Thank you for that post. I told a friend about it irl today and broke into tears, because even though this is terrible, the story of solidarity is what I at least desperately needed to hear, even though I am a world away.

I hope you and everyone there will be ok. Same goes for all in NC, it’s the one and only place I’ve visited in the USA and as I no longer use FB I have no idea what happened to people I used to know there.

I just went for a walk the other week with a relative and as we were just discussing things I again made the mistake of being myself and discussed things that I think about and think are important, like climate change and my actual work with paperless people.

After about 30 minutes they said “could we not always talk about something depressing”. I said sure and went on to shut myself up and proceeded to discuss things like canning and cooking.

This person is super anxious and depressed most of the time, they think our world and the people in it are fucked. He thinks people are shit. He thinks I see hope in the world only because I am “naive and idealist”. He thinks my sensitivity to justice is just my autism aka pathology. He is miserable and I am not. He has no interest in facing the world as it is and protects his cocoon of gaming and treats. This I do find depressing.

You are also right, it feels super unsafe being around these people. It’s people like this that have given me and my partner covid twice and yelled at me for asking for some caution with it.

This has been one of the mindblowing things I have learnt about AmeriKKKa, because I really could not first understand why people had to the keep eggs in the fridge there when I’ve just had them on the counter my whole life.

Finland is also doing a fence and putting a NATO base 200km away from the Russian border to point guns at them.

Interesting times for sure, making sure my passport is handy.

We have renewed our passports for sure. The only other option here is just doing ideology atm, no material analysis whatsoever. Just today I saw a political lib post about how groundbreaking it is to consider how right wing populism is about rhetoric and how with rhetoric they are getting all this support.

The leftish parties just point at these rightwing nuts in outrage with no alternatives given, and then move on to the next outrage. They aren’t engaging in an analysis of the material conditions of these movements because if they did, they would get an answer they don’t like. And this is why I think things are going to get very bad before they get better.

I’m a bit over 40 and have moved fully to the left just in the past years. Getting a better paying job has just made me see the contradictions better.

As long as you are aware of the brainworms around you, they can’t get to you.

I also very much choose to focus on humanity, in my choice of media and in the things I pay attention to. I’d much rather make a note of the person helping someone else cross a street than a person behaving selfishly, because it matters. I feel the most nihilist people around me just pick and choose the most negative things that affirm their already shitty worldview to justify and uphold said worldview and through that their own apathy and lack of kindness.

Coming in with the anecdotes, but I’ve done a public facing job with often just the carrageenan spray as prevention in small unventilated spaces face to face with clients for 6 months now and never got sick from work.

I did get covid, but from family via my partner at home.

The last time I had to spend an hour with a visibly sick person was at the start of this week and so far so good. Might be immunity too from having just had covid a little over a month ago though. I wish masking was ok in my work, but it’s not.

But considering how high risk my work is and how all my co-workers sure are sick all the time and I’m not, it makes me think the spray might at least be helping. I also avoid gatherings and have an air purifier on my desk, I also don’t people on my freetime. So there are many reasons for this as well.

It affects mine and makes them more painful and heavy, have heard of many other folks as well who have had it affect theirs. Either prolonging or causing them to be early or delayed. And affecting them otherwise too. All infections can do this, but it seems very common with covid.

Thanks for the tip. I tried the NAC and didn’t notice much, but antihistamines, kefir and probiotics helped me last time. Might have to try the combo. I’ve done everything from lactoferrin to natto and from quercetin to vagal nerve breathing to compression socks.

Not loving this age of DIY healtcare tbh. But doctors have been useless so here we are.

Oh fuck I am sorry, I had the sleep problems and spent months with horrible bedtime anxiety, but thankfully they aren’t bad this time. Really hope it eases for you.

I agree, the covid “experts” all deserve the wall. Here in the nordic countries they really revealed the eugenist roots of their public health policy with covid. I knew it was bad because I know what Finnish public health historically did to pathologize Karelian folks responses to poverty and oppression, but oh my god they didn’t even try to hide the same ideologies today. Every day a talking head was on the news reassuring the normos not to worry because covid only kills those already weak/frail. Disgusting.

Thank you.

It fucking sucks. The first time I had it after covid it was so bad I had a sick bag with me in public transport, because I was afraid I will throw up in the bus. This is when I had the violent coughing fits that also made me gag and throw up. These days the gag most often comes after I start walking.

There is also so much burbing after any food and then my belly just randomly bloats from all the things. The first time it happened with og covid it freaked me out so bad because my stomach turned into a balloon even from just eating a small piece of bread and almost all food made me throw up, I had to eat standing up and in the smallest possible bites to prevent my body from returning the food to the sender. I lost 10kg of weight in just a few weeks that time. Doctors were like “sucks to be you, eat more fiber”.

