Bargaining
But seriously. The virus doesn’t agree to step back for five days, and I find the bargaining language people use about this decidedly odd. They seem to think that if they promise it’s just five days and they promise not to infect each other on purpose then the virus will do its part and all will be well. Like:
One of my daughters lives with her boyfriend in London, and the other lives in a flat share. The three-household rule means I can see them both. It’s a rubber-stamp, and it means that in your conscience you can know you’re doing the right thing, and abiding by what the government deems acceptable.
But none of that makes any difference to anything. It doesn’t become safe because “the government” says it is. There is no rubber stamp. The conscience isn’t relevant, and you really can’t know you’re doing the right thing until two weeks later.
A different person:
It seems a sensible compromise to allow some level of mixing at an important time of year for lots of people. I think there was a risk that the government would just say you could do anything, and mix as many households as you like, and that would certainly be really bad.
But there is no compromise. There is no sit-down with the virus where you agree to social distance most of the time and the virus agrees you can have five days off. It doesn’t work like that.
I was chitchatting with some colleagues on a Zoom call this afternoon, and one was musing on how they were going to work things out for holiday visits. I forget the details, but the gist of it was he has multiple children, who have families of their own, and partners with their own parents and nuclear families. So if Colleague’s Daughter and Colleague’s Daughter’s Husband visit Colleague, along with Colleague’s Son and Colleague’s Son’s Wife, it may then be illegal for CD and CDH to also visit CDH’s family–not even considering that CDH’s parents also have other children with partners and families…he finally said ‘we need an app to keep track of all the connections.’ It’s pretty clear people who are less mathematically inclined are just going to say ‘fuck it’, which I suspect pretty much everyone will do anyway.
I think that’s a certainty.
The rules are a bit more restrictive than they appear at first sight. For example, if my father survives until Christmas (touch and go) he certainly won’t survive until the next one. He’s a Christian for some reason and Christmas is important to him. I’m sure he’d like his four children to visit him over Christmas but of course we’re from different households, so he’ll have to pick two. Then there’s the various grown-up grandchildren…
If we were a functional family, this would be a problem and I can well imagine family members thinking “fuck it” and visiting willy-nilly. Fortunately, we all hate each other so it’s less of a problem than it might have been. And since the whole family especially hates me, I don’t have any difficult decisions to make at all.
Mrs latsot and I are at our happiest when we’re sat at home being miserable, so this Christmas will be perfect for us.
Same with my family. Being 2 states away has been a real mental-health pick up for me.
I was just reading the comments on the faculty survey that our faculty senate did to determine our attitudes on COVID and COVID policies. It was…frightening. If anything convinced me to stay off campus, it was the comments. Almost no one thought people should have to leave their masks on (but one person said their young children could leave their masks on all day at school, why couldn’t the adults at our campus? Bless her/him/them). I know things are tough for certain types of instruction. I know welding, for instance, can’t be taught online. I know many of our students struggle with the remote. But the nastiness and hateful comments and flat out lies contained in that document are breathtaking.
COVID has a 99% survival rate? The tests are false, there aren’t many cases? College students are fine, and safe? (We have had quite a number of students who have gotten sick, and our students are frequently non-traditional students anyway). There is already a 99% effective virus that is widely available? It’s a lie? The science faculty shouldn’t be part of the decision making team because they have “bought into the narrative”? Masks have been proven not to work? This is scary shit.
And this: we don’t mask for the flu. Well, we did in 1918, when there was a pandemic.
Our town just passed a mask mandate Monday night. It will go into effect on Friday. They don’t expect to enforce it, but I guess stores will probably have to put up a sign.
I would rather skip one holiday season with family than never have them to spend the holiday with again (that is, if I liked my family. I did love spending the holidays with my husband’s family, but they are all gone now).
I shall send miserable thoughts your way in solidarity.
I hate my loved ones and advise everyone else to do the same.
To hate their loved ones, not mine.
Or hate mine if you want, knock yourself out.
