I think this is the key. It will be interesting to see how it’s handled in the mandate and how individual companies handle it if it is not included in the mandate.
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How do you think they got that way?
Spending too much time online.
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Damned if I know. I blame conservative talk radio and President Trump.
Seriously, read about prior epidemics and how they were handled. The closures and such have been in line with the historical actions of the US in response to epidemics.
What I particularly don’t understand is the massive politicization of masks, and mask mandates. Actually closing stuff is extremely disruptive to the economy and to living your life. But mask mandates pretty much allow you to everything that doesn’t involve eating. Which the vast majority of what we do. If Trump had sported a quietly masculine mask, and Melania had showed off a bunch of stylish masks, we would be in a completely different place.
But they sure as hell didn’t get hardened by vaccine mandates, as we haven’t had any of those.
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I think Trump was more driven by Twitter than Twitter was driven by Trump. He is just a by product of social media disinformation. But he did make the problem worse given he made it to be POTUS.
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I think it’s more that the people who care about this the most are more willing to post about it. I don’t love the mandate but I can understand why Biden thinks it’s needed. I can’t say anything here that will change anything. And I’m more interested in how my unvaxed sister feels about this.
That’s a big if. If that is the sole justification given, then I would agree that it would be odd to apply it to solely WFH people that the employer would be keeping as solely WFH even if they were vaccinated.
But if the employer wants to have the option to call them into the office for certain meetings and events, then it IS about creating a safe workplace.
And if the employer full-on admits that they are (at least partly) motivated by a desire to keep insurance premiums down by requiring employees to take reasonable steps to reduce their utilization then they are not disingenuous to apply it to WFH folks, although as I said, Delta’s method of charging more premium may be the more appropriate course of action.
And here’s a truly crazy thought: some employers may be partially motivated by the desire to be a good corporate citizen and do their part to get the country closer to herd immunity.
Another thought: they may see it as a useful tool for weeding out low-IQ or otherwise trouble-prone employees.
They probably don’t want to publicly admit that’s the reason, but it may in fact be a motivator.
I’ve said we’re going to look back in years and ask how did we continually fuck this up so badly given every chance we had to make this better? It’s a full discussion for another day, but let’s touch on some of that now.
- We could have isolated cases that existed back in March, 2020 and prior. We didn’t. The government-led strategy was “let it spread.”
- We could have saved lockdowns for isolated areas where outbreaks were going on. We didn’t - we did a massive 3-month lockdown of the world, did nothing proactive for when the world opened up, and then went back to business like all was well.
- Widespread usage of masks and social distancing would have helped mitigate spread. Some of us did that, the rest screamed MUH FREEDOM! and then bitched about having mitigation techniques continue.
- We could have not engaged in large group gatherings where asymptomatic carriers could pass the virus on to others, infecting them and causing some to get sick and some of those to die. We didn’t, because MUH FREEDOM! [Also a healthy dose of it won’t happen to me but that’s a discussion for how people generally suck at risk assessment.]
Want to know who’s most to blame for where we’re at 18 months later, and where we’ll probably be 18 months from now? It’s not the people trying to be proactive and take precautions to protect themselves and others. Until the other side realizes shit, we’re at 662,000 dead and counting and it’s all of us that are dropping dead, maybe we’re the problem, maybe we should do something to protect ourselves from continuing to drop dead we’re going to have to deal with all of this.
Those of us on the actual pro-life, anti-sickness side of this? We’re getting fed up with the death cultists.
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There are executives who will still have jobs who aren’t qualified to hold up a street light, so … I’m going to call bullshit on that notion.
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It does keep happening, almost daily at this point:
Reflect on that for a while.
Like how we closed everything down for months in 2009?
What I don’t particularly understand is why liberals always think they just need to get the right celebrity to promote their cause. Is that really what convinces people on the left?
We do now.
Here’s a hypothetical…
There’s a team of 10 people, and 1 person, Suzy Q, is not vaccinated. She is required to submit to testing twice a week to be in the office, and in order to work in the office must test negative, otherwise she has to go home and quarantine for two weeks or until she tests negative again. Only unvaccinated have to submit to testing.
The other 9 people in the office are vaccinated. Johnny B. Goode is one of them. He comes into the office with a slight cough that he just attributes to seasonal allergies.
Within a couple of days, 2 other vaccinated employees, Jack and Diane are coughing as well, but Jack is coughing so bad that he decides for peace of mind to go and get tested. Jack ends up testing positive. With contact tracing, everyone (but Suzy, since she already tested negative) has to test. Diane and Johnny get positive results back.
So, who’s to blame for spreading it in the office? Suzy, because she’s not vaccinated despite consistently testing negative? Johnny, who shouldn’t have attributed a mild cough for allergies? Or, the company, because to truly protect the workplace, they should have been testing everyone, vax and unvaxxed, as a condition of working in the office in the first place?
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They haven’t realized they’re the problem yet, so we still have a ways to go. Honestly, at this point I’m all for encouraging them to take whatever asinine prescriptions they think will save them provided that they all sign a waiver saying “I forfeit the right to use health insurance to pay for treatment if my self-prescribed methods do not work, and I authorize the health care provider to seize all my assets to fully pay for costs incurred to keep me alive and treat my condition.”
Want to buy the no-vax ticket? Take the whole fucking ride.
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Was there a global pandemic that killed 620,000 Americans and millions worldwide in 2009?
No? Then it’s irrelevant. “Spanish” flu is the most recent pandemic on this scale.
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COVID has killed 50x as many people, this is a bad comparison.
You knew the outcome going into it? Impressive.
And if how they did it 100 years ago is the justification for how we do it today, no thanks.
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Yeah, we pretty much did. We knew it was a moderately bad flu, and we knew it wasn’t as bad as covid appeared to be. Is this news to you?
And hint, if Ebola gets loose in the US, it’s worse than flu, too.
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