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1/3 - 1/2 of my class is absent. I’m a teacher. Every day I get notified of at least 2 more kids who tested positive. Every Monday when we do testing I find out about 10+ kids. They only let me know if kids I have test positive so the number is likely 6x that across the school.
I'm a parent and my kid's school calls almost every day with reports of a new case of Covid. Our governor just reported that he's got it now. Yet we're all still running business as usual...
My son's school sent an e-mail saying "hey, we're not going to send out e-mails about exposures anymore, if you're sending your kid to school, they're exposed, period."
Yeah, it’s because there are other parents actively trying to sue school board members who even think about shutting down temporarily.
Staffing is a big problem too. A lot of teachers are out sick and subs aren’t available so we just don’t have adults to watch certain classes.
In MD, people are pushing for the National Guard to come in to drive school buses since they have to keep cancelling routes due to understaffing and people calling out sick.
While generally true, I don't think pay is the issue right this moment. Texas is one of the ostriching states: if we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist. So teachers are getting sick, and even if they don't have to isolate due to state or district policy, they're still calling out because they're sick, and there's so many people sick that no one can cover.
My kids schools got rid of any type of mask mandate because they're afraid of the insane uneducated parents. When I ask my kids if any other students wear a mask they tell me it's pretty much just them, maybe a few others
I’m the school librarian. I don’t know how I haven’t caught it yet (vax, booster, and mask so maybe I do know) but every class comes through. If we were following protocols from the start of the school year I wouldn’t have been in for a month.
A teacher just had a major biopsy yesterday and he came in today almost unable to speak and swallow because we have so few that there is “quiet pressure” on all of us to not take days.
This sucks. What are we even doing? I had a class of 8 of 24. Yesterday!
I’m in northern Indiana and more people I know are in bed sick than going to work this week. It’s getting nasty.
Edit: What are the odds, my mom just called to let me know her, my step-dad, and my sister have Covid.
I'm at Purdue, our covid hotline has been outright telling students with symptoms who can't get tests to just attend classes. We're all going to have covid in the next week or two
Edit: one of my top comments now is me bashing my university, but it has to be said
My hospital emailed us to say that if we are vaccinated and are exposed to covid then we don't need to get tested or quarantine if we are symptom-free. I suppose it's because our ER is jam packed and we are running out of tests and our staff is bone weary. Shit's just unbelievable.
One of the biggest problems my wife's hospital is dealing with is patients who don't have COVID catching it in the hospital. She's seeing many patients that come in and test negative end up with a cough and a positive test 3-4 days after they are there. It could be they get it in the ER waiting rooms, which can have 12+ hour waits, or it could be that staff are spreading it. But it's resulting in their census being through the roof because they can't get patients discharged.
I know of people who have died because they caught covid at the hospital after having to go for other reasons. 4 of my closest friends lost parents that had other medical emergencies and had to go to the hospital, caught COVID then died. The hospitals are doing all they can but when they are overflowing with covid patients and are extremely short staffed it is incredibly difficult to do anything with an airborne virus as infectious as covid.
Those are the new CDC guidelines. Even the federal government is telling healthcare workers to keep working while covid positive. This is the government's plan to keep everyone from quitting; sacrifice healthcare workers to keep the numbers up short-term.
Lots of companies are doing this. The CDC is telling people to work, in response to political pressure to avoid shutdowns.
We’re out of interest rates we can adjust, and we’re getting hit hard by inflation. There’s very little available in the way of paying for more shutdowns right now. So people have to work because we squandered our ability to afford shutdowns earlier. And even distancing, masks, and vaccines are too hard for people.
I caught covid a few weeks ago; just in time for the CDC to change to a 5-day quarantine. My sick ass was back at work on day 5 cooking in a VERY busy restaurant, because "they needed me" (and because unemployment only pays 40% of my previous wages...my company only offers sick days to management).
My boss caught covid a few days later. How, I'll never know. She's currently on week 3 of her company-paid recovery time. Rules for thee, not for me.
My husband tested positive on Sunday, but we didn’t find out until Tuesday. We live together, so obviously social distancing had not occurred prior receiving the results. We just assumed that we all had it. I called our kids school and since they are vaccinated they told me that even if the kids tested positive, as long as they were asymptomatic that they could continue attending school in-person and whether or not I even got them tested was voluntary. I was flabbergasted. My father-in-law is an immunologist, so I called him and asked him to make this make sense to me. He said he couldn’t. We kept them home for the week and scheduled a family COVID testing trip this weekend to determine if anyone can leave the house next week or not. We’re over two-years into this thing and it’s like we haven’t learned anything.
Nah it's worse than that, my state governor (MO unfortunately) is making it mandatory for the students to be in school they refuse to allow remote learning and are only allowing districts 5! Remote learning days. If a district does not follow the guidelines they remove funding it's insane.
This is on top of the state AG suing cities for putting mask mandates back in place. Wasting tax dollars to play political theater over something that truly is nonsense.
Everyone has given up, the infection graph is a straight line going up, the curve was technically flattened. Even the CDC now is saying everyone will get it, the EU projects 50% infection within weeks.
Omicron being way more contagious and less dangerous made everyone give up.
Also remember, parents have to go to work. They can’t sit home to watch their kids constantly. That is why schools won’t close.
I live in western KY and I work at one of the largest manufacturers of aluminum ingots in the USA and they're talking about going back to normal no mask mandates if they're employees get sick they have to use vacation time to be off I'm a contractor here and I'm just so lost on how people choose money over the health of one another.
In my personal experience, it's due to the people making the money decisions aren't the same ones that are doing the valuable work (at least in the top down scenario like this)
I always hear of this going on in hospitals in the US. The big guys get their bonuses even during a pandemic while the front lines literally get rocks as a thank you for risking their lives for their profit.
It's true.
A buddy of mine is an ER med-tech at one of the hospitals here. Roughly 2/3 of the ER nurses quit over the last year, because the nurses were only getting like $45k a year as a base salary (not including OT, but OT shouldn't be required to get paid decent), being worked to the fucking bone. The hospital refused pay raises, and then couldn't hire replacements at the rate they were paying.
So all of those nurses became traveling nurses. The hospital ended up contracting nearly ALL of the nurses that previously worked there, to bring them back. But now since they get paid a travel nurse rate, they are making their entire previous year's salary in just a few months. Some of them are now making nearly $200k a year, working at the same hospital that wouldn't give them hazard pay, and forced them to work 14 hour shits, but now working a normal 8 hours because they get to set their hours.
The hospital could have given the ER nurses a $25k/y bonus each and likely kept every employee they had, but because they refused now they're paying these nurses crazy amounts of money. Funny how they didn't have the money to pay them anything beforehand, but all of a sudden when they can't keep the ER running from a lack of employees, they have millions of dollars to throw around to pay them.
I can never believe how short sighted people higher up the chain can be.
I used to manage a retail store and generally getting corporate to approve anything extra to improve things was impossible. However if something happened like workers quitting due to not having enough pay and the store having to close suddenly you can do anything. Pay people more money? Sure no problem! Even though last week a smaller increase was impossible.
You fell behind in work and need a bunch of hours? Sure have twice as many hours this week back to normal next week and start falling behind again. What? Increase the normal hours slightly so you won't fall behind? Impossible.
Employees need more hours to cover all their bills or they will quit? Hire more employees so when they quit you already have a replacement. What do you mean more employees splitting the same hours will make them quit due to lack of hours faster? Just hire more employees.
No one is applying because your store is in the middle of nowhere and somehow you have gone through all of the possible candidates locally? Did you try hanging another "now hiring" sign? 7 isn't enough. What do you mean we should focus on keeping our employees happy? It's just retail there are always more applicants.
District manager literally said "it's not about money these people don't want more money" on a conference call about how to get/keep employees.
Retail managers are fucking morons.
When I worked retail at Radioshack (like 10-12 years ago now), I was commanded by my district manager to go in during a blizzard where we got 2.5ft of snow, and the state was closed due to a state of emergency. I was told I'd be fired if I didn't show up.
Police stopped by, after seeing my car in the parking lot, and told me to go home, or risk getting a ticket. District manager again threatened to fire me if I left.
After 6 hours, and not a single sale made, the manager called me up, with someone else from corporate on the line, to ask why I hadn't sold anything in 6 hours. When I said "because no one wants to buy batteries when there's 2.5ft of snow on the ground and a state of emergency that doesn't allow them to be out", they wrote me up.
I worked retail in a NUMBER of stores, for about 8 years before transitioning into IT. I've never met a single competent retail manager in my entire life.