I do find it frustrating how inconsistent the regulations are. In many areas, you’re technically not allowed to have even one person not in your household inside your home — even if you’re both masked and stay distanced. Pretty much everyone I know disregards that “rule,” which no authorities are actually enforcing anyway, and has one or two friends that they will visit occasionally for “socially distant happy hour” or something. (Masked and usually outdoors if possible.)
And part of the reason is the arbitrariness of it — you’re telling me I can’t or shouldn’t have a friend sit ten feet away from me in my own home, but we can sit at the same restaurant table and eat and drink together unmasked? (But don’t worry, the restaurant got rid of physical menus, so it’s totes safe now!) Or I can shop or have my hair cut in the same room as a bunch of strangers? That doesn’t pass the common sense test. You don’t have to be a COVID Truther to call bullshit on this.
And sure, I personally can decide to be “safer” than the rules require. But I’m not a public health expert, and I would much prefer it if I thought I could rely on policymakers to be providing good, sensible rules — yet it’s pretty obvious that the rules are based at least as much on economics (“we have to keep restaurants in business”) as public health.
And don’t even get me started on assholes like Gavin Newsom attending parties at The French Laundry.
What I’m saying. I’m not making fun of bargaining in the sense of “this is less risky than that so shall we take the risk?” We do that all the time anyway. The one true thing I’m aware of Trump’s ever saying is that cars are a big risk too but we don’t stop driving them.
I had to go into town yesterday (Thursday) afternoon. All “non-essential” (quote marks because I don’t see how a shop selling mostly household and personal cleaning products has to close yet McDonalds ((purveyors of “food”)) and Holland and Barrett ((homeopathy and herbal “medicines”, ffs)) remain open) shops were closed and the few people around were all masked….except for the police, who were wandering around enforcing masks and distancing while bunched-up in groups of three or four with not a facial covering between them.
I would usually be the sarcastic one who loudly takes them to task for that, but they’re particularly nab-happy at the moment and with Mrs. o’Sagan completely bedridden I can ill afford an arrest and a few hours in a cell.
As for the three-household ‘bubbles’, it appears not to have occurred to the powers-that-be that a lot of people could easily (deliberately?) misunderstand that as meaning ‘three at a time’, so it’ll be Monday at his parents’ house along with his brother’s family, Tuesday at her parents’ house along with her cousins, Wednesday at the Jones’s house with the Wilson’s also in attendance……just three households together in keeping with the rules, officer!
@iknklast #3,
There is already a 99% effective virus that is widely available?
Do you mean that there is a 99% effective vaccine?
Completely agree with Screechy, and everyone else who’s said it–it’s incredibly frustrating to get any useful and (as far as I can tell) scientifically tested explanations and guidance from random web essays rather than any kind of consistent, evidence-based official source. One thing that’s particularly getting my goat now is that where I am we’re allegedly ‘locked down’…but kids are going to school. I will accept that closing schools, and providing primary and secondary education, is a complex question requiring lots of considerations and taking lots of stakeholders into account; what I’m finding hard to swallow is that what little I’ve read from any kind of official source says something along the lines of ‘schools are (relatively) safe, there’s no evidence of community transmission from schools, kids rarely get it’. I am sure this is bullshit, for at least two reasons–a) schools are closing right and left due to outbreaks; b) the apparently ‘inexplicable’ rise of cases in 30-somethings, rather than over 60s–ie the age of people with kids in school. I’d be happy to see a transparent discussion of whether and how to keep schools open, but the official dismissal of it as an issue has completely eroded whatever little was left of my trust in government policy.
Of course, if the only thing determining whether or not you did the right thing was dumb luck, you didn’t do the right thing in either case.
True – I meant “the right thing” in the very restricted sense of “winning that particular throw of the dice” – which is quite unrelated to the sense of “doing what the government says it’s ok to do.”
Colin Day, #9, yes, I meant vaccine. Too much reading of colleague comments, not enough proofreading of my own, I guess.