Brin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brin_bellway) wrote2020-04-27 10:54 am
brin_bellway) wrote2020-04-27 10:54 am
The grand experiment
[fairly strong cw: illness]
I was thinking: would I still be just as cautious about my decontamination if I didn't have multiple chronically-ill housemates to protect? If I were just doing it for myself?
And while I'm not sure I'd go *quite* this far without them, I'd definitely be taking *some* significant quantity of extra precautions. In large part because...the thing is, there's still so much we don't know about COVID-19. We're now finding out, over three months in, that COVID-19 causes *blood clots*. That in some cases--especially in my demographic--the *first* sign that you're infected is *having a fucking *stroke**.
It's worth an abundance of caution, because when I weigh the risks of exposure to COVID-19, I'm not just facing *known* risks, but also *unknown* ones.
(Not only are we still finding out about the potential short-term complications, we know almost nothing about the long term. If chickenpox were a novel virus, how long would it take to figure out that only people who've had it can get shingles?
(yes I'm aware that herpesviruses are unusually bad about that sort of thing, but still))
If you contract COVID-19, you're not just a sufferer: you're a guinea pig in the grand experiment on what this virus does to human bodies. Fuck *that*. I am *not* an early adopter.
---
Relatedly, the gratification of "people are *finally* taking disease *seriously*" is wearing off fast, because the fact is that we value not-being-sick (and *also* not-being-an-early-adopter-in-general!) different amounts and that's now shining through again. While other people catch up to the measures I was taking at baseline, I'm moving beyond that. It turns out that I, too, respond to incentives: my *entire* response-to-a-given-level-of-disease-risk scale is shifted upward from theirs, not just my baseline response.
I was thinking: would I still be just as cautious about my decontamination if I didn't have multiple chronically-ill housemates to protect? If I were just doing it for myself?
And while I'm not sure I'd go *quite* this far without them, I'd definitely be taking *some* significant quantity of extra precautions. In large part because...the thing is, there's still so much we don't know about COVID-19. We're now finding out, over three months in, that COVID-19 causes *blood clots*. That in some cases--especially in my demographic--the *first* sign that you're infected is *having a fucking *stroke**.
It's worth an abundance of caution, because when I weigh the risks of exposure to COVID-19, I'm not just facing *known* risks, but also *unknown* ones.
(Not only are we still finding out about the potential short-term complications, we know almost nothing about the long term. If chickenpox were a novel virus, how long would it take to figure out that only people who've had it can get shingles?
(yes I'm aware that herpesviruses are unusually bad about that sort of thing, but still))
If you contract COVID-19, you're not just a sufferer: you're a guinea pig in the grand experiment on what this virus does to human bodies. Fuck *that*. I am *not* an early adopter.
---
Relatedly, the gratification of "people are *finally* taking disease *seriously*" is wearing off fast, because the fact is that we value not-being-sick (and *also* not-being-an-early-adopter-in-general!) different amounts and that's now shining through again. While other people catch up to the measures I was taking at baseline, I'm moving beyond that. It turns out that I, too, respond to incentives: my *entire* response-to-a-given-level-of-disease-risk scale is shifted upward from theirs, not just my baseline response.