With the way people talk on Twitter you really would think the doctor's office was truly off limits for everything not WuFlu related, but here, my doctor's office sent me an email encouraging me to not put off scheduling my yearly physical exam.
It was also the quickest visit I've had in
years.
Earlier in the year, I believe I received either a letter or phone call from my (US-based) doctor reminding me that they were still seeing patients for both physicals and routine appointments for ordinary illnesses. When I had my annual physical, it also went quick. However, the doctor usually likes to chew the fat some and he didn't do that quite as much this year.
That much said, I do know plenty of people who are putting off seeing the doc because they figure a hospital waiting room is going to be ground zero for the virus, and I can imagine there's been more than a few deaths caused by people not seeking treatment or waiting too long to seek treatment due to COVID hysteria.
My doctor's office isn't allowing people to inside the waiting room and instead has them wait in their cars. Upon arrival, they're to call the office and a staff member will let the person being examined in for their appointment. After the appointment, the doctor has you wash your hands before leaving the exam room. Finally, a staff member lets you out the door once you've squared up with the billing/scheduling person. I imagine this is to address the fears of doctors offices being perceived as potential "super spreader" sites.
The thing that pisses me off the most is that the death toll over the next couple of years is going to increase because of neglected health concerns, and the fucking news media and statist politicians are going to pretend they don't know why that's happening. Just watch: you just know it's going to happen.
Those in power are already spinning upticks in cases/deaths. When Michigan slowly reopened things up at the end of May/start of June, the resulting uptick was attributed to places reopening too soon/quickly and not because of the initial Floyd protestors going out without masks and being less than six feet/two meters apart from each other.
Similarly, our current upsurge that led to re-imposition of some restrictions is being blamed on all sorts of factors and not the possibility of people going maskless to vote in person because the governor felt it was unconstitutional to require masks to vote (while mandating them in every other public place under penalty of law).
Even if many of the cases do come from people's poor hygiene and decision-making, those in authority find it easier to make them the exclusive scapegoats than to admit that some of their own decisions -- and inconsistent enforcement of their own rules -- are contributing to the higher numbers they're now using to spread additional fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
They're literally debating forcing employees to hand over account passwords right now to check against privacy settings.
I wonder how that works when many sites have a TOS that forbids sharing account credentials with others with loss of the account as a potential consequence. IANAL, but this could also raise a 5th Amendment question in the US.
Are those faggots unaware that it's possible to do things without posting it to social media? What the fuck.
The biggest issue is that many people today, especially teens and young adults, use social media to powerlevel hard about their personal lives. Look at how many cows and other persons of interest on this site share every little detail about themselves for the whole world to see. They can't fathom the idea that some people use social media for anything other than a running commentary/personal blog and don't make multiple posts per day like they do.
I don't believe anyone who says masks don't effect their workouts does intense or heavy workouts.
When I had to wear a mask for an outdoor activity on a very humid day in late-July, I had to take it off halfway through because all the running around I did was too much with a mask covering my nose/face that reduced the amount of air I breathed in. So, I'll agree that anyone who says that masks don't effect physical activity haven't had to wear one during any sort of significant aerobic activity.
It's sort of natural to look to a leader in times of shit hitting the fan, but from the beginning of this Covid stuff we've been given mixed messages and there has been so much blatant manipulation from those in authority that anyone with two brain cells knows not to trust the headlines.
I believe this is the biggest thing normies are dealing with during this pandemic. There's been so many mixed messages over the past eight months that it's justifiable and understandable for the average person to shrug
and wonder why they should bother following the latest guidelines when they've changed so many times already and might change again faster than the weather.
I read an article somewhere that a guy who died in a motorcycle accident was labeled a corona death.
There's been a number of posts here claiming that hospitals are inflating their COVID numbers to get the funding that comes with anyone diagnosed with it. I'm not sure how substantiated that has been, though. Similarly, it's also been claimed that anyone with COVID in their body at the time of death is being counted as a COVID death even if they were never diagnosed with it and died for another reason such as being hit by a car or dying in a fire. I'm not sure if that's being done to inflate the numbers to make the COVID threat seem worse, make Trump look bad, some combination of both, or none of the above.
I've never experienced anything like it before. I suddenly became violently ill in the middle of the night, waking up to flood the toilet with liquid shit. My relief was short-lived, because within an hour I was vomiting everything up. Then I shit again. Then I puked again.
It's possible that could have been COVID. Alternatively, it could have been a stomach virus (norovirus?) that tends to float around in December/January because the same symptoms often accompany the latter, too. Either way, that's not a fun experience and I'm glad you were able to recover quickly.
That said, I wonder how many other people had COVID before it was officially announced as a thing and dismissed it as flu, stomach flu, etc.
Anyway my point is COVID testing is fucking sketchy as hell.
And inconsistent. Look at the flip-flopping that's taken place in facilities in terms of encouraging everyone to be tested (to rule out COVID) to saying only those suspecting an infection should come for a test (to confirm it) -- and vice versa.
Not only that, but look at the fact that pro athletes who get those fast daily tests can get a positive result one day and then negative ones on subsequent days. It also raises the question of how reliable these tests are if false positives and negatives are happening so often in these situations.
Coronapanic has been going on longer than some minor prison sentences at this point.
There's a certain irony
when one considers the restrictions in Democratic-controlled states and localities in light of the fact many of the same Dems believe that we need shorter/no sentences for various crimes and have been lobbying hard for that as part of an overall push for "prison reform."
