In New York City, the slightest sniffle has people canceling holiday plans and packing coronavirus testing centers, where in recent days lines have stretched for blocks....
Despite receiving negative tests, some people keep burning through at-home coronavirus swabs just to stay calm....
There is a distinction between reasonable fear and anxiety that becomes disproportionate and all-consuming, said Dr. Itai Danovitch, the chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. A meta-analysis of dozens of community-based studies on mental health and the coronavirus showed that anxiety among the general population has increased threefold during the pandemic.
But in such tumultuous times, a certain level of anxiety is understandable, he said. “It is important to normalize how people are feeling: Anxiety and fear are common, it’s OK to feel anxiety, it’s OK to feel low, it’s OK to feel some distress,” Dr. Danovitch said....
There's a great photograph at the link of a woman wearing a T-shirt that says:
My body is a temple
Ancient & crumbled
Probably cursed.
Harboring an
Unspeakable horror
Is it "important to normalize" that? How much fear and anxiety should a person simply accept as just the way it feels to be human? The psychiatrist tells us our bad feels are "OK." Fine. But how should we live? How can we flourish?
I've heard from my NYC informants that the lining up for testing is quite extreme. Why aren't people afraid they'll catch the disease from standing around in line? I know that people maintain distance between other people in the line, but they are still hanging around, not isolated, crowding the streets for hours. And what good is another test? It could be a false negative. At some point all the checking and rechecking is a mental disorder. But if the whole city is doing it, it's the new normal.
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64 comments:
An OCD variant.
Gotta have that Beanie Baby.
Why aren't people afraid they'll catch the disease from standing around in line?
aren't Just standing around people; standing around people that THINK THEY HAVE COVID!!
Jesus F*cking GODDAMNED Christ! It's like they're TRYING to catch covid!!
meanwhile...
The OhmyGOD!variant looks to be about like a head cold
IF you have it, what will Our Beloved Government tell you to do?
Go Home, Get Rest, Plenty of Fluids
Jesus F*cking GODDAMNED Christ!
Pandemic of the neurotic.
On a relative basis, I suspect fear and anxiety in NYC is 100 vs. a national median of 50. One of the most disturbing aspects of the pandemic is that Americans across the country are peppered daily with the thoughts and experiences of the neurotic narcissists we call New Yorkers. We should have one COVID policy for NYC and similar precincts and another for the rest of America. But the decision makers on policy comes from the Eastern seaboard where they all think alike on COVID just as the vast majority did on the Russia hoax, etc. They are the kid in class who sat up front and tattled on anyone who spitballed when the teacher had his/her back turned, I.e. Karen. I can’t imagine thinking and living like them.
People in the rest of the country are not at all surprised to learn that the people in NYC are a bunch of neurotic loons. We see that in the Fake News every single day.
The thing of it is that the NYC loons want to impose their insanity on the rest of the country.
My dad taught us some fear is good. It keeps you alive. But fear is not a virtue. It should be something you try to get rid of. Not something you feed and allow to grow. You face your fears and conquer them. Today too many people brag about how afraid they are and try to recruit other people to join them. I'm not angry at them. What I feel is pity.
Why are your NYC informants still there? The crime is ratcheting up there (as well as in most major cities) and big city life has been going downhill.
Covid-compulsive Disorder.
It’s not going away, even if everyone were triple-vaxed.
I’m finding it harder and harder to wrap my brain around this. It’s so far from the way I live, from the way anyone I know (including the most liberal, or those with young kids or old people) that I feel like I’m reading about a different time, in a far away land.
It's NOT normal. It's a mass psychosis brought on by government and media for partisan purposes. The better question is, "why is this working on these particular people?"
And "why do you even consider that a random psychologist picked by a media corporation gets to define normal?" That is crazy, just like the Covid cowards lining up like cows to the slaughter.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay (1841).
If Mackay were alive today he'd add a chapter on COVID Madness.
