(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

[fairly strong cw: illness]


[Dreamwidth; Wayback) (by siderea)

aaaaaaaa

The main thing I'm going "aaaaaaaa" about is actually in the comments. Are you telling me that our society has been forcing adults to make tremendous sacrifices WRT their own levels of disease exposure† in order to train kids' immune systems, and we may actually be harming *everyone* *including* the kids by so doing?

...okay, I know, even *that* is giving too much credit: I'm almost certain that congregate schooling was not *intentionally* designed as a disease propagation method to give kids as many antibodies as possible while they're still young (read: can physically bounce back better + have few responsibilities). It was probably only obvious in hindsight, and even then only to people who, as Siderea puts it, believe in germ theory.

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†what happens in school doesn't stay in school. especially if you're a parent, but not entirely: I serve a lot of kids at work (they mostly stayed away in 2020, but they were there before and they're coming back now), and of course the chain of transmission can also go child-->parent-->other-adults. ↩

Comments

[brin_bellway]

So, unusually, they're encouraging everyone to get flu shots now, not October:

Ideally, everyone would be vaccinated against the flu by the end of October, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Korpics said September — now — is a great time to get vaccinated against influenza.

“Don’t wait,” she said.

Michelson agreed.

“Flu vaccines are currently available,” she said. “Go get your annual flu vaccine now.”

I, for one, don't need further encouragement.

Haha no.

(see last year's Siderea flu-shot discussion)

I mean, I can't complain too hard given some of the horror stories I hear about trying to get a hospital bed in the States right now. "Hospital beds are available but flu shots are not" is far better than the reverse.

I'm thinking that this year I will *get* a flu shot but will not trek across the county chasing them like I did last year: I'll wait until they're available at the closest pharmacy, or at a pharmacy I happen to be near while running errands. If I didn't have a respirator (just got another two pairs of P100 filters in!) I'd feel a lot more urgency about it, though.

[thedarlingone]

Not being an infectious disease nerd, I didn't understand more than half the jargon words about what types of diseasles are going around, but I grasped enough of it that I think I will go see if my local Walmart has flu vaccine yet. I suspect a fair part of what's going on is "We are all being forced to abandon social distancing way too early, often also with pressure to stop masking / inability to bubble successfully, and so Everything including false-negative covid is going around at record rates". My own workplace is definitely forcing voice workers to return to onsite, and is making noises about possibly forcing my new department to return as well, so that's up to 200 people who will all be sitting in a big room breathing recycled air for eight hours a day again, and not masking at their desks because then the customers can't hear them clearly. So they're all going to bring their kids' diseases to work, and the kids will spread other workers' diseases at school, just like in the bad old days when I'd lose my voice at least once a winter due to generic respiratory bullshit.

[brin_bellway]

>>My own workplace is definitely forcing voice workers to return to onsite

holy *shit*

At least you're not personally a voice worker anymore, but goddamn. I struggle to express in words how horrifying that is.

(a less emotional bit of me is going "Large Telecom Company sure is going into the glorious Solarian future kicking and screaming, huh")

((I see that post does not actually provide much of the relevant context, so: adult Solarians never come within physical proximity of one another (if you can see someone's actual corporeal vessel from here, you're too close) and find the very idea revolting. (...after first getting it out of their system in childhood creches, interesting echo there.) They communicate entirely via computer, mostly holograms.))

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(and of course there's yet more Discourse going around about whether people's immune systems have been atrophied by 18 months of half-decent sanitation, with insinuations that we're shooting our own feet by even being as sanitary as we have been, and like, I've already written about how I feel about that, but also: as someone whose cold frequency has varied in the range "twice a month" to "once every three years" depending on lifestyle, I for one have not found that low-exposure lifestyles lead to the colds I do get being worse, nor are high-exposure-lifestyle colds mild.)

[thedarlingone]

Well, in the interests of fairness, my workplace is a third-party-run call center with departments contracted to Large Telecom among other companies; I don't know if Large Telecom is forcing its own internal workers back onsite yet.

On the immune-system-atrophy hypothesis, as someone who has lived in wildly varying levels of isolation from other humans, I've never noticed a difference. Granted I'm not someone who pays super close attention, since my immune system has always been pretty solid -- my breakdowns come from overwork, stress, and trying to tough out cold weather in insufficiently warm jackets, not disease. But the common thread between the major respiratory illnesses I have come down with in my life (those being the ones I'm reasonably sure were germ/virus-related) was simply being around large groups of other people in enclosed spaces -- attending daily Mass during flu season, attending college classes ditto, working on a call floor with about 150 other people packed into it.

[brin_bellway]

On further reflection, I think I've also heard a similar-on-the-surface anti-sanitation argument that *doesn't* depend on each individual cold being worse, or even on the immune system per se being atrophied in any way. It goes more like "your ability to have only one cold every couple of years depends specifically on taking *above-average* precautions: if everyone took as many precautions as you, colds would evolve to be more contagious under the increased selective pressure, and before long we'd be back to the average person having four colds a year but now having to expend more effort to maintain that".

Which sounds a lot more plausible, and yet...I notice that if my ancestors had thought like that we'd probably still have cholera and tuberculosis and so on, so I strongly suspect that there's *something* wrong with this reasoning. It's possible that rhinovirus is just more adaptable than cholera: I know influenza is famously adaptable.

(...although I *also* feel like I must be missing something important about how tuberculosis ceased to be endemic in my area. Wikipedia seems to imply that my ancestors defeated an airborne disease with social distancing and a 60% effective vaccine?? ...does that mean COVID-19 *is* defeatable, or at least ~restrictable to the Third World like tuberculosis has been?)