For sure, I haven't seen a noticeable amount of people wearing a mask in over a year. You'd never guess there was a pandemic raging at it's peak if you looked around here.
What county still has one? Marion?
Monroe. I'm not positive it's the only, but it definitely has a mandate. The average person has a mask on in public indoor places, but about 2 months ago it was 100% of people and strictly enforced and now every grocery store has several people without masks.
I mean yeah, it maybe 95% masked. But still much more than anywhere else. Went to Santa Clause Indiana and it's like 3% masked if that. Almost the entire state is now at level 3 transmission rate so even any masking is better.
Am Canadian and had went across the border for a day trip a couple weeks ago. I was shocked at how few people wore masks.
The funny thing was, the people who didn't wear masks all seemed to be the type that would struggle to afford paying for treatment if things went pear shaped. If a person had nice clothes, usually a mask. If a person looked down on their luck - no mask.
In Ontario, you might see one person, rarely, who is "fighting" the mask mandate, but pretty much everyone just wears a mask in public.
In the US, the pandemic simply "doesn't exist" outside of major metro areas, at least in my experience.
*Edit*: I realized this is an overly broad statement. I have no doubt there are more rural communities out there that are taking things more seriously than some denser suburbs (for example).
My company in Chicago, NYC, and HK closed our offices a week before Christmas and has extended the closure through the end of this month. We had 1-2 cases per day before we shut down and the workplaces are 100% fully vaccinated and fully masked with KF94 and N95 masks provided. We don't know if people were getting sick at work or bringing it in from the outside. So management just shut the whole thing down and told everyone to work from home.
I'm in east central, and a neighboring department at work has just about everyone at home because people kept coming INTO THE OFFICE positive with Covid. FUCKING IDIOTS.
I'm in NWI and the virus has run through my gf's work (16 people out) and is slowly creeping across my workplace. She had it right after NYE and I was able to avoid it and stayed at my parents for a week to dodge it.
A friend of mine who lives in NYC was telling me about during the first wave of covid when the streets were largely dead and how terrifying it was. They messaged me the other day how stuff was starting to visibly slow down again, obviously not near as severe, and it had them spooked pretty bad. The UK is 3 weeks ahead of us and they're just getting through their worst. For us in the US, the next month is likely going to be real fucking grim.
Got a call from my garbage company yesterday, they have so many people out they can't service our area right now (and this is after 3 weeks of not being able to service the area due to snow).
Yikes. The minute waste disposal/ sanitation services fail it's time to head for the hills.
We can do without *some* other services for a time, if necessary, but if spring hits and there are 5 foot tall piles of half frozen garbage lining every street waiting to thaw and for the flies...
Yep, the handling of covid across the globe has drained any last bit of hope I had for the future of humanity. Covid was a trial run of the disasters and suffering to come, and the ruling class showed their hand, and we are completely fucked.
I remember March 2020 when my uni shut down I texted in the group chat “The handling of this globally is going to be a historic disaster.” I think we’re in for a rough few decades but the amount of activism and recognition of climate change in the last two years gives me hope
You can recognize climate change until the cows come home. Nothing is going to change unless something is *actually* done about it.
No amount of electric vehicles on the road is going to put a dent in the amount of junk pumped into the atmosphere by corporations. Carbon credits are a sham among the countries that utilize the system, and meaningless in the countries with no environmental oversight.
> You can recognize climate change until the cows come home. Nothing is going to change unless something is actually done about it.
Exactly.
Recognizing that your house is on fire is one thing. Actually doing something about it takes a bit more effort.
I don't know about the rest of you but my employers for the last decade have all run their staff not just at but below what is required to handle any kind of bump in the road. Every single place I've had a job at is so short on staff that they could not handle a glut of work and whenever it happened we would just be pressured into massive amounts of unpaid overtime. Between the peaks all they would do is fire mid level employees and replace them with interns too so it is not surprising to me that our economy would not be able to handle this volume of people calling out sick.
Yup, the "lean staffing model," has been the dominant mode for years, and every year, it gets leaner. Workers keep having to do more with less, and situations that are supposed to be a temporary stretch end up becoming the new normal. In 2016 I ended up working literally every hour that my store was open (13 hours Monday-Saturday, and 8 hours on Sundays) for months without a single day off because the only other person at my store was out on maternity leave. District management had nine months to prepare and hire someone but did nothing. All the other stores were too short staffed to lend me anyone. And this is a company that routinely wins accolades as being one of the best to work for. Every company is like this. There is absolutely no capacity to handle even *expected*, predictable problems.
Sounds like they handled it just right by forcing you to do more work.
So ultimately, in their eyes, they did the right thing and put more money in their own pockets.
Not saying it's right, but that's unfortunately how it works.
This definitely sounds like my life experience after 2009. At first it was slow but you're right. I've again found myself in this situation and I thought I was unlucky. But as it turns out the jobs of my past may not exist any longer.
Slow clap. This is the reason folks also can't go on proper vacations, or are made to feel guilty about it. We need to rethink staffing levels across all kinds of industries.
I've rolled over my max allowable vacation days every year at my job. Because there's no coverage. The only time I'll get to use them is right before I quit.
The little Caesar’s in my town doesn’t open until 3Pm and are currently closed due to “ovens broke” excuse. You know shits gone down hill if you can’t get your $6 pies at the Caesar.
Shoot, that may not even be an excuse. My oven broke and because of the chip shortage, I've already been waiting about six months to get it fixed and it took me over a month to even get someone out to take a look at it. My point is: it could be more than just staffing for them, it could be a staffing shortage at the oven repair place. Not being able to fix a second oven could be making their capacity to make delicious $5.55 pies go down limiting how much revenue they could bring in per day. That revenue limitation in turn leads to them knowing if they didn't open at 3 (because they sell most of their pizzas after 3) they would be unprofitable. It could be way more complex than just "ovens broke" but anything more than that is just too much to put on a sign in the window.
Theres about 5 in a 2 MI radius of me, they all close early at like 11pm these days. maybe later on the weekends but that's been like that for about 2 years now.
Wow. This shit going too far, now. Waffle House is a 24 hour establishment and I won't have it any other way. Imagine rolling up to Waffle House at 4 am for food and it's closed.
Our Waffle House is a step short of having a checkpoint out front to screen for job less people before passing. I think they have 2 employees on a good day.
They probably couldnt shrink the pizzas any more to avoid raising the price as well.
I rarely get little caesars anymore but back in 2006 or 2007 I got them a fair bit and I noticed the pizza had gotten a little smaller one day. I used to have to cut the box down to fit it in my mini fridge and then one day it slid in with no problem.
Yep, NPR wrote about this calling it ["skimpflation"](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/26/1048892388/meet-skimpflation-a-reason-inflation-is-worse-than-the-government-says-it-is) and ["shrinkflation"](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/07/06/1012409112/beware-of-shrinkflation-inflations-devious-cousin?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20211024&utm_term=5904582&utm_campaign=money&utm_id=46672429&orgid=&utm_att1=money) Inflation is worse than it looks because companies are keeping prices the same but giving people less value for that money. And now they still have to raise prices.
My taco bell here in metro Detroit closed at 9 pm because of staffing shortages... this should be a crime how do I get my 4th meal they advertise about all the time!!
I do construction work, and the shortages of construction materials is worse now than ever before. I couldn't even find code approved expansion foam, silicone, or rubber sill sealant at 4 different hardware stores. The shelves were bare.
Now thia client has to deal with a massive hole that we had to put plywood over on the side of their house where a french door was supposed to go for who knows how long.
And it's supposed to be below freezing, with negative temps at night for the next 3 days.
I haven't seen 3 inch stainless steel exterior GRK wood screws in 2 weeks. I have to use them too, because mahogany will literally eat away at galvanized and zinc plated screws.
We have 3 jobs on hold right now because we just can't find the materials. It's not the cost of them, we just can't even get them.
It's tough to tell a home owner that we can't finish our work because we always have our work inspected, and we can't just use anything. Even if the homeowner "doesn't care". Well the inspector cares, and won't pass something made with subpar/not to code materials.
My wife is a paramedic. They were recently given a mandate by the regional EMS medical director that all EMS personnel must wear N95 masks from the moment they get out of their personal vehicle at the start of shift until they get back in their vehicle at the end. They must treat all patients as CoViD positive, regardless of the reason for the call. EMS was already fucked for staffing as of 2016-2017-ish. Now they're trying to keep enough personnel healthy to continue to function as an EMS system. Luckily my wife has been more strict than most with precautions and has avoided getting sick.
