#i have a flu bare with me

[faunandfloraas]

fav skz // Save the baby bread.

[savage-rhi]

Magenta 😟

[britneyshakespeare]

I actually feel so sick and miserable

[l8tof1]

looking at the schedule for this weekend, i will only watch practice and sprint quali live i think 🙃 and race 1 and 3 of f1 academy

[awek-s]

if I ever recover from this sickness and I don’t die I’m gonna kick my own ass for not sending a next day delivery envelope to the dvla

[celepeace]

I want to go outside and find wildlife and go hiking and cook elaborate meals and go birdwatching and go on day trips and make things and reorganize my house but it feels like I'm trapped in a meat prison that can only charge up to 10% battery

[scarletfasinera]

Forgot to update everyone: I do not have covid! I'm just sick and my mother happens to have covid at the same time

[zevrans-remade]

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[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

Guess who has COVID and it's so much worse than last time?

[youremyonlyhope]

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[sesamenom-misc]

adding these additions from @vaspider in the reblogs in because yes, allergies/celiac CAN actually be That Sensitive. two weeks ago I nearly had to go to the ER because I was in the same building as a popcorn machine dispensing buttered popcorn, using "dairy free" butter with artificial flavoring vaguely derived from casein/dairy butter for two minutes. i am allergic to the flu vaccine because the viruses are grown in chicken eggs. i am allergic to the very air in starbucks. my immune system can detect egg and dairy contamination in concentrations too small to be legally required to be labeled.

polyculture crops definitely are an improvement for the vast majority of people, but the impact on the minority people consists of symptoms ranging from "miserable and unable to work for a week" to "death". personally, I do support finding better/more sustainable agricultural practices to replace the Corn Monoculture TM, but it is in some cases a literal matter of life and death for products such as walnut-grown wheat and wheat-grown walnut to be clearly and properly labeled, and for those products to not be the only available and/or affordable options at any given grocery store.

[popcorn-plots]

is it normal for my mom to want nothing to do with me when I'm sick

no cuddles, no hugs, no anything until I'm better so she doesn't get sick. which. I get that, but I just want some comfort while I'm feeling like total shit.

[captainhongjoong]

thinking about doing something fun for my birthday this year since i'll be 30 but idk what and my mom is taking off work that day

i don't think i have much vacation time left after korea and she is not really a big city traveling person but all i can really think is i want to go to new york

[terrminallycapricious]

((instant migraine from fear from viral sickness fear stuff in my house right now so im sorry fi im really slow or am confusing when replying im not well at the moment))

[threnodians]

having a breakdown because i’m severely depressed and i have been so stressed lately and i am so fucking sick of constantly feeling like shit and death and exhausted and miserable

[infiniteglitterfall]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)