It's not a new normal it's a mental illness. They are so scared they cannot function in society. Everything because about their obsession with this disease... and they know nothing about the reality of it.
It's the kind of thing that destroys societies. Thank goodness I am in a much saner place. I am actually seeing fewer and fewer masks while I am out and about.
Statement from the White House - Remarks by President Biden on the fight against COVID-19"
"The answer is straightforward: If you are not fully vaccinated, you have good reason to be concerned. You’re at a high risk of getting sick. And if you get sick, you’re likely to spread it to others, including friends and family. And the unvaccinated have a significantly higher risk of ending up in a hospital or even dying.
Almost everyone who has died from COVID-19 in the past many months has been unvaccinated. Unvaccinated.
But if you’re among the majority of Americans who are fully vaccinated, and especially if you’ve gotten the booster shot — that third shot — you’re much — you have much, much less reason to worry. You have a high degree of protection against severe illness."
Doubling down on vaccination. No mention of therapeutics. I read the whole transcript, including the softball questions. All eggs in one basket. Heckuva job, Joe.
exhelodrvr1 said...
An OCD variant.
**********************************
This. Just more germophobe craziness.
The same people lining up for hours in the freezing cold because of a new variant that is like a cold are the same people who believe anything the Pravda media spews. Fauci wants everybody to be scared. What would he do, if he couldn't go on TV everyday to scare everybody, whilst he collects a big fat paycheck from taxpayers?? Everyday Progressives ignore their own rules, but expect the serfs in America to buckle down and stay hidden away?? Screw them all. I got vaxxed. Now because of all their lies, I don't think I am going to get the booster. Why bother if you can catch it anyways?? I will take my own like into my OWN hands.
This quote: "There is a distinction between reasonable fear and anxiety that becomes disproportionate and all-consuming,..." says it properly, I think.
This out of proportion anxiety is a common trait of the New Yorkers of today. Not just them, though they seem to be more proud about their neuroses than most. (Where are the New Yorkers I used to know?) I've got friends and relatives scattered throughout the Northeast and upper Midwest. I can tell they live in a different world than I do here in Florida. Its not that we're more free of the disease or the possibility of the disease. It's that we live with it, our state government allows us and encourages us to learn how to live our lives with it, and we don't depend on the corporate media as the one source for information. Their narrative has nothing to do with "the science". That said, there are many down here who live in fear as well. And you can bet your last dollar they get their information from the standard sources: New York Times, NBC, CNN, etc.
The other day I spoke with a relative in the Detroit area, and you'd think the world is a dark place, and there's no reason to go out for at least another year. She told me this while I was sitting on my lanai, looking over a beautiful sunny day, about to go meet some friends for dinner. I dunno. I think it's a choice. And we have no doubt that among the most prevalent traits of those on the left are the desire for tragedy, or a desire for suffering. What my grandmother would call Tsoris (yiddish for trouble and suffering). I think this crop of New Yorkers and others strive for this, wear it proudly, and look down on those who don't play along with it all- as if we are children who just don't get it.
Anyway...I look forward to the day when New Yorkers find themselves again. They may need to cut off Brooklyn from Queens and send it floating away to get carried by the Gulfstream up to Cape Cod.
Reports like the following are the reason people are skeptical. Nobody knows the truth, nobody knows what is going to happen, and everybody is making it up as they go...https://www.ibtimes.com/622-fully-vaccinated-oregon-residents-died-covid-19-64-are-white-americans-3359388
When the bug is the scariest thing in your world, you're pretty darn lucky. Give thanks. And get a hobby.
“ At some point all the checking and rechecking is a mental disorder. But if the whole city is doing it, it's the new normal.”. The city is a human invention, and like most inventions, it is largely invisible. That is, what can be seen of the city rests on a vast unseen infrastructure of values, beliefs, habits, mores, skills, tacit agreements, conventions, rules. The city is a machine that is operated by (and operates on) those who live and work in it. If they forget or abandon their skills and duties, if they fall ill with some virus of body or spirit, the city breaks down.