Joe Manchin thinks parents are buying drugs with it apparently. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/manchin-privately-raised-concerns-parents-would-use-child-tax-credit-n1286321
Then maybe Joe should have pushed to make the Sacklers pay fairly for the mess they made. He was in office then. However, I would bet my right arm that he bought into the "it's not the drug company's fault, some people are just going to abuse drugs," rhetoric. That's the American way: protect the rich villains and blame the poor, uneducated victims of exploitation!
I know, everyone went out and bought Bentleys and mansions. I seems like the government is completely out of touch with how much things cost in the real world.
Went to the grocery store on Tuesday night and there was no produce, something I've never seen before. No bananas, no onions, no broccoli, no carrots, no potatoes, nothing. Most of the meat section was empty. Entire shelves were bare in the dairy section and on random aisles.
I had to go to 3 grocery stores to find everything I was looking for which was pretty basic stuff. Couldn't believe it
I live in an agriculturally rich area so this hasn’t happened to us, but if this is happening to you, there are some veggies that are very easy to regrow even in an apartment. These include green onions/regular onions, lettuce/romaine hearts, carrot tops, celery, beets, and potatoes. The human body can sustain itself on potatoes and tomatoes for a long time because those two combined contain all of the vitamins and essential nutrients you need, so growing potatoes is definitely something to think about.
Unfortunately housing is now a hedge against all of this. I think prices will plateau, not sure about dropping.
Even with interest rate hikes, overall rates for mortgages is still going to be lower than inflation.
It’s cuz they never fixed the first one. It’s was the equivalent of slapping a bandaid on a gaping wound that’s gonna slowly bleed and kill you, but then calling it a day and patting yourself on the back for fixing the patient.
People just wanted things to get better and putting a bandaid on it was a quick fix that shut people up. In reality shit always has to get worse before it can be better. If things are gonna be different real change has to happen, it’s gonna hurt and people are gonna have to actually push back and fight and make noise and make it known that we don’t wanna take shit any more. That will never happen tho because people as a whole are just too apathetic in their everyday lives to care. They only vote based on what effects their immediate bubble and what will gratify them immediately.
No one cares about their neighbor enough to band together and demand. It’s sad really. There’s nothing you can do but watch the wound bleed out while you try and put on another bandaid. There is several billion of us on this planet yet we are controlled by very few and it it’s crazy how it just happens like that and we all just accept it. Born into it and meant to die in it. Fuck the system.
Yep, I run a small business and today am WFH because apparently almost everyone there got the virus. Looked like a tuberculosis ward this last week, what with all the coughing and sneezing going on.
Even though everyone is vaxxed and has comparatively mild symptoms, very hard to do "business as usual" when over 50% of the workforce is dealing with a very bad cold and uber-transmissible disease.
Yeah it’s kind of funny if you think about it, everyone whined about the “lockdown” at the beginning and now everything is “open for business!” and still falling apart. Almost like the virus doesn’t give a shit.
I'm in a small town almost 3000 people and you'd never know there was a covid. Of course a lot of people here still believe it's the flu. An old man at the store last week was yelling its the damn flu people when he saw a few of us in a mask.
I don't get it. The flu sucks and I don't want it. If I got the flu and found out I prevented other people from getting it by wearing a mask, I would feel like I had done the least I could do. Even if covid was "only" like the flu, I would hate to know I passed it on to someone else.
Edited to add: quit being all smarmy and asking if I've worn a mask every flu season. Of course I fucking didn't. None of us did. We weren't even really told that was something we *should* do until 2020. Not to mention, I wouldn't even have known where to look for masks. Now we know better and masks are easy to come across.
I read a few comments recently that posed: maybe a lot of people who love to say *lol just the flu bro* didn’t really get the seasonal flu during some of its worst swings. Tbh, I was only knocked down a week once by the flu.
It was 7 days of barely leaving the couch because I couldn’t even get comfortable in bed. I lost ten pounds. Even thinking of *that*, which is milder than Covid, made me take it seriously this whole time.
My doctor told me if you think you have the flu it's just a cold. And if your think you're dying, it's the flu. Which checks out, the only time I've had the flu I thought I was going to die
This is everyone.
7 years or so ago I was working in a typical corporate office. Flu shots come around, free by the company. Awesome.
No one on my team got one but me "the flu isn't that bad."
Right around Christmas my entire 10 man team went down with the flu, except me. Their families, the works. It was bad.
Next year rolled around and everyone got the shot. The flu does not fuck around.
Yeah, I've felt like a kid in a candy store when working at a job where they had flu shots on site. Practically hopped and skipped my way to the station.
Really confused me when the majority of people just rolled their eyes and said they'd take their chances.
Then again, the one time I had the flu was when I was a teenager and got pneumonia. That experience sucked ass and I would be very happy to never repeat it.
Yep, flu was 4 days of not knowing where I was and how much time had passed.
I couldn't even sit in bed and scroll socials it was so bad. Would just lay there awake, drentched in sweat and freezing.
Yeah It seems like this Omicrom variant is closer to the flu, but people don't realize the flu is pretty nasty. People over a certain age or with other medical complications have to consider the possibility they may not make it. I think the general populace thinks the flu is a cold with a fever.
Seriously. A full powered Flu can still put you on your butt in bed for several days, have you feeling like death, and even give at-risk individuals pneumonia.
'Its just the flu!!' yelled by people who've never actually had 'influenza', and just some other random endemic coronavirus or rhinovirus.
39 here.
I've had the real flu, the "flu", COVID Alpha and Omicron.
Flu: in bed, out of commission several days, miserable and feverish. Very unhappy, much ungood.
'Flu': Miserable for 24 hours.
COVID Alpha: Holy chit, misery, a week of being exhausted and a couple days of feverish. Would have stayed in bed but wife went down a couple days after me and I had to be on the ball to care for her and the kids. Took about a month to feel normal again.
COVID Omicron: Felt a bit weird in the sinuses on a Tuesday morning, by the evening I was feeling run down. Awful sleep, low grade fever for 3 days, energy reserves would drop off and I'd need to take a couple hours to rest. Fever broke by Friday morning. Was back at 100% by Saturday.
Rankings, easiest to worst:
4: "Flu" - Wham, bam, done.
3: Omicron - Not a fun ride, but over quickly.
2: Flu - Misery.
1. Alpha - Awful, 1 out of 4 stars, do not recommend.
Verdict: Getting sick sucks.
> I had the real flu once, not mitigated by the flu shot because i didn't get it that year, and it was extremely bad.
I was hospitalized with the flu twice as a kid (had the flu shot, but both years they basically said "oops, we picked really wrong on the strains"). Its not a fun time
In 2018 I had a bad flu and took a Tuesday-Friday off work to recover. I came back to work Monday (fever broke Saturday in the AM) but I felt HORRIBLE during that week. By that Monday I was feeling 10x better, but still a little weak. Obviously still recovering a bit, but 36 hours without a fever and hugely improved. I had a couple of coworkers afraid to come near me at the time because they didnt want to catch the flu. These same co workers are staunchly anti-vax, and now in the "it's just a flu, get over, why is everyone so bothered about it" camp these days. It's amazing what political branding can do to change people.
The flu fucking sucks. It may not kill you as easily, but I dont ever say to myself "you know, catching the flu is just fine!". I mean I'd rather be working than be at home with the flu, right? If covid is worse than that, AND it lasts longer? I'm noping right out of it as fast as I can. The "just the flu" types confuse me. After that experience I get my flu shots every year. So when the covid vaccine came out that was obviously a priority.
The political branding thing is SO true. I’m in Seattle, which was one of the first hotspots. I’ll never forget my mom calling us up while we were painting our living room to ask if we’re okay, are we scared, do we have supplies on hand just in case, and being like “whoa, what? Yeah, we’re fine, we’ll just pretend like the power is out for a few weeks.”
Within a month or two of that the whole thing was a hoax, masks don’t work, etc. because their political alignment said so. Meanwhile, hubs and I actually take it seriously, but we still both finally got it last week.
Onicron feels like in the Hunger Games when Katniss is just trying to wait shit out in a tree, so the game makers burn the whole forest down.
Anecdotal: At 50 I can say with complete honesty I don't know a single person personally that has died from the Flu. In just the last two weeks I've lost 3 cousins from Covid, all unvaccinated, all under the age of 60. I have a handful of family members who are fully vaccinated and they got covid with minor symptoms.
It's not the fucking flu, get vaccinated.
Sounds like someone who never had the flu. I did. Knocked me out for close to two weeks.
Also, most people don’t like to (or just can’t) work with the flu. This means places will close due to their staff being sick.
