mine also got extreme throat pain when she caught covid. She said she spent an entire night just crying because of the pain and not being able to swallow. The only thing she said helped was boiling water and taking small sips as the water cooled. The warm sensation eased it a little. I haven't done it myself, but maybe worth trying if nothing else helps.

I've been taking an acetaminophen + antihistamine combo and it instantly cut the mucus but it didn't help with the throat pain. It also didn't feel like a sore throat, more like having a wound on your throat.


Yeah, that was me last night. Thanks for the tip, I'll probably drink tons of soup/tea then if it comes back. For some reason I had an episode of dry cough a few hours back, I felt a strong pain in the throat and the pain was suddenly gone. So was the cough. I really don't understand this virus. I really can't complain though, I've only had mild tiredness and fever for only 5 hours but the throat pain was terrible indeed. Since it's my 5th day with the virus hopefully the worst is in the past.

Thanks for the kind words anyone. I caught it at a show by the way. My advice to you all don't go to venues without air conditioning/recirculating air.

Also, maybe this was just the fever but did anyone else had mild pain on the place where he/she was vaccinated? I'd swear I noticed pain there while I had high fever.

I'm really thankful I got this shit while fully vaccinated, I can't even imagine getting all these symptoms x 10.

Holy hell GT, get well soon dude!

And yes, I've had mild pain in the area of vaccination myself without a fever.

Thanks! I'm much better today. It seems I got lucky and only caught mild symptoms.

Covid finally hit me. Feels like a protracted cold with fatigue, no appetite, and a pinch of nausea. I'm in day 2 of isolation, and thankfully there's stuff to do otherwise I'd go mental.

0/10 would not recommend.

I got it late April...while visiting my cousin in South Carolina on the second of two weeks off between jobs. Not exactly ideal, but at least I was in a big condo with a lot of sun, and thankfully work was chill with taking sick days for my first week. Definitely felt worse than a cold for me, but not as bad as a flu. The worst part was really just the exhaustion, even if I was mentally alert I just felt exhausted and wanted to sleep all the time. Most annoying part was feeling better on day 5, then back to shitty and tired for days 6 and 7. Things finally broke for good on day 8, though I felt like I had a low grade cold for about ten days after.

Got it myself now, first time.
Tested postive on a self tester yesterday.

Not to bad really, a little fewer, throat is sore and slimy.
I get these random pains hitting me all around the body, and also some heavy dizziness.

Guess I will have a few days of work now then.
Never took any vaccine.

I had to get it sometime, I blame my sister or here kids that I was with last weekend

If you aren't vaccinated the process is probably going to be a bit slower. That's what happened to my brother. I was vaccinated, I had symptoms and tested positive the day after I got it. My brother caught it from his flatmates and the symptoms appeared after a 4-5 days. The recovery was also a bit slower.

Very odd virus.

My daughter and I both caught it last month. She's fully vaccinated, doesn't drink or smoke, and it kicked the shit out of her for a good week or so and kept her in bed for about three and a half days. I'm not vaccinated and I'm a smoker and the worst symptoms I had were a headache and a sore throat for three or four days, and my symptoms started a day or so after she got laid up. This was also her second round with the virus after being vaccinated.

Fourth day after the postitive test, and I am getting better and better.

The fewer left during the night, everythign was wet from sweat when I woke up today
The dizziness is also almost gone now, aswell as the random pains.
So now I just have a little sore throat.

Guess I will get back to work tomorrow, or Thursday.

Well fellas, after avoiding this fucking bug for 2.5 years, it finally nabbed me. Tested positive yesterday.

Yesterday was full of fever, fatigue and shitty body aches that made it next to impossible to find a comfortable lying position. Today it's almost completely subsided. Coughing a little bit today, but nothing severe and not even comparable to the random cough/cold/allergy fit I had a few weeks ago (which tested negative).

Still taking time to rest, but might run some online classes for my students tomorrow evening, provided I'm well enough and up for it.

So, I've got a friend who I still consider a good friend but haven't seen in a while, but I 100% disagree with him on his stance on covid.

