Now, there are a few ways to look at this current pandemic, but in the United States at least, it behooves you & will benefit many more if you avoid getting infected at all.
Clearly the best way to avoid getting infection is to never see anyone but the people in your own home, but clearly this is not a reasonable expectation nor would human beings thrive avoiding every other possible virus host for the rest of our lives.
There ARE smart things we can all do to avoid infection at all. One thing to remember is it only takes one mistake to get yourself infected, and there is a consistency needed in order to avoid it. At this point I sometimes have dreams about going into the store without one & semi-freaking out, but that’s just a natural response to a new normal we’ve all been forced to endure. We all have experienced it watching tv now & seeing people freely socializing, sometimes judging them, not realizing we are still more comfortable in fictional realities than our own. It doesn’t make you a paranoid insane person to look at anything like that, clearly-it makes you someone who has been paying attention.
*First and foremost, a vaccine is your best prevention to avoid infection and possible illness or death later. This vaccine was developed with ALL of our new technology, & finally these AIs that we have not been able to use for our own benefit have proven useful in helping not only identify the virus to start, but also in helping in the therapies developed & being used to treat coronaviruses including the vaccine itself.
The vaccine is nothing more than TRAINING for your body to learn how to identify & fight a virus that humanity did not have the inherent tools to fight. Sure, we all have an immune system, but there are several stories of the perfectly healthy succumbing to the virus. Of course there is a possible hidden genetic factor that might be making some people more prone to infection and death as an outcome, but ultimately that training session or three if you want to go through full graduation, but that training session is often enough to avoid the worst outcomes listed. Clearly there is no guarantee, but certainly everyone can agree that having some training is better than having no training and there’s a few hundred thousand that should be able to agree with that.
Of course there have been a few who have been hurt by the vaccine-of course-over billions of shots we certainly aren’t able to avoid every problem, but the bigger problems have been avoided with the vaccine’s development and AI involvement. We would see larger problems by now but ultimately we see that more problems are happening with people who unvaccinated, who, WITH COVID running rampant in our world, are experiencing a mortality rate 14 to 20 times that of the vaccinated. If you reacted poorly to just attempts to TRAIN your body to fight & recognize this virus, certainly an untrained fight might very well go the same way for someone who had no vaccine at all. Perhaps someone whose body immediately rejects attempts to train it would fare just as poorly to the virus which is the REAL thing vs a practice session which the vaccine provides.
These theories about population control when we see climate change will be doing that job for us, or assuming that they are using technology to kill us already is not a reasonable thing to assume in a world where billionaires are still working all the levers, setting us all on each other over them, who hold ultimate responsibility for lengthening this pandemic by not encouraging prevention over infection. They’ve bought the republican party, who has decided to stoke the fires of rugged individualism and freedom to hurt the public by encouraging everyone to get infected so they can make money off you later. The party of money has absolutely sold you all off to be future profit centers for them, their friends & lobbyists. They don’t care about your freedom. no, the whiney ones think that’s what they’re representing, but notice nobody who appears normal speaks up because they collectively decided to sacrifice the country in honor of business and money and the future of wellness here will be a hundreds of millions of dollar industry soon, trying to give people relief who sacrificed their good health, sometimes just listening to the wrong people, or being in service to those who do. It’s precisely why they have never and will never come up with a health plan, and if they do, it’ll be some dodgy thing that wrecks your credit & financials if you need to use it anyways. They have already done the cost benefit analysis for that and have correctly deduced there are certainly greater SAVINGS with neglect vs the COST to help everyone. That’s certainly why there was no health plan, but at this point that idea will have proven to be VERY short-sighted because a sick population sometimes needs more resources in terms of Medicaid access, food stamps & possible social security disability.
Now, I still leave the house when I need to, I just consistently wear a 6 layer mask or an N-94, as we have plenty in my home. On top of vaccination, mask wearing is key. In other countries, mask wearing is the polite thing to do when you’re feeling under the weather & ultimately you hope becomes a little less feared later on. I tend to go to stores more in off-hours, and if not plan my entrance & exit to happen very quickly-usually this is a 5-10 minute affair max because I know what I want. Lately I have been pre-ordering some of my groceries because Omicron has me freaked out a bit. I did spend some time last week with my nose running incessantly and feeling like I needed to sneeze but never get the chance to do it, just trying to push it out. I cleaned it with tissues and put the medical grade air filtration on high. What I use works to get out 99.9% of COVID particles, works for fires, air pollution, allergens and other things. I have a theory about filtration working as an extra set of lungs and in a space like this, certainly easy to manage. That was the one and only time I’ve appeared sick in a few years. Was it omicron? I have no idea. I have tests in the cabinets but don’t feel the need to take one right now because neither one of us has any symptoms presenting.
So on top of medical grade air filtration, good masks are key. N-94 or N-95 if you can get them. My other strategies to survive during the pandemic without getting infected include this:
*Make sure any appointment I schedule for any services is the first appointment of the day. I used this for waxing, hair, every appointment I have had mostly except for a short time pre-Omicron where just a mask seemed fine for my hair appointment. Why first thing? I figure the air has less of a chance to get infected by someone who has taken the mask off at any point while I am in there aside from the techs. The air has been filtered throughout the night in most places so it seems safer to go in to appointments first thing vs mid morning to late afternoon.
*Wear goggles, especially if you are going into a medical office-I also wore those for my waxer, and though yeah, it fogged up, I felt safer knowing there was no point of entry for any errant droplets left in the room before I got there. I did at one point wear a full on hijab over my mask, but that didn’t end up being necessary at all.
Beyond this are the common sense measures we all know we can take. You’re not going to die, your fear of missing out leading you 6 feet under is not the memorable end you think it will be. This could have an end, but certainly that requires something we seem to not be capable of in the United States of America, and that’s a united response. We’ve let our problems fog us up and not see what we used to be capable of doing, and it was at one point at least, showing China wasn’t going to be able to outdo our united response because we cared more about each other than to ever need government intervention to do it.
Now, you’ll hear people argue about its only overweight people, it’s people who were unwell who are dying, but the one thing that everyone seems to be neglecting is Today’s COVID infected are tomorrow’s people with a very obvious pre-existing condition it will be easy to reason out of existence later. You’ll hear people say: “well, she did get COVID in the 20’s did we really think she was going to live forever?”
It’s almost like the universe has a self-correcting karmic dial to remind people never to try and revel in anyone else’s suffering, no matter if you think they deserve it or not.