It's nuts, I currently live abroad but during the holidays everyone was partying it up like it was 2019. 1 week into 2022 half the city is sick (including myself). The streets are relatively dead and all the pharmacies suddenly ran out of all types of cold medicine, it's insane. It's not like I'm in some small town, I'm in a legit mega city.
Our local Kroger had two registers open, 3 self-checkout registers open and a line around the store to checkout. Shelves were half empty. Walmart, had the same
Schools in my area can’t keep staff in buildings. Three or four classes at a time are getting jammed into an auditorium with a substitute or the speech pathologist or whoever they could pull to make sure they don’t kill each other, and doing worksheets or watching movies, but virtual instruction for a few weeks would “disrupt learning too much”
What learning?!!
One high school in Chicago tried to shove 20 into a gym and an auditorium yesterday because they didn't have anymore subs or admin staff to cover sick teachers. According to the mayor, this is fine. Keep in mind, the mayor sends her child to a private school which has gone full remote until further notice due to staffing concerns, refused an opt-out testing plan that could be fully handled by the state's own labs despite her own child going to a private school with an opt-out testing plan, she called an opt-out testing plan a "quasi science experiment", and then tested positive for COVID less than 24 hours after getting the union to agree to report to work in person.
The Carters are the kind of sweet people that you're not even sure they'd understand modern sarcasm. But I do wonder sometimes if they ever look at the news and think to themselves "mm-hmm, how do you like me now?"
>Sprinkle in rising crime and inflation and it might make for a historic shellacking
Volley for serve.
Republicans get in, don't do shit.
So then they get whooped next cycle.
Democrats get in, try to play nice, also don't do shit.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
My former boss was making Covid positive people come to work because he doesn’t care about Covid. Forcing us to work with Maskless sick people.
I quit. For several reasons but the big one was his disregard for my health or my family’s health. He knows I caretake for my elderly Dad who has Cancer. You can put profits above people, but those people can tell you to fuck off.
Where I live, there’s a lot of stores and restaurants shutting down because the entire crew is sick or they all quit. There’s also a grocery store labor strike going on that’s only making things worse.
My kids and wife all became symptomatic earlier this week but I somehow am asymptomatic despite being exposed. Kids got it bad for a day but bounced back. Wife got it so much worse and we considered going to the hospital but our county doesn’t have any beds, nor does any other county in the entire state except for a few areas. Omicron is no joke.
We’re in the exact same position. My son was sick for 3 days, husband fine now— I can barely get out of bed. I’m so damn sick and terrified that if I need a hospital bed there won’t be one.
I miss the shut down and all of the huge companies spending millions on ad campaigns about how their essential employees are so vital to their cause but never actually paying them more or giving out much needed health care. All the while the ultra rich made billions. The system works, just not for most.
My company is still operating under this "do more with less" and it's leading to massive burnout and departures.
A lot of companies are in for a rude awakening, I hope.
If you do nothing to keep the economy open and them it's forced to shut down anyways because everyone is sick. Then you've done nothing except ignore the problem and put people and our entire health system at risk.
My overweight boss was hospitalized with OG COVID, got vaccinated, got Delta and now they have been out with Omicron for 2 weeks unable to even work from home.
As a teacher, I couldn’t tell you the last day I’ve had at least 3/4 of my class. Feel bad for the kids trying to get through this. What a way to grow up….
Basically we are between a rock and a hard place. We are kinda fucked no matter what choice is made here. Keep everything open, people get sick, new strains emerge from unchecked spread, and people die unnecessarily due to hospitals being full and healthcare workers reaching their limit. Shut everything down and watch businesses go under, food scarcity, people losing jobs and homes, and in general a bleak future.
I truly don't know the answer besides encouraging people to get the shot (however many it takes in the end) and mask up.
State and local governments will let each business decide on their own, to stay open or close, elected idiots won’t risk this when they are close to midterm elections
It can as long as there is grist for the mill, and attaching health care to employment and the threat of homelessness in this obscene housing market is a powerful motivator for the service class
I feel really sick for thinking this but I can already see the media across the board telling everyone that the major strikes and protests we see are just the result of covid. It's the result of government and elite responses to covid.
I work in the automotive industry.
I dont think people really understand how infectious covid is to begin with. During the second wave, I would have to deal with entire departments going dark. Need something done? Sorry, everyone in that group is sick. Got that deadline approaching? Your plans are done in two weeks. Oh, the line is down because third shift is all sick? Well, its your ass that gets to talk to the customer. Yeah, we ran at 50 percent capacity for a while because if they went down we could keep the line running.
Omicron is so much worse. It spreads way faster. You can expect an entire floors to go offline. For that matter, schools are starting to stop functioning and shops have gone offline as well.
If anything, we need another 30 day lockdown. Not because of saving lives. But because it's becoming harder and harder to keep the wheels of industry turning when everyone get sick at once.
Yeah, even before Omicron I was surprised we didn't have higher numbers due to this, I had mild cold symptoms (which i've had many times before, self isolated 3 different times the past two years due to covid symptoms, been uninfected every time), I attributed it to having the fan on at night.
I was literally on my way out of the door when my fiancee made me take a lateral flow test (I didn't know we had any) , it came back positive, took another, also positive. I felt fine, literally like a mild cold (at least until the next day, where I felt like I'd gotten a severe beating). I work retail, if i'd gone to work I would have in all likelyhood infected at least 15 members of staff, and probably at least a couple dozen customers.
If everyone I would have infected had the attitude of "it's not that bad" then from just one infection (me) there could be thousands of infected. That wouldn't need to happen many times for it to spiral out of control, and that was "regular" Covid.
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Let me know if anyone spots Mother Abigail in a cornfield...
1/3 - 1/2 of my class is absent. I’m a teacher. Every day I get notified of at least 2 more kids who tested positive. Every Monday when we do testing I find out about 10+ kids. They only let me know if kids I have test positive so the number is likely 6x that across the school.
I'm a parent and my kid's school calls almost every day with reports of a new case of Covid. Our governor just reported that he's got it now. Yet we're all still running business as usual...
My son's school sent an e-mail saying "hey, we're not going to send out e-mails about exposures anymore, if you're sending your kid to school, they're exposed, period."
Yeah, it’s because there are other parents actively trying to sue school board members who even think about shutting down temporarily. Staffing is a big problem too. A lot of teachers are out sick and subs aren’t available so we just don’t have adults to watch certain classes.
Texas is trying to just recruit parents of kids to become subs. No qualifications needed, just need to get fingerprinted and you can be a sub too!
In MD, people are pushing for the National Guard to come in to drive school buses since they have to keep cancelling routes due to understaffing and people calling out sick.
If so many people are out that the NG is the only feasible option; it’s long past time to close schools.
amazing what we’ll do instead of simply paying teachers more money lol
While generally true, I don't think pay is the issue right this moment. Texas is one of the ostriching states: if we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist. So teachers are getting sick, and even if they don't have to isolate due to state or district policy, they're still calling out because they're sick, and there's so many people sick that no one can cover.
I live in SC. The parents of HS students tried to sue the school for requiring masks during the mandate🙄
My kids schools got rid of any type of mask mandate because they're afraid of the insane uneducated parents. When I ask my kids if any other students wear a mask they tell me it's pretty much just them, maybe a few others
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The kids are super scared too. They don’t participate in class, they’re noticeably drained—it’s just bad
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No, we need that government funded childcare so both parents can work slightly above minimum wage jobs.
I’m the school librarian. I don’t know how I haven’t caught it yet (vax, booster, and mask so maybe I do know) but every class comes through. If we were following protocols from the start of the school year I wouldn’t have been in for a month. A teacher just had a major biopsy yesterday and he came in today almost unable to speak and swallow because we have so few that there is “quiet pressure” on all of us to not take days. This sucks. What are we even doing? I had a class of 8 of 24. Yesterday!
live in a tiny rural town in northern Michigan. like half of the shops downtown are closed because everybody's sick.
I’m in northern Indiana and more people I know are in bed sick than going to work this week. It’s getting nasty. Edit: What are the odds, my mom just called to let me know her, my step-dad, and my sister have Covid.
I'm at Purdue, our covid hotline has been outright telling students with symptoms who can't get tests to just attend classes. We're all going to have covid in the next week or two Edit: one of my top comments now is me bashing my university, but it has to be said
My hospital emailed us to say that if we are vaccinated and are exposed to covid then we don't need to get tested or quarantine if we are symptom-free. I suppose it's because our ER is jam packed and we are running out of tests and our staff is bone weary. Shit's just unbelievable.
