As a Cusper, it certainly feeds the Boomers ruin everything narrative.

I'm convinced Covid is currently running loose around here, but nobody is testing or tracking it because it is so mild.  Everyone seems to have a dry cough.

I actually dug out an old testing kit on Saturday after taking a 3 hour afternoon nap, and wasn't really surprised to see it come back positive.

Allergy season is a convenient mask for COVID… I’m seeing a lot of little kids with continuously running noses.

Flint wrote:

Years ago when I was really sick with a cold, I thought about how much I never really appreciated the times that I didn't feel like total shit. How different my normal experience was from the intense and all-consuming the sensation of feeling sick. Then I had the depressing thought, "what if I felt like this all the time?" Then I thought of the even-more depressing sci-fi scenario wherein the entire human race was infected with a permanent "super cold" and every living human felt like total shit for their entire lives.

Is this where we're headed? Either 1) nature is smart enough that pervasive infectious organisms are selected to not totally debilitate their hosts, or 2) nature doesn't care about our subjective "experience of living"

...


eta: cognitohazard warning, but if an infectious organism could alter our qualia, how would we know, i.e. how would we know if the subjective, incommunicable experience of consiousness had been changed from how it was in the past?

I got thinking about this when I woke up this morning. In my youth when cycling I'd would get up on my pedals and hammer so smoothly that it just felt effortless. That feeling is something I pursue on the bike now. Whether it's achievable or not is kind of irrelevant, I know how it could feel. What if I never felt that? A lot of folks are riding e-bikes when mountain biking and in my gut I hate it. It's a disconnection between work and output that is the antithesis of my vision of mountain biking. However, if they've never felt a real match between input and output then anything goes. In a world where unrecognized disease has destroyed that connection for a generation of people suddenly cheating yourself out of an experience isn't a cheat.

tw wrote:

It burns gasoline in the exhaust pipe...

Just sayin'...
 

This is a time when "he/she" would be better than "they".

glatt wrote:

Measles.  WTF?

I'm getting an MMR vaccine tomorrow because I don't have copies of my records and I am of an age where I might have received the measles vaccine that doesn't work.

So maybe you saw that over the weekend, someone with active measles flew into Dulles and took the Metro home.  Went to the doctor a day or two later and learned it was measles.  They must have exposed thousands of people from this region.

Maybe the shot tomorrow will be too late.  On the other hand, maybe I don't even need the shot because I might have received one of the booster shots for older kids who got the worthless shots when they were younger.  Hell if I know.

Show of hands, how many of you have actual records of your childhood vaccinations?
 

Another option, if you're not sure you need it (and perhaps want to save the shots for those who do, if they end up in short supply in the future,) is you can ask your doctor for a measles titer test, which will measure the level of antibodies in your blood. That will definitively tell you whether you're currently immune.
 

My mom just wrote down when each of her six kids got what. We got what was called childhood diseases… we didn’t need no stinkin’ vaccines. What doesn’t kill ya makes ya stronger dontchaknow.

I did get the Rubella vaccine while being in-processed for military service since already having had that disease wasn’t a given. I also got enough other shots to make me feel I’d run into a porcupine. That included some they don’t give anymore.

Show of hands, how many of you have been vaccinated for Smallpox?

If only there were vaccines for mental illness

Girls in my era often got smallpox vaccinations on their thighs so the little (sometimes not so little) scars would not show while wear sleeveless blouses or gowns.