this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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I hate that people will look back on this behavior with derision, rather than taking sensible precautions during a time of uncertainty.
I think a lot of that depends on your viewpoint and attitude. I will admit that I got grocery delivery for a few months and would actually sanitize the packaging before bringing it inside. I chuckle about it now and think I was maybe going a bit overboard - but like you said, the times were so uncertain for many - especially during the beginning.
For a few months basically no one knew how it spread. I look back and think about how it could be seen as overboard, but being cautious and careful is more important in a time when something like Covid was quickly spreading and had these wildly different experiences for people. Especially the first alpha variant which seemed to either kill people, or cause them to not smell/taste and have memory issues. I wasn’t going to fuck with that, and still don’t want to.
Also, some forget, but there was a lot of videos coming out of China where it started with people running around seemingly trying to infect others and felt very zombie-esque.
Same... we'd wipe down our groceries, and anything delivered by mail or UPS would sit on our back porch for a few days before we'd bring it in the house. Was it necessary? Probably not, but our house never got sick - at least not until 2023. So for the next pandemic I won't mind being overly cautious again.
Yeah I remember it was months in before studies started coming out that it didn't spread via surfaces. I distinctly remember thinking "shit what am I supposed to do with all these Clorox wipes??"
I wish that message had gotten around a little faster. By summer or fall of 2020, we had a pretty good idea that covid didn't live well on surfaces, but we still had people gobbling up isopropyl alcohol and causing a shortage. Worse, a few companies made hand sanitizer with methanol as a cheap way to keep up with demand.
Yep. There were reports that it could live on plastic surfaces for over a week.
Is it silly in hindsight knowing everything we do today? Sure. But if a new epidemic spreads rapidly again before we have any reliable info on it, I'm going back to wiping things down and washing my hands after touching anything.
It's funny to look back on is my point in posting this, but at the time we were just trying everything we could.
I got to work from home, I got to actually invest in my living space. I started tailoring my buying to businesses that I wanted to survive. I cooked more. I invested into learning new skills. I spent almost zero time communiting anywhere. I prioritized my health, getting enough sleep. I didn't even get as much as a runny nose for like 2 years.
Honestly, one of the best times of my life.
Generally I don’t shill online but my town just gots its first microbrewery when COViD hit so when I found out they were doing takeout, you better believe I spread the word far and wide. It worked: that business survived.
Of course I accidentally spread negative word about a great Pakistani kebab place, so I shut the hell up and went there every week for the summer. It became a thing with my family, when you couldn’t go places with people and restaurants were closed. We’d walk down to the center of town, order through their app, send one person in to pick up, and have dinner outside on the town common
Yeah I'm pretty nostalgic for it too, sans the whole potential death part haha. I cooked constantly, worked from home, and played classic wow with my homies. It was awesome.
Seriously, this is just peak hindsight and at the time things people did where the most appropriate application of better safe than sorry.
Maybe because they are not sensible precautions?
Meet less people, wear a mask, wash your hands - please yes
Wash your keys, buy delivery but then put it in the oven (including packaging) - I won't stop you from having fun, but it was not exactly required to stay safe.
Yeah, you didn't know this back then. Maybe you did if you were a healthcare professional or a specialist in virology. In the US, all we had to go off of was the CDC, who are supposed to be the apex specialists, fighting with Trump who just had gut feelings about drinking bleach to kill the virus, and a literal ocean of misinformation and horrifying lockdown/mass casualty stories coming out of China.
It was clear that nobody actually knew what was up, and that public safety advice was biased through this filter intended to get people back to work to save the economy. Someone at some point decided that X number of people might die to save X percent of the economy and apparently we were supposed to be okay with that?
Hmmm.
Fair enough, I'm not from the US and we did fine all things considered.
If you were paying attention at all, you knew this by June or July. People were doing silly shit like this a year later.
Unless you were only paying attention to Instagram or Tiktok
We know that now, but at the time there was less information about how the virus spread and, I believe more importantly than the short term dangers, the long term effects of infection.
Of course one could think that it is silly to go to the extra effort of sanitizing your take-out when cooking at home was an option, but I don't know their situation enough to make that judgment.