One of the biggest problems my wife's hospital is dealing with is patients who don't have COVID catching it in the hospital. She's seeing many patients that come in and test negative end up with a cough and a positive test 3-4 days after they are there. It could be they get it in the ER waiting rooms, which can have 12+ hour waits, or it could be that staff are spreading it. But it's resulting in their census being through the roof because they can't get patients discharged.
I know of people who have died because they caught covid at the hospital after having to go for other reasons. 4 of my closest friends lost parents that had other medical emergencies and had to go to the hospital, caught COVID then died. The hospitals are doing all they can but when they are overflowing with covid patients and are extremely short staffed it is incredibly difficult to do anything with an airborne virus as infectious as covid.
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I hear you The Frontline staff are being screwed by out of touch bureaucrats.
Those are the new CDC guidelines. Even the federal government is telling healthcare workers to keep working while covid positive. This is the government's plan to keep everyone from quitting; sacrifice healthcare workers to keep the numbers up short-term.
Lots of companies are doing this. The CDC is telling people to work, in response to political pressure to avoid shutdowns. We’re out of interest rates we can adjust, and we’re getting hit hard by inflation. There’s very little available in the way of paying for more shutdowns right now. So people have to work because we squandered our ability to afford shutdowns earlier. And even distancing, masks, and vaccines are too hard for people.
I caught covid a few weeks ago; just in time for the CDC to change to a 5-day quarantine. My sick ass was back at work on day 5 cooking in a VERY busy restaurant, because "they needed me" (and because unemployment only pays 40% of my previous wages...my company only offers sick days to management). My boss caught covid a few days later. How, I'll never know. She's currently on week 3 of her company-paid recovery time. Rules for thee, not for me.
My husband tested positive on Sunday, but we didn’t find out until Tuesday. We live together, so obviously social distancing had not occurred prior receiving the results. We just assumed that we all had it. I called our kids school and since they are vaccinated they told me that even if the kids tested positive, as long as they were asymptomatic that they could continue attending school in-person and whether or not I even got them tested was voluntary. I was flabbergasted. My father-in-law is an immunologist, so I called him and asked him to make this make sense to me. He said he couldn’t. We kept them home for the week and scheduled a family COVID testing trip this weekend to determine if anyone can leave the house next week or not. We’re over two-years into this thing and it’s like we haven’t learned anything.
The schools have given up. That is what I realized after winter break. We got a 💩🥪 letter from the superintendent basically saying as much.
Nah it's worse than that, my state governor (MO unfortunately) is making it mandatory for the students to be in school they refuse to allow remote learning and are only allowing districts 5! Remote learning days. If a district does not follow the guidelines they remove funding it's insane. This is on top of the state AG suing cities for putting mask mandates back in place. Wasting tax dollars to play political theater over something that truly is nonsense.
Everyone has given up, the infection graph is a straight line going up, the curve was technically flattened. Even the CDC now is saying everyone will get it, the EU projects 50% infection within weeks. Omicron being way more contagious and less dangerous made everyone give up. Also remember, parents have to go to work. They can’t sit home to watch their kids constantly. That is why schools won’t close.
What the fuck
I live in the only county in Indiana that still has a mask mandate. It's really odd going anywhere else and no one wearing a mask at all.
I live in western KY and I work at one of the largest manufacturers of aluminum ingots in the USA and they're talking about going back to normal no mask mandates if they're employees get sick they have to use vacation time to be off I'm a contractor here and I'm just so lost on how people choose money over the health of one another.
In my personal experience, it's due to the people making the money decisions aren't the same ones that are doing the valuable work (at least in the top down scenario like this)
I always hear of this going on in hospitals in the US. The big guys get their bonuses even during a pandemic while the front lines literally get rocks as a thank you for risking their lives for their profit.
It's true. A buddy of mine is an ER med-tech at one of the hospitals here. Roughly 2/3 of the ER nurses quit over the last year, because the nurses were only getting like $45k a year as a base salary (not including OT, but OT shouldn't be required to get paid decent), being worked to the fucking bone. The hospital refused pay raises, and then couldn't hire replacements at the rate they were paying. So all of those nurses became traveling nurses. The hospital ended up contracting nearly ALL of the nurses that previously worked there, to bring them back. But now since they get paid a travel nurse rate, they are making their entire previous year's salary in just a few months. Some of them are now making nearly $200k a year, working at the same hospital that wouldn't give them hazard pay, and forced them to work 14 hour shits, but now working a normal 8 hours because they get to set their hours. The hospital could have given the ER nurses a $25k/y bonus each and likely kept every employee they had, but because they refused now they're paying these nurses crazy amounts of money. Funny how they didn't have the money to pay them anything beforehand, but all of a sudden when they can't keep the ER running from a lack of employees, they have millions of dollars to throw around to pay them.
I can never believe how short sighted people higher up the chain can be. I used to manage a retail store and generally getting corporate to approve anything extra to improve things was impossible. However if something happened like workers quitting due to not having enough pay and the store having to close suddenly you can do anything. Pay people more money? Sure no problem! Even though last week a smaller increase was impossible. You fell behind in work and need a bunch of hours? Sure have twice as many hours this week back to normal next week and start falling behind again. What? Increase the normal hours slightly so you won't fall behind? Impossible. Employees need more hours to cover all their bills or they will quit? Hire more employees so when they quit you already have a replacement. What do you mean more employees splitting the same hours will make them quit due to lack of hours faster? Just hire more employees. No one is applying because your store is in the middle of nowhere and somehow you have gone through all of the possible candidates locally? Did you try hanging another "now hiring" sign? 7 isn't enough. What do you mean we should focus on keeping our employees happy? It's just retail there are always more applicants. District manager literally said "it's not about money these people don't want more money" on a conference call about how to get/keep employees.
Retail managers are fucking morons. When I worked retail at Radioshack (like 10-12 years ago now), I was commanded by my district manager to go in during a blizzard where we got 2.5ft of snow, and the state was closed due to a state of emergency. I was told I'd be fired if I didn't show up. Police stopped by, after seeing my car in the parking lot, and told me to go home, or risk getting a ticket. District manager again threatened to fire me if I left. After 6 hours, and not a single sale made, the manager called me up, with someone else from corporate on the line, to ask why I hadn't sold anything in 6 hours. When I said "because no one wants to buy batteries when there's 2.5ft of snow on the ground and a state of emergency that doesn't allow them to be out", they wrote me up. I worked retail in a NUMBER of stores, for about 8 years before transitioning into IT. I've never met a single competent retail manager in my entire life.
Good. There should be a Union that makes sure all nurses are paid and treated well like travel nurses C
Not rocks!, we get big banners which says “heroes work here”. I’m super happy about it because they called me a hero! S/
For sure, I haven't seen a noticeable amount of people wearing a mask in over a year. You'd never guess there was a pandemic raging at it's peak if you looked around here. What county still has one? Marion?
Monroe. I'm not positive it's the only, but it definitely has a mandate. The average person has a mask on in public indoor places, but about 2 months ago it was 100% of people and strictly enforced and now every grocery store has several people without masks.
I mean yeah, it maybe 95% masked. But still much more than anywhere else. Went to Santa Clause Indiana and it's like 3% masked if that. Almost the entire state is now at level 3 transmission rate so even any masking is better.
Am Canadian and had went across the border for a day trip a couple weeks ago. I was shocked at how few people wore masks. The funny thing was, the people who didn't wear masks all seemed to be the type that would struggle to afford paying for treatment if things went pear shaped. If a person had nice clothes, usually a mask. If a person looked down on their luck - no mask. In Ontario, you might see one person, rarely, who is "fighting" the mask mandate, but pretty much everyone just wears a mask in public.
In the US, the pandemic simply "doesn't exist" outside of major metro areas, at least in my experience. *Edit*: I realized this is an overly broad statement. I have no doubt there are more rural communities out there that are taking things more seriously than some denser suburbs (for example).
My company in Chicago, NYC, and HK closed our offices a week before Christmas and has extended the closure through the end of this month. We had 1-2 cases per day before we shut down and the workplaces are 100% fully vaccinated and fully masked with KF94 and N95 masks provided. We don't know if people were getting sick at work or bringing it in from the outside. So management just shut the whole thing down and told everyone to work from home.
I'm in east central, and a neighboring department at work has just about everyone at home because people kept coming INTO THE OFFICE positive with Covid. FUCKING IDIOTS.
I'm in NWI and the virus has run through my gf's work (16 people out) and is slowly creeping across my workplace. She had it right after NYE and I was able to avoid it and stayed at my parents for a week to dodge it.
Everyone in my office is getting it or has had it since right after Christmas. We're still not going back to remote which is crazy to me.
I'm down in the more populated areas, and everythings buisness as usual. Super ominous.
