Daily Check-In

[mecurtin]

This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time on Sunday) now to midnight UT (8pm Monday Eastern Time).

Poll #25000 Daily check-in poll

This poll is closed.
Open to: Access List, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 47

How are you doing?

I am OK
36 (76.6%)

I am not OK, but don't need help right now
11 (23.4%)

I could use some help
0 (0.0%)

How many other humans live with you?

I am living single
23 (48.9%)

One other person
14 (29.8%)

More than one other person
10 (21.3%)

Please, talk about how things are going for you in the comments, ask for advice or help if you need it, or just discuss whatever you feel like.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Here we are going into a harder lockdown again, because the partial one with just restaurants and entertainment venues closed, limiting social gatherings, and mask wearing and occupancy limits in stores and such that we had for over six weeks didn't work, and infections weren't going down. So starting Wednesday they are shutting down all non-essential stores, schools, etc. like in spring. It's really depressing.

[mecurtin]

What do you think is driving this wave in Germany? I know what the problems are in the US (lying President, no sick leave, not much testing & no contact tracing), but I assumed you guys were doing better at all those things.

[ratcreature]

I don't think it's anything in particular, except that it's a really transmissible respiratory virus, and once there's community spread mild measures aren't going to prevent spread enough, and contact tracing just can't keep up anymore. Also they had to narrow testing criteria again compared to summer because labs were starting to experience delays. And also there are testing material shortages (I think there's some catch-22 as well since the chemicals needed to produce the vaccines overlap with the chemicals needed for testing, and it's because of the huge number of needed tests all over Europe and the US that the pharma companies had to lower their estimates for vaccine production -- not that it's approved here yet).

Schools being open probably didn't help, but they were masked, no singing and such, and had to frequently keep windows open, and there were few larger outbreaks in them (in my city at least) and when they mass tested some schools when they had a bunch of cases they didn't find huge spread inside schools, just some, so I don't think it was worse than elsewhere, but probably contributed.

The virus is just everywhere. Like, even though I only go out once a week to the supermarket, and prior to this harder lockdown once a week to a language class (that's now shutdown), for weeks now my virus app shows me having had low risk exposures to known infected people (i.e. shorter or farther away than the cutoff when the app would switch to red and you are supposed to quarantine as precaution). Sometimes it's long enough between these notices that it expires, but mostly not. And app usage here is far from universal, so only a fraction would show.

The previous measures did slow things down a bit, but not enough to for hospitals to keep up if it kept spreading like that.

I don't think people who say stuff like "if everyone just wore masks in public and took a few sensible precautions, and we close just the high risk places like bars, we could curb the infections enough for hospitals to keep up" are right. Not once this thing already established itself. Maybe this works to prevent it getting to that point, but we had really low infections in my city during summer, like single digits among almost two million people, none on some days, and mask mandates the whole time that most people followed, though indoor dining was allowed for a while. Also people were allowed to travel during summer, and while there was testing and quarantine after return it wasn't enforced like New Zealand or such places. So there was some ramp up in infections from summer vacations and then it got worse and worse from there.