AIBU to be sick of people who think it's all back to normal?

[JanusTheFirst]

Woke to the news that my cousin died early this morning of Covid. No underlying conditions and she was vaccinated. But she was elderly. She hardly ever went out but must have picked it up on a rare outing to the local shop.

People are still dying and we should still be looking out for those vulnerable to this awful disease. It isn't all back to normal. My cousin is dead and she wouldn't be but for Covid.

That's the most you can do really.
Lots of people on here don't want to go back to isolating when they're ill though, or to wearing masks in any circumstances. I know many people can't anyway, for a variety of different reasons, but if people can, I think it might help a bit sometimes.

I think I do know what eugenics is, and I certainly know what a eugenicist is with regard to this pandemic. As it is used in this example:

"But the arguments from the eugenicist right are useful to us anyway. The fact that they think the elderly and the sick are acceptable offerings is something we should remember long after the pandemic is over."

nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/eugenics-isnt-going-to-save-you-from-coronavirus.html

Well virtually no one was wearing masks then if you want to split hairs. The day I was out before I was ill with Covid I went for lunch out where I wouldn’t have been wearing a mask anyway. When I felt crap I tested and stayed home for the isolation period

I work from home which makes it easier I suppose.

Yes, a lot easier. Many have no choice but to go in to work sick. I hope some of the wfh options are here to stay, better for the environment too.

It's your comment that was disgusting.

Young people have sacrificed so much already in order to protect people like me. To ask them to sacrifice even more is unthinkable.

That's not eugenics, that's a simple truth.

Right. Perhaps you could point out to me where I said young people should sacrifice anything? You're just making things up!

Anyway, I do apologise - perhaps I picked the wrong one of cuppasoupmonster's 50 plus posts in this thread to make my observation that she was back to expressing her revolting attitudes regarding the worth of older humans, as I see several others have also recognized and mentioned on this thread.

Young people have sacrificed so much already in order to protect people like me. To ask them to sacrifice even more is unthinkable.

Have you forgotten how many vulnerable and elderly people died and are still dying? That's the sacrifice thse communities made.

Asking people to isolate if infected and to wear masks and not spread Covid around is not asking for a huge sacrifice from people. Don't be silly.

I don’t think these things will happen that much. The impetus isn’t there, I see a few doing it but it’s very much the minority.

This discussion is incomplete without acknowledging that isolation in itself makes some people vulnerable, or more so. Conflating vulnerable to covid and vulnerable per se is always a problem, but particularly so here.

But people can't isolate if infected if they have to go to work, can they? What do you expect them to do?

And of course I know how many people died and are still dying. I know of people in their 40s with the same health condition as me - well managed, with immunosuppressant drugs - who died.

I still say that restrictions which affect the mental health and prospects of young people must be an absolute last resort.

They definitely are, wfh is going nowhere. It's now a permanent arrangement that a significant minority of the workforce will be fully or partially remote working. Given that commuting is a pretty environmentally disastrous concept, that's a good thing.

It’s also quite a hard thing for those of us who don’t have home offices/unused rooms to work from. I have to work from the kitchen table, and have to pack away all my equipment including 2 monitors at the end of each working day so my family can eat at the table. I also have a disabled child who is cared for in our home and he doesn’t understand that I’m not on hand to engage with him all day. Forced working from home has been tough on a lot of us.

Of course, just as the situation pre March 2020 with many fewer options for remote working was tough and even made work impossible for some people who have now been able to access the workplace. There's no one size fits all, and more recognition of that is one of the sadly few positives of the last three years. I also work at the kitchen table due to lack of a spare room and have an ND child, and to be honest the latter is one of the main reasons wfh has been so great in our circumstances.

Yes, if our disabled child was able to access education or childcare out of the house I’m sure it wouldn’t be such a problem, it may even help.
As you say, there’s no one size fits all approach, there is just very little discussion around how working from home is awful for some (like me, it caused me to have a breakdown 2 years ago). In fact those who struggle with working from home are often ridiculed for having no friends and therefore needing to go to an office for their social interaction, for example.

I can see that this would be frustrating. It was also the position for those who were excluded or at least disadvantaged by the limited remote working options prior to March 2020. For those of us who were in that group (I remote worked before lockdown) it's often frustrating that the problem was virtually absent from the societal agenda when it was us who were struggling.

Ultimately, the best solution is for there to be more options, and this is clearly the way things are moving. I'm against further covid restrictions now, which would include any legal requirement to wfh.

It’s a pointless discussion where each party (including myself in that) just keeps responding with ‘yes but it’s hard for me because x, y and z’, so I’ll leave it there. Of course I care more about what is best for my family than what is best for other peoples, and if that makes me ‘selfish’ then I’d wager that the vast majority of us are selfish at heart.

I don't find it to be pointless, personally. For me, it's a good thing to spell out that different groups of people are disadvantaged and sometimes excluded by any one size fits all model of working. That's not to say it doesn't sting a bit how little interest there was in this topic before March 2020, but on balance it's still definitely a beneficial thing that we talk about it more now.

I certainly agree that most people are selfish, though. While pretty much everyone has made voluntary sacrifices in the last three years, it's not sustainable to expect people to continue putting their own and their loved ones interests second. So it's another positive that we have more awareness of this now. Earlier in the pandemic, the wider societal discussion facilitated too many people in thinking their selfishness was morally better than other people's.