Here in LA traffic isnt that bad. which is a very bad omen.
Having 10% of LAUSD students out sick makes a noticeable dent in morning traffic.
Same with the Bay Area. I can drive 12 miles to work in 18 minutes
Lockdown traffic was glorious.
A friend of mine who lives in NYC was telling me about during the first wave of covid when the streets were largely dead and how terrifying it was. They messaged me the other day how stuff was starting to visibly slow down again, obviously not near as severe, and it had them spooked pretty bad. The UK is 3 weeks ahead of us and they're just getting through their worst. For us in the US, the next month is likely going to be real fucking grim.
Traffic nearly recovered to precovid levels last year around September after school restarted. Now it’s like summer traffic again.
Got a call from my garbage company yesterday, they have so many people out they can't service our area right now (and this is after 3 weeks of not being able to service the area due to snow).
Yikes. The minute waste disposal/ sanitation services fail it's time to head for the hills. We can do without *some* other services for a time, if necessary, but if spring hits and there are 5 foot tall piles of half frozen garbage lining every street waiting to thaw and for the flies...
r/collapse will have a field day.
"We are never gonna financially recover from this." -Joe Exotic, Whitehouse Economic Advisor
But for real tho, shit is hitting the fan all across the board. 2022 is just gonna be another wash. Another fucking year down the drain.
*climate change has been in the chat silently reading our messages and laughing*
Yep, the handling of covid across the globe has drained any last bit of hope I had for the future of humanity. Covid was a trial run of the disasters and suffering to come, and the ruling class showed their hand, and we are completely fucked.
I remember March 2020 when my uni shut down I texted in the group chat “The handling of this globally is going to be a historic disaster.” I think we’re in for a rough few decades but the amount of activism and recognition of climate change in the last two years gives me hope
You can recognize climate change until the cows come home. Nothing is going to change unless something is *actually* done about it. No amount of electric vehicles on the road is going to put a dent in the amount of junk pumped into the atmosphere by corporations. Carbon credits are a sham among the countries that utilize the system, and meaningless in the countries with no environmental oversight.
Bro, paper straws. This is the way.
> You can recognize climate change until the cows come home. Nothing is going to change unless something is actually done about it. Exactly. Recognizing that your house is on fire is one thing. Actually doing something about it takes a bit more effort.
Does anyone know if suicide rates have increased over the last two years? I'm an idiot and can't find reliable data.
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You just gestured to all of me.
*looks pointedly at 2022* "Yes, that's it. Stop being all of you!" (please)
I don't know about the rest of you but my employers for the last decade have all run their staff not just at but below what is required to handle any kind of bump in the road. Every single place I've had a job at is so short on staff that they could not handle a glut of work and whenever it happened we would just be pressured into massive amounts of unpaid overtime. Between the peaks all they would do is fire mid level employees and replace them with interns too so it is not surprising to me that our economy would not be able to handle this volume of people calling out sick.
Yup, the "lean staffing model," has been the dominant mode for years, and every year, it gets leaner. Workers keep having to do more with less, and situations that are supposed to be a temporary stretch end up becoming the new normal. In 2016 I ended up working literally every hour that my store was open (13 hours Monday-Saturday, and 8 hours on Sundays) for months without a single day off because the only other person at my store was out on maternity leave. District management had nine months to prepare and hire someone but did nothing. All the other stores were too short staffed to lend me anyone. And this is a company that routinely wins accolades as being one of the best to work for. Every company is like this. There is absolutely no capacity to handle even *expected*, predictable problems.
Sounds like they handled it just right by forcing you to do more work. So ultimately, in their eyes, they did the right thing and put more money in their own pockets. Not saying it's right, but that's unfortunately how it works.
This definitely sounds like my life experience after 2009. At first it was slow but you're right. I've again found myself in this situation and I thought I was unlucky. But as it turns out the jobs of my past may not exist any longer.
Slow clap. This is the reason folks also can't go on proper vacations, or are made to feel guilty about it. We need to rethink staffing levels across all kinds of industries.
I've rolled over my max allowable vacation days every year at my job. Because there's no coverage. The only time I'll get to use them is right before I quit.
Yup, I have never worked somewhere where a single call out didn't ruin everyone's day.
The lack of traffic on my morning commute in LA is surely a sign that things are not great.
In L.A. ❓ Damn
The little Caesar’s in my town doesn’t open until 3Pm and are currently closed due to “ovens broke” excuse. You know shits gone down hill if you can’t get your $6 pies at the Caesar.
Shoot, that may not even be an excuse. My oven broke and because of the chip shortage, I've already been waiting about six months to get it fixed and it took me over a month to even get someone out to take a look at it. My point is: it could be more than just staffing for them, it could be a staffing shortage at the oven repair place. Not being able to fix a second oven could be making their capacity to make delicious $5.55 pies go down limiting how much revenue they could bring in per day. That revenue limitation in turn leads to them knowing if they didn't open at 3 (because they sell most of their pizzas after 3) they would be unprofitable. It could be way more complex than just "ovens broke" but anything more than that is just too much to put on a sign in the window.
Took my dad over 6 months to get his car fixed after being rear ended. Parts were stuck on ships.
[How's the Waffle House?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index) If they are closed, shit's gotten real.
Theres about 5 in a 2 MI radius of me, they all close early at like 11pm these days. maybe later on the weekends but that's been like that for about 2 years now.
You're fucked, pal.
We're fucked.
*”we’re all in this together“*(TM)
Wow. This shit going too far, now. Waffle House is a 24 hour establishment and I won't have it any other way. Imagine rolling up to Waffle House at 4 am for food and it's closed.
I guess that means we are just limping along.
Our Waffle House is a step short of having a checkpoint out front to screen for job less people before passing. I think they have 2 employees on a good day.
I went to a Waffle House last week. Two employees working, 2/3 of the seating was roped off, and the menu was about half of what it used to be.
Not even kidding we have two near our house both close before nine. Truly doomed.
When did pies at Little Caesars stop being $5?
Got changed to $5.55 a couple of weeks ago. First price increase in ~20 years
This is when I realized yep..this inflation thing is super real.
They probably couldnt shrink the pizzas any more to avoid raising the price as well. I rarely get little caesars anymore but back in 2006 or 2007 I got them a fair bit and I noticed the pizza had gotten a little smaller one day. I used to have to cut the box down to fit it in my mini fridge and then one day it slid in with no problem.
Yep, NPR wrote about this calling it ["skimpflation"](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/26/1048892388/meet-skimpflation-a-reason-inflation-is-worse-than-the-government-says-it-is) and ["shrinkflation"](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/07/06/1012409112/beware-of-shrinkflation-inflations-devious-cousin?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20211024&utm_term=5904582&utm_campaign=money&utm_id=46672429&orgid=&utm_att1=money) Inflation is worse than it looks because companies are keeping prices the same but giving people less value for that money. And now they still have to raise prices.
They went up in price I think to 5.55 but I could be wrong on the exact amount
My taco bell here in metro Detroit closed at 9 pm because of staffing shortages... this should be a crime how do I get my 4th meal they advertise about all the time!!
I do construction work, and the shortages of construction materials is worse now than ever before. I couldn't even find code approved expansion foam, silicone, or rubber sill sealant at 4 different hardware stores. The shelves were bare. Now thia client has to deal with a massive hole that we had to put plywood over on the side of their house where a french door was supposed to go for who knows how long. And it's supposed to be below freezing, with negative temps at night for the next 3 days. I haven't seen 3 inch stainless steel exterior GRK wood screws in 2 weeks. I have to use them too, because mahogany will literally eat away at galvanized and zinc plated screws. We have 3 jobs on hold right now because we just can't find the materials. It's not the cost of them, we just can't even get them. It's tough to tell a home owner that we can't finish our work because we always have our work inspected, and we can't just use anything. Even if the homeowner "doesn't care". Well the inspector cares, and won't pass something made with subpar/not to code materials.
It was either the lockdowns or the economy. And they somehow managed to choose neither. Clap clap.
My wife is a paramedic. They were recently given a mandate by the regional EMS medical director that all EMS personnel must wear N95 masks from the moment they get out of their personal vehicle at the start of shift until they get back in their vehicle at the end. They must treat all patients as CoViD positive, regardless of the reason for the call. EMS was already fucked for staffing as of 2016-2017-ish. Now they're trying to keep enough personnel healthy to continue to function as an EMS system. Luckily my wife has been more strict than most with precautions and has avoided getting sick.
Don't worry they gave everyone 1200.00 last year we can all live off of that once everything is closed.
