It is easy to do an at-home nasal swab test when you are infected but before the viral load has gotten to the point of being highly contagious, at which point you think you are negative but really will soon become contagious.
"Reasonable precautions" would have to be very rigorous, and I have to imagine it would be easy to cave and relax precautions as loneliness sets in.
They’re often late with details for this reason.
It is practically impossible to avoid catching covid in modern society.
'On a long enough timeline everyone's chance of survival drops to zero.'
For the average human going about an ordinary and active life that statement is quite true.
However, the person in question didn't lead an ordinary life. He was confined to a medical device and probably very rarely had in-person contact with random people. Besides, the people who met him personally all must have known about his condition.
Under such circumstances avoiding COVID-19 is actually pretty easy: Have everyone in the room wear high-quality face masks.
Even for the average person during the height of the pandemic, avoiding COVID-19 was still possible, but required significant effort (no lockdowns though, mind you): Basically, it meant wearing such a mask properly in public settings (and changing it at appropriate intervals) as well as frequent testing of everyone you were in touch with regularly.
Here, we report on a 62-year-old male hypervaccinated individual from Magdeburg, Germany (HIM), who deliberately and for private reasons received 217 vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 within a period of 29 months (figure A; appendix 1 tab 1).
Furthermore, HIM had no signs of a past SARS-CoV-2 infection, as indicated by repeatedly negative SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests, PCRs and nucleocapsid serology (figure A; appendix 1 tab 1).I’d suggest instead focusing on that this man managed to live a fulfilling and accomplished life in what I would be terrified of being in for even one day.
Rest in peace sir. You are not a cultural war bargaining chip.
Edit: the quote below (Palahniuk, fight club I believe,) is an actuarial reality.
As somebody with a medical condition since birth, this line really hit home. I'm not speaking for Mr. Alexander, but for myself "used to it" is such a great way of putting the odd experience of living with frequent and cumbersome medical intervention.
On the one hand you have no choice so it is quite easy. You just do it. On the other hand there are often periods here and there through your life where you wrestle with the treatment, complain about it, explore other options, etc. But then a new option does come around every so often and, well, some times you stick with what you know even though there are "better" options.
"used to it" is such a disarmingly accurate way of putting it. It is simultaneously the most difficult and easy thing to do.
Requiem aeternum Paul Alexander.
Yet everyone I've ever spoken to that happened to has a simple answer: "not difficult at all. It isn't there". One put it like "I'm also not a tiger and can't jump 8 meters high. It's similar".
Very strange how adaptable humans are sometimes.
But I remember asking him when we were teens and he me gave a really good answer about how he's learnt to interact with the world as a blind person so for him to be able to see it would a huge hinderance to him at this point – perhaps as much as me being blind.
He'd would need to read and write again. He would need to learn how to use a computer again. He might not like how his girlfriend looks. He would need reorganise his life and activities around the fact he can now see. Would he still be interested in doing the same things if he could see? Might he want to play video games instead of piano in his spare time if he could?
I think in a lot of cases it's not even just not knowing what you're missing, but it's also not worth hassle. If you're content as is then why change things?
Just as sighted people take for granted a lot of things about their sight, I'm not surprised some blind people take many things for granted about their lack of sight -- even when they are negative, frustrating things.
While accessibility has come a long way, it still seems like it would be objectively more difficult to navigate the world blind than sighted.
> One put it like "I'm also not a tiger and can't jump 8 meters high. It's similar".
This makes a lot of sense, even if it's an imperfect analogy. Sometimes, if you have no experience with something, you won't mind not being able to do it, even if you know that a lot of other people can.
But if you look at it the other way: imagine a tiger with mobility issues that can't jump at all. Likely their life will be pretty limited, compared to most tigers.
I'm glad it seems there are (at least in your experience) a lot of people who are blind but don't consider it that big a hindrance. Ultimately what matters in life is that people are happy, and I imagine feeling like your life is constantly difficult due to something like blindness would reduce your happiness.
If you are born without sight, it only exists as an abstract concept for you.
This happens for medication too. If you're on a specific drug for your whole life, it may be disruptive to switch to a different medication even if it's notionally better. I take a pill every morning, and will for the rest of my life, would I prefer one I took every other day? Not really, it sounds like I'd just miss days sometimes. If it had fewer side effects? I haven't noticed any effects now, despite the list in the leaflet so "fewer" doesn't sound like a meaningful improvement.
In the first few days maybe even weeks of taking it I'd have been open to any improvements, but now I've settled into a habit, so any change needs a serious justification.
No, it's nothing as serious as chronic medical conditions and I certainly do not intend to make light of them, but the underlying motives are the same.
Also see: https://xkcd.com/1172/
There are also enormous social pressures to stay in abusive relationships: people feel free to tell you you should stay in a relationship, that it can be fixed, etc. Very few people are willing to tell someone they should leave a relationship. So, what you hear is everyone thinks it should be fixed rather than ended.
There are many practical difficulties in ending a relationship too: financial, legal.
There are also many things in pop culture and media that can encourage it: normalisation of what are actually controlling behaviours, for example. The even "when you are right you are wrong" trope is just one common version of this.
I used cpap for a while and fitting a mask to your face is just a total pain. The default ones would scab my nose, even with foam ones I had to strap is so hard to avoid leaks that it left red marks on my neck for hours after I woke up. You have the change/clean the masks. You risk problems like the recent Phillips one where a component was disintegrating, going into people's lungs and giving them cancer.
The iron lung not having to go over your face would avoid all of those problems so I'm surprised it completely disappeared.
It says he went out with friends, saw movies, and even flew on planes while "frog-breathing", as he called it. He couldn't do it while unconscious so he still had to sleep in the lung.
So, to state it in computing terms, this wasn't a fix for not being able to breathe, it was a workaround. But it seems to have worked really well: at 40, he was "able to spend most of his day outside the machine that still kept him alive".
If this is reported correctly, it would even have been an deliberate choice to not leave more often or entirely.
EDIT: This was seemingly not reported correctly, it seems he only depended on the iron lung while sleeping but could otherwise live without it.
Contracting Covid, unfortunately. :(
Source: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/projekte/artikel/magazin/eiserne...
When I first saw him, I was rather horrified by his predicament. But then I saw that Paul was always upbeat and positive and accomplished. He seemed to live his life to his maximum. And he accomplished more than the average abled person.
I hadn't seen him the past couple weeks (though my TikTok usage is more cautious morbid curiosity and at an arm's length). I guess this explains it.
His story and positive attitude has had a lasting impact on me in making me appreciate and enjoy life more- and to really work to make the best out of whatever is thrown at me.
WOW -- I just read this:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/26/last-iron-lu...
Talk about determination