That’s what we are seeing. IMHO.
"I have thought so much about this disease for the past two years, that any potential brush with it feels a bit monumental."
New Yorkers sure are tough.
The CCP has done a hell of a job here, hasn't it? One little virus, not particularly deadly to people under 65, has reduced the richest, most free society on earth to sniveling masses of hypochondriacs--and the psychosis appears to be getting worse, even though fairly effective vaccines have been developed (you might still get it, but you are much less likely to die from it).
The earth is flat, as Thomas Friedman might say.
Well, since we did this, there will be others coming our way--trickier, deadlier others. Our enemies are getting to see us disable ourselves. When the plague hit Athens in 430 BC, it was well on its way to defeating the Spartans. Athenian society fell apart, and the war continued until 404 BC. Didn't the Chinese try germ warfare in the Korean War?
How could it have been otherwise? Well, the Great Barrington Declaration laid it out. Protect the vulnerable as best we can, and get on with life. Immunity in the population will build, and the vaccines--which were developed quickly--would help protect the elderly and sick. Therapies could have been honestly tested rather than being shot down. We could have behaved like men and women, instead of like mice and rats.
I am embarrassed by what I have seen in 2020-2021. By the way, I am not aware of any Democratic Party elected officials who have spoken up for the Great Barrington Declaration--although I think most of the authors were probably Democrats or center-lefties. I am happy to be informed or corrected on this.
Living in Arizona, where life has been pretty much back to normal for a year or so, it's hard to comprehend the panic and the frantic government responses to this. Government action here, at all levels, has been sensible and low-key. I feel lucky. I can't imagine living in such a state of fear.
I have yet to have a COVID test. Never had any symptoms, so I've never needed to have one.
Most of us recognized that we could live our regular lives and not get Covid in the summer of 2020. Eventually, New York will figure it out too.
There's an acquaintance of mine that went absolutely crazy about the virus. They'd planned a flight across the country to visit family just before Omicron became a thing. They're still going, which is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, when the trip goes well they'll recognize that they can rejoin the living.
The unique problem confronting us now is a “Public Health” bureaucracy heavily invested in panic-mongering instead of calm advice. This is Fauci’s second shot at being a Cassandra-cum-dictator and he pulled out his AIDS playbook and ran the same “it could kill us all!” bullshit that exacerbated HIV panic and insisted on a “vaccine” instead of the promising antiviral therapeutics. Shutting healthy people up was a new definition of quarantine. Shutting down the worldwide economy was the single most boneheaded decision in history with persistent problems continuing to harm people all over the world. Now we have won and the idiots in charge won’t accept victory as an outcome. Americans are moving on in large part, even as our “leaders” fail to see the blessing in Omicron— a mild cold-like COVID that confers immunity without serious illness and usually without symptoms at all— while normal people just want to resume normal life. Sure the DNC-Media will focus on the bedwetters and fraidy cats, but we the people are in general just over it. Anyone with any knowledge of epidemiology could see this coming a mile off, and the closer we get to herd awareness the more Big Tech and Big Government want to cling to “emergency” as an excuse for their tyranny and censorship. I feel for these poor people living in fear. Public Health has let them down. Keep Calm and Carry On works so much better than Live Scared and Shut Up.
If you stare into Covid long enough it will begin to stare into you. And by stare I mean kill you without really killing you. In a sad ironic way I’m glad I lived through this mad moment in history for it has reconfirmed in me how utterly ovine most of humanity is, needing a Good Shepherd and choosing lab-coated wolves every time.
"And what good is another test? It could be a false negative."
And if it's a true positive there's nothing to be done unless you start getting really sick. In which case they're sure to test you again.
