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203 comments

  • That's me!

    • Me too. Though I'm wondering if I ever caught it and just ended up being asymptomatic. I can't say that I've been particularly careful and pretty much everyone in my social circle had it at some point.

      • I thought about that to but I usually got sick with something every year before 2020 and I have not been sick since either late 2018 or early 2019. Its been so long I can't remember. The masking is working for everything else so likely I don't think my wife or I have caught covid ever.

    • High five! (from a safe distance)

    • Me too!

  • I'm one of them! It has been in the house three separate times and I've managed to make out without a single positive test. I don't even bother with masks outside the house

  • That fucker got me in april. Even with precautions. Thank god i got vaccinated or my immunocompromised ass would be six feet under.

  • I kind of hope I am just immune at this point. I'll probably get it randomly in a few years when I least expect it.

  • Alright I’m not certain there’s not a genetic variable here but I have not found it very hard to avoid. I wear a mask indoors and eat outdoors and don’t really do anything else.

    But like, I travel a lot not for business which I theorize is riskier than business travel. That’s a lot of airports, and even with an optimistic 70% lounge rate it’s probably not great for avoiding illness (plus I managed to get flu somehow). I do eat indoors for special places but I guess those typically have less than 20 seats so the risk is reduced. Still.

    My immediate family all got it and were extremely symptomatic so I doubt it’s genetic though. Plus I don’t think I’m related to my SO and by using an N95/KN (I prefer N for comfort on the ears) we’ve managed to avoid it despite frequent travel and separate social lives. I know masks are very uncommon now but honestly, didn’t really change my life that much. I’m pretty sure they work too, the second time I was in Tokyo this year masks were a minority thing and you couldn’t get onto a bus or train without people coughing. I resigned myself to Covid but somehow still didn’t get it.

    Anyway now that I’ve gone on this incoherent ramble I’m definitely gonna be sick next week. Probably deserved.

  • I wouldn't have gotten it if not for a libertarian roommate who didn't believe it existed. They tested positive, said it was a false positive, took no precautions whatsoever at home, and then went back to work at their nursing home a day later.

  • I was serving in the last couple years of my military career when the pandemic started. The military took it very seriously, because we still have a mission that needs to be accomplished. Anyone dropping out for a severe illness would compromise our capabilities.

    So we went on full lockdown. No one was allowed to leave military bases unless you lived off-base, in which you were only authorized to go straight home and then back to work. It was highly recommended you order delivery services for groceries and stock up so you wouldn't need to leave home. Going to the grocery store was the only exception to the lockdown, but it was considered an extreme risk and should be avoided if possible.

    Our work shifts (in my unit, anyway) were split in half. Half the crew came in for the morning shift, then thoroughly disinfected the office, locked up, and went home. Then 30 minutes later, the second shift would come in and do the afternoon shift. The 30-minute break ensured no physical contact between shifts. The split-shift allowed a shift to take over full work days in case someone on the other shift got sick. Their whole shift would stay home for 2 weeks to ensure the contagious period passed before sending them back into the office to resume split shifts.

    We would've moved to work-from-home (WFH), but unfortunately, I happened to be working in an Intelligence unit at the time and 90% of their job was on classified computer systems, which we couldn't access from outside the office. I was an IT guy, fixing the Intel guys' computers, so I did WFH for a few months, managing their unclassified computer accounts from a laptop. But eventually, I was needed in the office for their other systems.

    We were also required to wear masks outside of our homes at all times. Anyone caught without a mask anywhere - even sitting in our car on the drive to or from work - could be punished for violating a direct order from our base commander. We used to make fun of conservatives who bitched about how uncomfortable the masks were and how they couldn't breathe while wearing them. We had to wear them all day without breaks, from the moment we left home until the moment we got home. I empathize with emergency room workers; it was brutal, but it wasn't impossible to do, and we got used to it eventually. After a while, I started to feel naked without my mask on.

    In the last 2 years I served, we had a few people drop out with COVID-19 (their civilian families brought it home from their work/school), but the majority of us stayed COVID-free.

    When I retired last summer, I moved in with my elderly hermit dad who lives out in the countryside. He avoided leaving his house for the whole pandemic, and even now rarely goes into town. He, my wife, and I are still COVID-free to this day.

    My sister and her family caught it 3 times! But my sister married into an ultra-conservative religious family who thought the pandemic was a hoax and continued to hold religious parties and barbeques for the neighborhood all throughout the pandemic (They were anti-vaxxers too; something my sister fought with her husband about long before the pandemic occurred). There were a few scares when she came to care for our father and then got diagnosed with COVID-19 a day or two later. But somehow, my dad never tested positive for COVID antibodies. And despite my sister's husband losing his sense of taste and smell (which is still not fully recovered to this day), her whole family has thankfully survived their run-in with COVID.

  • The secret is to barely go outside.

    I mean I have grocery shopped one a week the whole time but I've literally not been sick, not even with a cold, this whole time (and I used to get colds all the time). I didnt even mask for awhile there though I decided to start again because of the surge and the fear of long covid.

203 comments