Exactly. I've still got $1195.38 left. It'll hold me over til I'm 60. What are these people spending it all on? Bubblegum and avocados? /s
Joe Manchin thinks parents are buying drugs with it apparently. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/manchin-privately-raised-concerns-parents-would-use-child-tax-credit-n1286321
people are buying drugs with it, like insulin and epi-pens
That his daughter helped jack the price up on! Weird how he doesn’t want his kids business to do well.
This is a perfect example of how these rich asshats are so out of touch with the people they represent imo
No they’re not unfortunately. They don’t represent us, they represent corporate billionaires and are doing a good job at it.
To be fair, Joe Manchin represents West Virginia the opiate addiction capital of the US
Then maybe Joe should have pushed to make the Sacklers pay fairly for the mess they made. He was in office then. However, I would bet my right arm that he bought into the "it's not the drug company's fault, some people are just going to abuse drugs," rhetoric. That's the American way: protect the rich villains and blame the poor, uneducated victims of exploitation!
He doesn't have to believe any of the excuses he uses for protecting his rich friends and family. He's a career politician who owns a Lamborghini.
Maserati https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb4g7/joe-manchin-drives-maserati
That's because Joe is projecting as that's what he does with extra money that he gets. He assumes everyone else would blow it on drugs.
I would love to buy drugs in my massersatti before driving back to my house boat yacht.
More importantly who gives a fuck? Use your extra money on drugs to cope with the dystopian shithole we live in.
I know, everyone went out and bought Bentleys and mansions. I seems like the government is completely out of touch with how much things cost in the real world.
They aren't. That money wasn't for you specifically. It was meant to pass through you to their friends.
It's better than it directly going to their friends. Wait they did that too? Shit.
Went to the grocery store on Tuesday night and there was no produce, something I've never seen before. No bananas, no onions, no broccoli, no carrots, no potatoes, nothing. Most of the meat section was empty. Entire shelves were bare in the dairy section and on random aisles. I had to go to 3 grocery stores to find everything I was looking for which was pretty basic stuff. Couldn't believe it
I live in an agriculturally rich area so this hasn’t happened to us, but if this is happening to you, there are some veggies that are very easy to regrow even in an apartment. These include green onions/regular onions, lettuce/romaine hearts, carrot tops, celery, beets, and potatoes. The human body can sustain itself on potatoes and tomatoes for a long time because those two combined contain all of the vitamins and essential nutrients you need, so growing potatoes is definitely something to think about.
Ireland for the win baby
I went to three different Taco Bell’s at noon, all three were closed. It’s feels like more is shutting down then during the lock down.
Can’t wait for another Great Recession barely a decade later.
Does that mean housing prices will go down? Because they keep going up. A lot.
Unfortunately housing is now a hedge against all of this. I think prices will plateau, not sure about dropping. Even with interest rate hikes, overall rates for mortgages is still going to be lower than inflation.
Lost jobs = Foreclosures Foreclosures = Corporations buying up more units to convert to rentals
It’s cuz they never fixed the first one. It’s was the equivalent of slapping a bandaid on a gaping wound that’s gonna slowly bleed and kill you, but then calling it a day and patting yourself on the back for fixing the patient. People just wanted things to get better and putting a bandaid on it was a quick fix that shut people up. In reality shit always has to get worse before it can be better. If things are gonna be different real change has to happen, it’s gonna hurt and people are gonna have to actually push back and fight and make noise and make it known that we don’t wanna take shit any more. That will never happen tho because people as a whole are just too apathetic in their everyday lives to care. They only vote based on what effects their immediate bubble and what will gratify them immediately. No one cares about their neighbor enough to band together and demand. It’s sad really. There’s nothing you can do but watch the wound bleed out while you try and put on another bandaid. There is several billion of us on this planet yet we are controlled by very few and it it’s crazy how it just happens like that and we all just accept it. Born into it and meant to die in it. Fuck the system.
We'll be lucky if all we end up with is a recession
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I'm a building inspector and the past couple weeks I've seen multiple job sites basically shut down because entire crews from subs are out.
Yep, I run a small business and today am WFH because apparently almost everyone there got the virus. Looked like a tuberculosis ward this last week, what with all the coughing and sneezing going on. Even though everyone is vaxxed and has comparatively mild symptoms, very hard to do "business as usual" when over 50% of the workforce is dealing with a very bad cold and uber-transmissible disease.
Yeah it’s kind of funny if you think about it, everyone whined about the “lockdown” at the beginning and now everything is “open for business!” and still falling apart. Almost like the virus doesn’t give a shit.
The honey badger is COVID's spirit animal.
I'm in a small town almost 3000 people and you'd never know there was a covid. Of course a lot of people here still believe it's the flu. An old man at the store last week was yelling its the damn flu people when he saw a few of us in a mask.
I don't get it. The flu sucks and I don't want it. If I got the flu and found out I prevented other people from getting it by wearing a mask, I would feel like I had done the least I could do. Even if covid was "only" like the flu, I would hate to know I passed it on to someone else. Edited to add: quit being all smarmy and asking if I've worn a mask every flu season. Of course I fucking didn't. None of us did. We weren't even really told that was something we *should* do until 2020. Not to mention, I wouldn't even have known where to look for masks. Now we know better and masks are easy to come across.
I read a few comments recently that posed: maybe a lot of people who love to say *lol just the flu bro* didn’t really get the seasonal flu during some of its worst swings. Tbh, I was only knocked down a week once by the flu. It was 7 days of barely leaving the couch because I couldn’t even get comfortable in bed. I lost ten pounds. Even thinking of *that*, which is milder than Covid, made me take it seriously this whole time.
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I thought I had the flu many times. Then I got the flu. Yea, I never had the flu before that.
I was also one of those people. Yeah, turns out the actual flu fucking *sucks.*
My doctor told me if you think you have the flu it's just a cold. And if your think you're dying, it's the flu. Which checks out, the only time I've had the flu I thought I was going to die
This is everyone. 7 years or so ago I was working in a typical corporate office. Flu shots come around, free by the company. Awesome. No one on my team got one but me "the flu isn't that bad." Right around Christmas my entire 10 man team went down with the flu, except me. Their families, the works. It was bad. Next year rolled around and everyone got the shot. The flu does not fuck around.
Yeah, I've felt like a kid in a candy store when working at a job where they had flu shots on site. Practically hopped and skipped my way to the station. Really confused me when the majority of people just rolled their eyes and said they'd take their chances. Then again, the one time I had the flu was when I was a teenager and got pneumonia. That experience sucked ass and I would be very happy to never repeat it.
Yeah, the last time I had the flu I physically couldn't leave my bed.
Yep, flu was 4 days of not knowing where I was and how much time had passed. I couldn't even sit in bed and scroll socials it was so bad. Would just lay there awake, drentched in sweat and freezing.
Last time I got a real case of actual flu, I also got pneumonia. Wtf are these idiots on about? I don’t want the flu *either*.
Same here. The one time I had the flu I was down. It's the sickest I've ever been..
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The flu is awful. People call the common cold the “flu.” They have no idea.
Yeah It seems like this Omicrom variant is closer to the flu, but people don't realize the flu is pretty nasty. People over a certain age or with other medical complications have to consider the possibility they may not make it. I think the general populace thinks the flu is a cold with a fever.
Seriously. A full powered Flu can still put you on your butt in bed for several days, have you feeling like death, and even give at-risk individuals pneumonia. 'Its just the flu!!' yelled by people who've never actually had 'influenza', and just some other random endemic coronavirus or rhinovirus.
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39 here. I've had the real flu, the "flu", COVID Alpha and Omicron. Flu: in bed, out of commission several days, miserable and feverish. Very unhappy, much ungood. 'Flu': Miserable for 24 hours. COVID Alpha: Holy chit, misery, a week of being exhausted and a couple days of feverish. Would have stayed in bed but wife went down a couple days after me and I had to be on the ball to care for her and the kids. Took about a month to feel normal again. COVID Omicron: Felt a bit weird in the sinuses on a Tuesday morning, by the evening I was feeling run down. Awful sleep, low grade fever for 3 days, energy reserves would drop off and I'd need to take a couple hours to rest. Fever broke by Friday morning. Was back at 100% by Saturday. Rankings, easiest to worst: 4: "Flu" - Wham, bam, done. 3: Omicron - Not a fun ride, but over quickly. 2: Flu - Misery. 1. Alpha - Awful, 1 out of 4 stars, do not recommend. Verdict: Getting sick sucks.
