COVID and climate crisis (depression, covid-19, anger)

[elainegrey]

I do appreciate the microcovid.org site. The surrounding counties* have reached the maximum level of risk on the New York Times risk map, while Chatham moved to the "very high risk" category in the past month. So, i double checked the risk for a grocery run and friend visiting this weekend and was gratified that i would have no worries.

What about the family gathering the following weekend?

The microcovid site lets you put in a number of people and then assign them all a risk factor. During the summer, i knew my extended family was trying very hard to minimize our collective risks, to the extend that my unvaccinated niece stayed masked around my mother.

But now my sister's kids are back in school in person. What do they look like as vectors? ....

And then at 8 am this morning the calculator increased the risk of the "average person in your area" by 3.5 times and....

I'm feeling anger (and just behind it lurks despair): if this is how humans react to a really obvious threat with comparatively clear cause and effect, the climate crisis is ....

I'm not willing to write a conclusion there. So i must still have some hope.

* except for Orange County, where Chapel Hill is located.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I agree that this past year has been pretty revealing about what humanity as a whole are like. Although I do think that the majority of people are trying to be safe, but the general avoidance of voting and political participation is really biting the country back now.

[tamena]

OK that Microcovid thing is scary and amazing all at the same time
thank you for sharing it
and I said back in July that we'd be back to masks by Labor Day weekend and locked down shortly there after
I only wish at this point is the people I love and care about continue to stay as healthy as possible - after working retail for the past way-too-many years I've given up hope on the general public =(

[amaebi]

Wow, that's an extremely interesting, helpful, and worrying calculator.

[tylik]

I'm so glad that I live alone, and don't have high risk people in my near contacts. I'm on campus, teaching in person. At least UNC has a much higher vax rate than NC State where Zodiac is... we've been doing a lot of outdoor social stuff, but with the heat this week, we had pedicures. Still fairly low, really? - they are serious about masking and distance. But I pretty much figure I'm going to be exposed to delta, for all that I'm trying not to be, and just hoping the vaccine holds up. (And we have a whole back up system in place in the lab for covering each other's classes, though I'm the only one teaching this semester.)

[elainegrey]

I do think most people are trying to get by, make ends meet, and protect their loved ones - trying to be safe falls in there. But there is a large enough fraction of humans who just want power, and those humans.... Maybe they are "just getting by" in their emotional interpretation of their experiences and the loss of power is an existential threat: that, though, is an existential threat to all of us.

[elainegrey]

It is a little more scary than i think it has to be. The budget concept is really useful, but the idea of saving up for a splurge doesn't seem well represented.

That brief period in June where there were counties in North Carolina "low risk" for the unvaccinated were a marvelous thing.

[elainegrey]

I find it a little over-alarming -- if one is to use a concept of a budget, an event 2x the weekly budget isn't "EXTREMELY DANGEROUS" but needs something like "Requires 2 week quarantine to afford" or something like that. Maybe someone can afford the two weeks, maybe they can't.

I corresponded with someone about it who didn't get the idea of the risk budget. It came to me pretty quickly, but our mental models of risk are hard to keep rational.

[elainegrey]

It is budgeting, isn't it? But by keeping most risks extremely low, the pedicure risk is affordable. The vaccine is marvelous in its reduction of risk: i hope the boosters get distributed before the efficacy drops too far.

I still have a calendar reminder of your monthly craft gathers. Did you keep those going via Zoom?

[amaebi]

Yes, I agree with you about the super-cautiousness, though I definitely don't diss people who *are* that cautious.

I'm not convinced that the budgeting paradigm is an inevitable fit, but I do think it's a useful metric. That is, that's not my policy paradigm, but as a gage of risk I quite like it.

[tylik]

I haven't, but I was just thinking about restarting them this fall. Early on, the idea of doing them over zoom seemed pretty unsatisfactory, but since I've spent more low key social time on zoom.