Have looked into histamine, SIBO, probiotics, all the things. Only time seems to really help, but it never fully goes away. It did get a lot better again just before we got this shit again.😭

It does and it causes so much grief. My biggest thing has been the loss of strenght and just the way my body no longer “works”.

I used to lift a lot and do different high intensity workouts for my dopamine, after the first round of this I noticed I lost my all of my bounce and speed and those never came back no matter how much I tried, but we still managed to get back to light running, hiking and lifting in 2021.

After the omicron one and the leg pains however I no longer can run at all, walk too fast or too long or my leg pain or back pain just gets so severe that I can’t go on. I have to pace everything I do. In 2021 we still did long hikes in the woods and bogs, it used to be my lifeline mentsl health wise.

It really takes a lot from us, and seems like it takes a bit more everytime we get it. My sense of smell and taste also seems to be a bit diminished forever and for a huge food enjoyer that just sucks, although it isn’t life threatening. But it’s just this overall loss of life quality that was preventable and that is really hard to come to terms with.

Honestly I’m just waiting where I will get the covid caused cancer and if it kills me at this point.

Oh I am so sorry. Shit just sucks.

Reading the comments there sure was a hell of a peek into the brains of these people. They genuinely say that everyone pro Palestine is a terrorist. I will admit that I haven’t bothered to look at comments on Reddit, but it’s pretty unsettling to read tbh.

I reuse them. I use one per for example travel and put the mask in a box on our balcony to chill out for a few days. My kid was at school at the start of this and I had this whole system of numbered weekly paper bags for him for one mask per bag and a chill out box for the ffp2 masks where we circulated them from. Afaik good masks can easily be reused for quite a while and any masking is better than none.

Edit. To answer your question I think I’ve spent maybe 100€ on masks during the entire pandemic, but then again we have dropped all unnecessary socializing for good. A box of 20 is 5,90€ and these days a box will last me for months.

Edit. 2 I do work and travel to meet clients in public transport sometimes several times/day and study at uni. I do remote work as much as I can, but there is still plenty of mask use. They still last me for months. The total cost is for a family of 3, two working adults and a kid in school.

1. I do whenever I can, in my work I can’t, because it’s socially so frowned upon here. I try to work alone/remote as much as I can becaude of this and bought and aur purifier for my office, I have high risk loved ones, have longcovid and so does people closest to me. I’d rather mask everywhere, did not miss the smells of other peoples sweat at all.

2. In my country (Finland) masking was negatively framed from day one. Also it was strongly hinted that they don’t work, there’s nothing we can do and the frail will fall regardless.

There have been no masks used here for most of the time I masked everywhere, the mask wearing only happened for the delta wave, but when the vaccinations began, they disappeared. “Expert” opinion has been very anti-mask and covid has been “just a cold” that only kills old people all along.

This whole thing has been my single biggest eye-opener to the fucked up fascist values I have actually grown up surrounded by. It has also made me understand that covid and covid protection is 100% a working class issue and a matter of class consciousness. It’s the workers like me who don’t get protected that die from it or get longcovid. Also lots of eugenist brainworms in my country.

This is a country where unironically one popular saying is “there’s still room behind the sauna” and this is supposedly a joke about how the undesirables used to be shot behind a sauna in our fash past and gets thrown around whenever someone for example does something dumb. We are the baddies actually and covid made me see this in its entirety, because the society I live in is behaving like monsters without even realizing it.

We were in an old soviet style apartment building in the beginning of covid and never got it from there. Up until we did get Omicron but that came from work exposure, not the housing.

We wore masks in the hallway always and when opening the door, also made sure not to walk in the stairs with other people in there, listened for the traffic before leaving.

We did have a towel under the main door, kept our balcony door and windows open as much as possible (winter) and just were cautious.

There is no real ac in these buildings and we could always smell our neighbours cooking, smoking or weed smoking in our bathroom especially so we covered that vent for some time too. Also already owned a HEPA filtered air purifier and that was always on.

Oh and never using the lift was one, I still don’t use those anywhere unless there is no other way. That is just too much shared air.

And after we’d open the door to for example receive a food delivery we would keep masks on for a while and ventilate the apartment fully by opening windows and the balcony door.

We did have our own washer.

My take is that the focus on this as “a solution” is essentially a grift that gives libs a sense of “something is being done” much the same way recycling or many other green tech related things are. I don’t trust that it would be scalable or possible resource wise if the people telling me it is operate from the system we currently live in.

If we were not doing profit, I think stuff like this could be tried and studied absolutely, but then again humans could live without meat just fine too. So to me putting those resources to farming soy would make much more sense than manifacturing fake meat in factories.

It seems like it’s a luxury product for a world of scarcity to make some feel that they better off than others. Essentially the whole thing feels very capitalist logic coded.