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On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?
I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.
I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.
Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.
I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.
It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.
I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.
Does this gel with anyone else?
COVID did have one positive lasting effect: masking on public transit. In many East Asian cities, it was normalized/acceptable preceding the pandemic for the purposes of limiting the risk of the flu and the common cold, and I'm glad wearing a mask on crowded subways won't be considered weirdo territory.
As far as broken people and their brains, though, the most significant social COVID risk is on education. Most immediately, students suffered severe learning loss, both for the material they were supposed to learn and the processes needed for learning. We'll see those effects for a lifetime. But the institutional and cultural changes driven by COVID are also significant. COVID laid bare the reality that the institutions responsible for education aren't really interested in education: learning and intellectual development may be good side effects, but they're not the primary goals. And institutions have learned this lesson. If some desired policy results in plummeting test scores, that's to the discredit of the test scores, not the damaging policy. This has been happening for awhile, but COVID tempered that principle. Schools, informed by the experience of COVID, will increasingly discard objective measures of learning and student well-being for the sake of alignment with the faddish ideas of the day. That's the long COVID we need to worry about.
Is there any data to support the belief that masking on public transit reduces one's chance (long term) of getting a cold. In the sense that it might reduce your chance of getting a cold right now but won't reduce your chances in general due to your weakened immune system. I've certainly never worn a mask voluntarily and I am almost never sick.
Talking out of my ass here as someone with only a GCSE education in biology, but does this 'weakened immune system' thing actually make any sense? The whole reason why you can keep getting colds is that they are new mutations each time you catch it, so you haven't been able to develop any immunity to that specific mutation. So it would seem sort of irrelevant how many colds you've caught before because that won't help with the next one.
I mean, n=1
I think we're all talking out of our ass here. Speaking of N=1, one of the posts above said they did an "A/B" test and determined that wearing a mask helped reduce their own incidence of getting sick. How many colds must they suffer to glean any useful information? Surely, hundreds or thousands at a minimum. How truly awful things must be for them.
That makes sense, but think about the consequences of that statement. There are thousands if not millions of different cold variants. A subway station can have hundreds of people crowded into a small area, many who are contagious. You would be nearly assured of getting sick every time you rode public transit. As this doesn't happen, it stands to reason that your immune system does protect you against some novel pathogens.
The unanswered question becomes: does your immune system become generally weaker when not exposed to pathogens? My lay person answer is yet, but with low confidence.
On another note, it's rather sad that we have to resort to this level of lay person reasoning because, with Covid, our public health apparatus has completely abdicated their responsibility to provide accurate and unbiased information. Even if an expert were to come here and refute me, I would be skeptical of their information until I knew more about them.
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I, for one, would like to see the data confounders added to such a study:
Do participants pick their nose?
If so, do they consume the fruits of their labor?
Do they breathe in through their nose while showering, carrying humid air through their virus-infested nares into their lungs?
Do they take any vitamin D or zinc, daily or weekly?
And so on.
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