I've got a father who has underlying conditions and could die if he got covid, so he has to be careful about where he goes, and this is always on my mind when people say they think it was wrong that there were lockdowns which probably prevented countless deaths, when people refuse to wear masks when in fact they help, and most of all, refuse to vaccinate which is what's necessary to get to herd immnunity.

He posted this shit on social media:

"Remember, three years ago today governors went totalitarian, stripped all your freedom without warning for absolutely no reason and destroyed the myth of freedom existing in the USA."


I wanted to hear what some intelligent people actually have to say about this because I honestly wouldn't have the right words. All I know is that it makes me extremely frustrated to have to hear that such a good friend thinks this way.

I mean, were there REALLY ZERO reasons why we had lockdowns and were asked to wear masks? Are there no reasons to vaccinate ? (stupid to even ask...) and did we REALLY lose all our frreedom in the U.S.?

Did we really go totalitarian?

Or did it just happen to be that we were hit with a pandemic that has now killed SIX MILLION PEOPLE worldwide and measures needed to be taken, much like countless pandemics that have been happening since the dawn of time?

I'll do my best to never ever talk about this with him because we'd just argue and it would be horrible and I don't really care if we have different opinions, but part of me wonders what I'd say to him if I really could speak my mind...

Also, why is everyone acting like covid is over when it's not?

Cause I'm not concerned about it anymore as a "younger" vaccinated person, but for many older people, especially those with health conditions, it's still a very real threat.

^Yeah, meant to say something about that in the US Politics thread earlier, but your post was kind of lost amidst the gun-control stuff.



What to say about your friend's comment? Besides that it's false?

Well...I don't think people make such comments because they've honestly done the hard work of trying to understand the world. More likely, IMO, people make such comments because they sense it's expected of them, by whatever ideological community/-ies they belong to. They're "playing a part," whether they can realize and admit to this or not. (Speaking from my own experience, it's not exactly a pleasant thing to become aware of one's prejudices and deficiencies in knowledge, let alone to see one's half-baked posturing for what it is.)

In contrast, doing the hard work of trying to understand the world - this means quickly discovering your limitations, discovering which areas of human knowledge and inquiry you have a knack for, and which of the (far more numerous) remaining areas you don't have a knack for. Nobody can master them all; nobody totally succeeds in understanding the world. What any given person doesn't know could fill several libraries. It's unavoidable that in many/most areas of life and intellectual inquiry, one has to content oneself with rough, cursory, superficial, highly fallible impressions at most. (I'm not just talking about academics and scientists. There's hardly any grown-up person who hasn't learned vastly more about some part of nature/society/culture - be it insects, sculpture, insurance, cars... - than you or I ever will.)

"Having a knack for medicine," for instance, means having the competence - earned through extensive firsthand experience consisting in some form of dialogue or interaction with a community of experts - to make decisions and evaluate controversies pertaining to medicine, and to do so in a way that can be transparently explained and justified to similarly competent peers. It isn't simply that you've amassed a collection of factoids about medicine; you have some genuine insight into the methods employed by specialists to achieve and apply knowledge (and to subject it to ongoing critical scrutiny).

The flip-side of this, when you don't have this competence, is to have the willingness to defer to people who do - in other words, to openly admit: "My views (or rather, my semi-educated hunches) on medicine are much less credible, much less well-supported, than the views of physicians and medical scientists. Given their hard-won expertise and my lack of expertise, the wisest policy for me is to trust them when they unanimously put forth something as 'established medical knowledge,' even if I find it unobvious or counterintuitive." (This isn't necessarily common sense! I think it often has to gradually dawn on a person that they aren't omni-competent. And there isn't necessarily a huge incentive to achieve this insight; instead, it's often a painful thing to find out that you've overestimated your competence.)

The opposite of this policy is "Do your own research!" - some amusing commentary on this here.

Well said. And while I agree with almost all of that, I don't know about the "playing a part" comment. I mean maybe to an extent, but the thing about him is that he owns a business that was shut down for about six months or so during the first lockdowns, and because he's a libertarian who was too proud to accept the money he almost certainly could have gotten from the government, he used up his life savings to keep paying for the rent on his business even while it wasn't actually bringing him in any money. I never asked him if he tried to get money from the government because I know he simply wouldn't have, and I can only assume he could have gotten it because so many in his situation did.

