Have your Covid Precautions changed since March?

[Mel Fulks]

Mark, you nailed that one. I was a kid when I saw Harvard had billions. It was in an almanac, had to ask my parents to define the word.

[Alan Rutherford]

... we know children are insignificant sources of infection and have a higher chance of dying struck by lightning then dying of COVID.

From an editorial in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) July 29, 2020 titled "COVID-19 and School Closures":

Talking about the effect of the widespread school closures earlier in the year: "...school closure was associated with a -62% ... relative change in COVID-19 incidence per week ...[or]..423.9 cases per 100,000....school closure may have been associated with 1.37 million fewer cases of COVID-19 over a 26-day period and 40,600 fewer deaths over a 16-day period during the Spring of 2020." They acknowledge the difficulty in making accurate estimates, but even if you cut the reductions in half, those are significant numbers.

There is another study showing that transmission rates for children are about the same as for adults but children are much less likely to show symptoms. The big risk is not to the children. It's to the adults in their lives. Those adults get just as sick when they are infected by a child as if they had been infected by an adult.

If there really was no spike in your state from opening schools then you were fortunate. It's simply not true that "we know children are insignificant sources of infection".

[Andrew Seemann]

I live in a university town. They spread everything they get outside of the campus. They don't/won't stay in the dorms, they don't/won't stay on campus. We're already seeing an increase in cases.

They won't even actually perform the current "requirements" of the university in regards to any of this. What makes you think they won't leave the campus to go drink and party? They will, and do. It's a pipe-dream to believe otherwise.

Were any of us that bright at that age? I wasn't and I wasn't nearly as bad as others I knew.

A lot of things would go away if people just did what they were supposed to do. Drunk driving deaths, STDs, drug addition, road rage, cutting in line, athlete's foot, the common cold, type 2 diabetes, you name it, nearly all are preventable, yet all are problems and none show any sign of going away completely. Even with decades of public health campaigns, even simple to prevent things like STDs are still prevalent.

I see both sides. I have highly at risk older relatives, but I also see the mental health damage it is doing to my kids. Kids aren't able to handle the social separation from their peers like us older folks. It does real damage to them; the physical and hormonal stress of isolation is much higher in adolescence and early adulthood than it is after. Remember, this is the time of life when most of us met our spouses, got our first jobs, met our lifelong friends. It isn't surprising that they are unwilling to give these things up.

[Thomas McCurnin]

Nope. Never washed groceries, although I always washed fruit before eating it, virus or not. Never wore gloves.

Since March, always washed hands, stayed six feet away from everyone, and I wear a mask. Sometimes I have been known to remove the mask to speak clearly to someone.

[Bruce Volden]

No changes here. Life like it has always been.
Have to wear a mask where I have to, VA, some other medical services.
I quit watching the news a couple months back due to burn out. Media claiming the sky was falling etc.

[Brian Elfert]

I think I read that the N95 mask has a valve that allows the air from an exhale to exit without any filtering. As long as you don't have Covid that's not a problem.

Only some N95 masks have that exhalation valve. Medical N95 masks don't typically have that valve.

[Brian Elfert]

I just got back from a 4,000 mile trip with four friends in my motorhome. We took basically no COVID precautions while in the motorhome. The few times we went into stores we wore masks and washed hands afterwards. We were at an event with 50 other people on a desert playa. The dirt is so alkaline and enough wind that nobody really worried about COVID.

I am still working from home 75% of the time which might be the new normal. I wear a mask in public. I wash most of my packaged groceries when I get home. I don't (and never did) sterilize door knobs and the like at home since I live by myself.

[Tom M King]

I've been working by myself since the middle of February. My helper lives with his Brother, who works at a Prison. I didn't like the odds then. They both got it sometime early Summer, and the Brother ended up in the hospital for a while. I gave him paid leave to start with, but quit that when his unemployment came in, and then he had the $600 a week added. His Brother got him a job with him, so I think it worked out okay for them.

I've always avoided crowds anyway, and my Wife is such a good cook that we rarely ate out anyway, since it would be a downgrade.

The big difference for us is that my 104 year old Mother had to move in with us. She was in Assisted Living, had a stroke, went into hospital after testing negative, went to Nursing home, got better, COVID found her assisted living place just before the nursing home released her, so she's here now.

All my Scientist friends started working from home in January. Some are staying here at the lake in a house I built some decades ago. We have our own bubble going. A couple of weeks ago, when I needed to rejoin a tractor that I had to put a clutch in (when I go get parts, they put them in the back of my truck. I don't go in to mix with all the non mask wearing), I had two Nobel Prize in Physics winners to help me put it back together. They were good help.

edited to add: I've ended up losing weight, unintentionally. I never bothered to know what my weight was, but my jeans size has gone from 34, to 33, and this week putting on long pants for first time in a long time, 32. Before, I would eat lunch out, and eat what I wanted. Since this, I've been eating what Pam fixes three meals a day. She's into health, and fitness, so for a while now, I've been eating Trim, Healthy Mama recipes.

[Alex Zeller]

Not much has changed for the wife and I. We don't take a lot of precautions other than masks when in a store, I now cut my own hair, and only once have I eaten in a restaurant. But I also live in a state with very low numbers. I expect that will change now that leaves are turning colors and those from other states come up. But the colors are changing real fast this year so maybe we'll be spared.

As for masks and stopping the virus. That's BS. Most viruses need to mutate before they can jump between humans and animals. This is not the case with COVID. Even the CDC warns about this. So the virus is not going away. Humans most likely passed it on to their pets who then passed it on to other animals. Since most people appear to be asymptomatic or with mild symptoms it would be impossible to tell how many animals have it without actually testing them. As far as I know little to know studies have been done.

Even slowing down the rate of transmission is debatable. We are humans and as such we base our judgement on what we feel to be true and the level of risk we face. Look at things like the deadliest roads in America. People still drive them knowing the likelihood of dying is a lot higher. Yet they drive it everyday without incident and assume that will always be the case. The 20 somethings immediately went into panic mode but then realized after seeing the charts that the risk of death to them is a tiny fraction of what the media has been pushing. That's why they have changed drastically in how serious they take this. My take is they would have gone back to life as normal if us older people weren't forcing change on them.

[Andrew Joiner]

One thing I've not changed. In March Dr Fauci and Dr Gupta said "act like you have the virus to help you take proper measures". This helps prevent spreading or getting covid.
This is still SO true as we learn more about testing. Even people who are tested often can get and spread covid.