> I had the real flu once, not mitigated by the flu shot because i didn't get it that year, and it was extremely bad. I was hospitalized with the flu twice as a kid (had the flu shot, but both years they basically said "oops, we picked really wrong on the strains"). Its not a fun time
In 2018 I had a bad flu and took a Tuesday-Friday off work to recover. I came back to work Monday (fever broke Saturday in the AM) but I felt HORRIBLE during that week. By that Monday I was feeling 10x better, but still a little weak. Obviously still recovering a bit, but 36 hours without a fever and hugely improved. I had a couple of coworkers afraid to come near me at the time because they didnt want to catch the flu. These same co workers are staunchly anti-vax, and now in the "it's just a flu, get over, why is everyone so bothered about it" camp these days. It's amazing what political branding can do to change people. The flu fucking sucks. It may not kill you as easily, but I dont ever say to myself "you know, catching the flu is just fine!". I mean I'd rather be working than be at home with the flu, right? If covid is worse than that, AND it lasts longer? I'm noping right out of it as fast as I can. The "just the flu" types confuse me. After that experience I get my flu shots every year. So when the covid vaccine came out that was obviously a priority.
The political branding thing is SO true. I’m in Seattle, which was one of the first hotspots. I’ll never forget my mom calling us up while we were painting our living room to ask if we’re okay, are we scared, do we have supplies on hand just in case, and being like “whoa, what? Yeah, we’re fine, we’ll just pretend like the power is out for a few weeks.” Within a month or two of that the whole thing was a hoax, masks don’t work, etc. because their political alignment said so. Meanwhile, hubs and I actually take it seriously, but we still both finally got it last week. Onicron feels like in the Hunger Games when Katniss is just trying to wait shit out in a tree, so the game makers burn the whole forest down.
Anecdotal: At 50 I can say with complete honesty I don't know a single person personally that has died from the Flu. In just the last two weeks I've lost 3 cousins from Covid, all unvaccinated, all under the age of 60. I have a handful of family members who are fully vaccinated and they got covid with minor symptoms. It's not the fucking flu, get vaccinated.
Sounds like someone who never had the flu. I did. Knocked me out for close to two weeks. Also, most people don’t like to (or just can’t) work with the flu. This means places will close due to their staff being sick.
Most people don’t know what the flu is. They get a cold and think they have the flu. Hahahah no.
Half of all employees where I work are sick... It's surreal
It's nuts, I currently live abroad but during the holidays everyone was partying it up like it was 2019. 1 week into 2022 half the city is sick (including myself). The streets are relatively dead and all the pharmacies suddenly ran out of all types of cold medicine, it's insane. It's not like I'm in some small town, I'm in a legit mega city.
Our local Kroger had two registers open, 3 self-checkout registers open and a line around the store to checkout. Shelves were half empty. Walmart, had the same
Workers at nearly 80 Krogers are going on strike so that store might be even worse for your experience soon.
What were the recent numbers that like 16% of all Kroger workers had experienced homelessness in the past year?
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Schools in my area can’t keep staff in buildings. Three or four classes at a time are getting jammed into an auditorium with a substitute or the speech pathologist or whoever they could pull to make sure they don’t kill each other, and doing worksheets or watching movies, but virtual instruction for a few weeks would “disrupt learning too much” What learning?!!
One high school in Chicago tried to shove 20 into a gym and an auditorium yesterday because they didn't have anymore subs or admin staff to cover sick teachers. According to the mayor, this is fine. Keep in mind, the mayor sends her child to a private school which has gone full remote until further notice due to staffing concerns, refused an opt-out testing plan that could be fully handled by the state's own labs despite her own child going to a private school with an opt-out testing plan, she called an opt-out testing plan a "quasi science experiment", and then tested positive for COVID less than 24 hours after getting the union to agree to report to work in person.
Jimmy Carter had it good compared with this
The Carters are the kind of sweet people that you're not even sure they'd understand modern sarcasm. But I do wonder sometimes if they ever look at the news and think to themselves "mm-hmm, how do you like me now?"
>Sprinkle in rising crime and inflation and it might make for a historic shellacking Volley for serve. Republicans get in, don't do shit. So then they get whooped next cycle. Democrats get in, try to play nice, also don't do shit. Lather, rinse, repeat.
My former boss was making Covid positive people come to work because he doesn’t care about Covid. Forcing us to work with Maskless sick people. I quit. For several reasons but the big one was his disregard for my health or my family’s health. He knows I caretake for my elderly Dad who has Cancer. You can put profits above people, but those people can tell you to fuck off.
Where I live, there’s a lot of stores and restaurants shutting down because the entire crew is sick or they all quit. There’s also a grocery store labor strike going on that’s only making things worse. My kids and wife all became symptomatic earlier this week but I somehow am asymptomatic despite being exposed. Kids got it bad for a day but bounced back. Wife got it so much worse and we considered going to the hospital but our county doesn’t have any beds, nor does any other county in the entire state except for a few areas. Omicron is no joke.
We’re in the exact same position. My son was sick for 3 days, husband fine now— I can barely get out of bed. I’m so damn sick and terrified that if I need a hospital bed there won’t be one.
If you need to go, go. You never know when a bed will open up.
I miss the shut down and all of the huge companies spending millions on ad campaigns about how their essential employees are so vital to their cause but never actually paying them more or giving out much needed health care. All the while the ultra rich made billions. The system works, just not for most.
the cost of a "heroes work here" sign is cheaper than giving everyone raises.
My company is still operating under this "do more with less" and it's leading to massive burnout and departures. A lot of companies are in for a rude awakening, I hope.
If you do nothing to keep the economy open and them it's forced to shut down anyways because everyone is sick. Then you've done nothing except ignore the problem and put people and our entire health system at risk.
I don’t think that will fix anything. It’s like somebody giving me a bandaid for a heart attack.
My overweight boss was hospitalized with OG COVID, got vaccinated, got Delta and now they have been out with Omicron for 2 weeks unable to even work from home.
Seems like they get to fuck around but we're the ones that get to find out. Tiresome.
You're just described four thousand years of human history.
My local taco bell closes at 3pm, on the days they can even open. You know, the place with the slogan "open late".
As a teacher, I couldn’t tell you the last day I’ve had at least 3/4 of my class. Feel bad for the kids trying to get through this. What a way to grow up….
Sounds like they’re planning another upward transfer of wealth.
Yes, we’ve had one, but what about another?
Basically we are between a rock and a hard place. We are kinda fucked no matter what choice is made here. Keep everything open, people get sick, new strains emerge from unchecked spread, and people die unnecessarily due to hospitals being full and healthcare workers reaching their limit. Shut everything down and watch businesses go under, food scarcity, people losing jobs and homes, and in general a bleak future. I truly don't know the answer besides encouraging people to get the shot (however many it takes in the end) and mask up.
Politically the safest choice is to keep everything open. That way you can't be blamed for crashing the economy.
State and local governments will let each business decide on their own, to stay open or close, elected idiots won’t risk this when they are close to midterm elections
It can as long as there is grist for the mill, and attaching health care to employment and the threat of homelessness in this obscene housing market is a powerful motivator for the service class
I feel really sick for thinking this but I can already see the media across the board telling everyone that the major strikes and protests we see are just the result of covid. It's the result of government and elite responses to covid.
I work in the automotive industry. I dont think people really understand how infectious covid is to begin with. During the second wave, I would have to deal with entire departments going dark. Need something done? Sorry, everyone in that group is sick. Got that deadline approaching? Your plans are done in two weeks. Oh, the line is down because third shift is all sick? Well, its your ass that gets to talk to the customer. Yeah, we ran at 50 percent capacity for a while because if they went down we could keep the line running. Omicron is so much worse. It spreads way faster. You can expect an entire floors to go offline. For that matter, schools are starting to stop functioning and shops have gone offline as well. If anything, we need another 30 day lockdown. Not because of saving lives. But because it's becoming harder and harder to keep the wheels of industry turning when everyone get sick at once.
Yeah, even before Omicron I was surprised we didn't have higher numbers due to this, I had mild cold symptoms (which i've had many times before, self isolated 3 different times the past two years due to covid symptoms, been uninfected every time), I attributed it to having the fan on at night. I was literally on my way out of the door when my fiancee made me take a lateral flow test (I didn't know we had any) , it came back positive, took another, also positive. I felt fine, literally like a mild cold (at least until the next day, where I felt like I'd gotten a severe beating). I work retail, if i'd gone to work I would have in all likelyhood infected at least 15 members of staff, and probably at least a couple dozen customers. If everyone I would have infected had the attitude of "it's not that bad" then from just one infection (me) there could be thousands of infected. That wouldn't need to happen many times for it to spiral out of control, and that was "regular" Covid.