So if the government shuts down your business and you lose money, but they give you a way out and you don't take it out of some silly notion of "pride", then you really have no one to blame but yourself. Had he done so I can only assume he'd still have his life savings.

He's a very angry person who has very specific views on subjects and a huge distrust of government. I'm not going to say I trust the government all the time, but I believe that sometimes it acts for good, whereas he generally thinks politicians are usually power hungry and trying to take our freedoms away. The irony is that while he's not a Trump supporter, he is a Rand Paul supporter, who supports Trump, and it's really the right wing that has threatened our democracy, but that's going a bit off topic.

He's an example of someone who, out of emotion, will NOT EVER defer to the experts. In fact, he would go out of his way to find podcasts with those few doctors who had an axe to grind with the medical establishment and who denied that vaccines or masks worked, and would post them and say "see, this guy says it's all bullshit."

For example, there was one doctor who was one of over 100 doctors involved in the development of MRNA vaccines in the 80s and 90s, but he had NOTHING to do with developing the covid vaccine, and he was constantly giving his arguments for why the vaccine is harmful and ineffective and why masks don't work, etc. Later on I did some research on him and found out that he was pissed off because he didn't get the credit he felt he deserved for working on the early vaccine technology, so he was out for revenge, and he'd pass himself off as "the creator of the covid vaccine" when in reality he never even played a role in that.

Then there were other doctors and medical professionals who were part of the "disinformation dozen", along with Robert Kennedy Jr. who wrote that ABSURD book criticizing Fauci, which he loved. I obviously haven't read it, but anyone who devotes so much energy to trying to discredit ONE doctor who just happens to be the figure head for vaccines and masks in the U.S. is IMO missing the point. It wouldn't matter if Fauci had a dirty history full of all sorts of lies (I doubt it really is that bad) because this pandemic is obviously world wide for one, and for two, Fauci is really only one doctor chosen to speak for thousands of others. He is not, and never has been, the one and only person who represented taking the right precautions against covid, so even if somehow you entirely devalued and discredited him, he could just be replaced by hundreds or thousands of other doctors who had the EXACT same educated opinions about covid.

He'd also constantly post studies on how "lockdowns don't work" by showing graphs and such with the number of deaths in states that did and didn't impose them. The studies did often show that much of the time the states that imposed lockdowns didn't have fewer deaths than those that didn't, but I think that means jack shit because that's not really about whether or not lockdowns work if you follow them, but about whether or not people listen to lockdowns when they are imposed. We can't possibly know how many people obeyed the lockdowns, so there's pretty much nothing to be gained from those studies. Obviously if you don't obey a lockdown it doesn't work, and we all know that if you aren't around people with covid you don't get it and spread it so it's idiotic to claim that the actual PRINCIPLE of a lockdown doesn't work.

He's just an angry person who hates the government and has these really strong anti-government ideologies, and as an angry person with an axe to grind he will actively look for any evidence that seems to support his views and ignore that which doesn't.

The problem is how many people are just like that. He's part of a community of people who practice a sport that I like which I haven't practiced in years, and they all see things the same way as him. For some reason it must attract conservatives, who by nature have this massive distrust of any and all "authority", even when that "authority" is actually composed of medical experts who are simply trying to quell a pandemic which has now killed six million people world wide.

And yet, he claims there was "no reason whatsoever" for the lockdowns, when I'm sure had we not had them we'd have had 2-3 times as many deaths, he claims we lost all our rights which is just complete nonsense, and the claim that we are now "totalitarian" makes me think he should go check out North Korea, China and Russia and get back to me.

It's really frustrating and sad, because he's one of my best friends, and I haven't seen him in years, but I know that when I do see him again I'm going to have to tell him that I refuse to talk about covid or politics or we could get into an argument and potentially stop getting along. I don't know if he talks about it as much in person as he does online, but if he does I'm having no part of it.

Anyone else have any opinions on my friend's ridiculous stance on covid?

It just annoys me so much that I want to hear some intelligent rebuttals.