I had coincidentally purchased a big pack of Clorox wipes from Costco not too long before lockdown. I quickly turned into the Silas Marner of disposable cleaning products.
Same I bought my yearly Costco TP and paper towels like 2 weeks before. I was like the Mother Teresa of poop paper in my building for my elderly neighbors.
I don't really get how things are supposed to work now. Covid still exists, and the vaccine offers incomplete protection. But apparently things are back to normal for most people? Even I don't wear my N95 all day while I'm in the office, but when I wear it in crowded places I'm one of very few people doing that.
Covid is now endemic and no longer an epidemic/pandemic, so the need to contain cases is less immediately important. I, too, still like to wear masks in super crowded places or if I'm not feeling well but it is rare.
It’s an interesting and difficult question to answer.
My personal take: we collectively went through a really difficult time. The virus killed a lot of people; over 7 million globally according to the WHO. The vaccines were instrumental in slowing the spread and keeping people safer than they would’ve been without them.
The vaccines and science bought us time. We learned how to treat people, and we also gathered data on what the virus does to people. Basically, we now ‘know’ how most people will react to an infection. And since corona is here to stay, most of us will have gone through an infection once or twice by now.
So today, corona is less scary than when it started. We’ve lived through it, we understand it, we have measures to protect the weakest from it. It’s now a part of life much like the flu.
We’ll never be back to a world without corona. But we’ve learned to live with the virus for now.
The virus has weakened considerably. For most people, it really is just another flu. I live with my sister, she just got it this past week. Neither me nor her boyfriend got sick, and I'm totally negative. She's mostly recovered now after a week. Also, I was a few months out of date with the booster. She was totally out of date.
Absolutely, yes. Back when it first started in early 2020, there were still a lot of unknowns. People were suddenly dying, there were no vaccines yet, a lot was unknown and every government and business was basically trying to invent protocols to stay safe.
How long could a virus survive on a particular surface or object? Most people didn’t know. So they panicked and pretty much did what felt most appropriate: disinfect the ever living fuck out of everything that might’ve been touched by someone, somewhere.
People were doing contactless package delivery. Folks were disinfecting cardboard packages so as not to catch the ‘rona. Of course, that was all a bit of an overreaction - but pretty understandable considering how scary that time was for a lot of people. That, at least, was something they could do.
The scenes from New York, which seemed like they were pulled out of an over the top science fiction horror, was enough to justify cleaning the bar of soap with more soap before using it.
Very few people did this. If you were this paranoid, you left your city to live in the country. Or you didn't buy your Cheetos for a little bit.
You could just leave shit in the sun for a bit if you really wanted to kill everything. UV and dry air will zap and dessicate a lot. I believe bacteria likes to hide in crevices, so move it around. A few hours of you want to be "sure".
Remember, infection depends on the amount of exposure. One virion is going to get stuck in your mucus and die. You don't need to get every one because they can't replicate outside the body. Salmonella or shit in your bathroom can be way worse than someone sneezing on your Cheetos.
I still do this if I don't have rubbing alcohol to soak things down in. But that's not because of COVID. It's because I have contamination OCD caused by my toxic family and made significantly worse by living and working in places with cockroach infestations as soon as I escaped from them. Now I'm unemployed and living with my parents again.
I did this since the 90s. A bunch of relatives got sick from some filthy cans. Then I worked in a liquor warehouse. In the unmopped piss floor bathroom where every guy stands farther back to not stand in the dribble, eventually the one guy that doesn't care stands in it, none of them wash their hands, then they even stand on the cans as they build their pallets higher. Not to mention the one top rack pallet that leaks down getting everything sticky and moldy, and the mouse and rat nests with their piss and shit all over the place both in the product and the fork pockets of pallets which get lifted above all the others and it trickles down. The mop tank roams around but it only cleans the lanes and not under the racks or anything. Piss and shit cans at best get taken to a bay with no truck and compressed air blasted, or maybe to the throwaway area and hosed down but it's just water until visually clean looking. Some days you can call in a bay with dirty product and the guy shows up to just dust it to the lane with canned air for the mop tank.
Even guys that work there just drink cans without washing, but some of them are piss drinkers that think the government doesn't want them to drink their own piss so they don't develop psychic powers. I've been told if you don't drink your piss your third eye crystallizes and atrophies. And everything is connected and we are all one, etc.
Were you born on 2021? Did you not live to see people wearing masks and double layered latex gloves to physically fight over the last can of beans at winco?
We mixed hydrogen peroxide with water and put it in a spray bottle. Everything that came into the house was sprayed down until we were able to get vaccinated.