The risk has to be balanced with the rewards. So I wear masks when asked to and wash my hands often. And take the 1/1000ish risk of contracting covid a few times a week. Trusting that my low risk of it having lasting complications means that it costs me something like 1/million chance of really bad outcomes to resume most of my normal life.
This is what I did at the beginning, but as the risks became more clear I see no reason to keep it up. I’m happy to take many much more serious risks than catching covid and it’s become clear that covid is never going away and I’m not going to spend my life in a darth vader mask.
Yeah, it's important to balance the risk of catching COVID with the benefit of living a little more "normally" such as going into a store every now and then rather than doing pickup literally 100% of the time.
I don't want to get covid either but the risk is low enough that it doesn't bother me at all. I try to live my life as it was before pandemic as much as i can.
I can only explain my system but it works like this: try to drink alcohol every day. I'm not sure if it reduces the covid risk, but it just feels right.
Same here, I handled covid fine, a full 2 years after it all started. Was 4 days of feeling lame with fever. Before I didn't take many precautions, stopped masking after it was obvious that the spread was mostly seasonal and cloth masks had no evidence behind them.
Now I've got an immune response based on the complete virus, rather than a no-longer-existing subunit of a single protein. I expect I'll fare better than the immune chaos of infinite boosters.
People at risk should take precautions of isolating, otherwise it's time to move on with life.
Then it's fair to reduce the total risk by needless return-to-office policies.
With every new infection, more damage accumulates. Huge increases in heart disease, strokes, and risk of Long Covid. The answer is not to give up and just catch every variant, but to delay it as long as possible with reasonable measures like never eating indoor at a restaurant and wearing a NIOSH approved mask when you go out.
If you consider infection rate in your area and your own behaviour vs behaviour of an average person in your area, you can do some basic math to understand what the chances of getting covid are for you. For example I've deduced it to be around 1% per year, right now.
My behaviour is also better for society in terms of reducing the R. Even if I were to get Covid, since I go out so rarely it's unlikely I would ever go outside during a symptomatic phase.
What I'm doing for example:
1. WFH.
2. Order everything in.
3. Go see family only when infection rate is reasonably low.
4. Do sports outside.
5. Go to gym only at times when there's very little traffic and cases per day seems reasonable to me.
And trust me I do believe Covid19 is really bad, but I don't like vaccines either based on information I've gathered.
Keeping my R lower than 1 or even 0.5, I can also live guilt free. Many vaccinated people have R larger than 1.
I once wondered if a way to avoid Covid, for healthcare workers and the likes would be to have constant exposure. For example, by working, unprotected and on a day to day basis around covid patients just after recovery from an initial infection (and later, vaccine).
The idea is to stimulate the immune system constantly to not let the virus have any chance. While the virus and vaccine are not the same, the fact that the body seems to not have a problem with constant exposure could make it an idea not as dumb as it may seem.
Assess your actual chances of catching and suffering from covid. Then balance it against the risk of a rushed experimental gene therapy still in initial trials.
Edit: Remember that none of the media and government published figures show recovery rates - this is hugely important.
I have purposely avoided getting covid by being covid conscious in modern society despite having been exposed by using n99 masks, HEPA filters that circulate air 4x per hour, and only eating at resturaunt patios when they aren't busy.
One cannot live in 2022 without catching covid, the level of precautions I would have to take to avoid it would be extreme and damage my quality of life and probably my mental health.
I've definitely had it once, likely twice, just doing basic things exposes me to it now, so what can I do?
The risk has to be balanced with the rewards. So I wear masks when asked to and wash my hands often. And take the 1/1000ish risk of contracting covid a few times a week. Trusting that my low risk of it having lasting complications means that it costs me something like 1/million chance of really bad outcomes to resume most of my normal life.
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