I heard the Omicron Andromeda Strain engineered by Fauci and the ChiCom Bat people in the Mandela Lab comes on first with a scratchy throat. Not a sore throat. This is perfect for the paranoid ocd hypochondriac.
My friend from Kiev used to tell us about waiting in lines for bread, every day, for hours. Sometimes you'd get other food as well.
Not very good, but it sounds better than what they're doing in NYC.
Keep Calm
and
Carry On
Just follow the science! COVID isn't transmissable while standing in line for a COVID test.
I've just gotten over a bad cold that lasted two weeks, working its way slowly through my body. I usually get a cold for a few days in the spring and another for a few days in fall. Probably due to hand washing, social distancing, masking, avoidance of crowds and more hand washing, I didn't have one in 2020 and nothing until now in 2021. I got tested for COVID when it started, and was negative. My test was at a drivethrough test site at a medical center, taking a phone consult with my doc, a car trip, and about 60 seconds for the nose swab with no waiting.
I wore a mask, making me one of about 5% or so of the public here in Austin doing so. While I was side-eyed and avoided by everyone in public who saw me cough behind my mask, and by many who saw me just wearing my mask, it didn't hurt my feelings.
I plan on wearing a mask sometime in 2024, just to remind people of the pandemic panic.
It's a cult.
from a local TV online site - it seems the source is Consumer Reports.
headline:
Traveling for the holidays? Don’t overlook disinfecting your car. Here’s what to do.
A clean car is a good thing, but a major theme is to urge people to not use bleach or hydrogen peroxide to do the cleaning, as it will damage the car's interior. Why would someone use these products to clean a car interior? COVID, of course. (How many months ago were we assured this was a respiratory virus?)
They recommend an alcohol based cleaner (70%+!), which will kill the COVID virus lurking to infect you from your car door or seat warmer button. The reader can now travel with at least this small degree of additional safety.
Does this seem like normal behavior to anyone else here?
Dr. Itai Danovitch might have trouble attracting patients in Tokyo.
Because "itai" in Japanese means: owww! ouch!!! it hurts!!
This is all driven by the Biden administration along with their media flacks.
The fear porn has been relentless...
Blue City Life, peopled by MSNBC viewers who follow Jen Psaki, and the Big Guy, Brandon.
The prevailing mental condition at the moment seems to be a debilitating mental illness. It can be traced back at least to the ubiquitous public enthusiasm for having confrontational interactions with conservative relatives during the holidays. That was a blatantly political and cynical exploitation of kids by leftists, who are notorious for their inability to predict negative consequences from their good intentions.
That same bullying-is-good-if-I-do-it attitude encourages them to confront their neighbors, co-workers and anyone else who has a different assessment of COVID risk.
Is it a coincidence that the same political movement that demanded for years that health care is a human right is now championing denial of health care for their political opponents? These people are evil and they should be excluded from any positions of power, certainly, and maybe from society.
Why should we be listening to the mental health "experts" who have been standing watch over this insanity?
Encouraging people to embrace fear and anxiety is destructive. The question is whether these "experts" are malicious or incompetent. Either way, they are charlatans.
Here's hoping that I can get a 72 hour PCR test for travel without the snifflers having burned through the supply.
Luxury beliefs.
Big Brother says OBEY... OBEY... OBEY...
And using fear will keep them OBEYING.
This is Biden and Fauci's message. OBEY... fall in line... do what we say or "dark dark nights" will come.
They will blame non-masking people for all their troubles, like they blamed Trump.
It's just a transparent mind control shtick, and it works well in NYC.
What are these people doing that gives them cause to check for Covid every 5 minutes?!
Isn’t the best way to not get it is to just not be around people/strangers? If you prioritize being in close contact with people you don’t know, or where they have been (reminiscent of the parent saying ‘put that down! You don't know where it’s been!’) then you have to accept some consequences. These people are children, no wonder .gov has to tell them what to do.
It does not seem to be possible to be tested for the Omicron vaccine. While it will show up in KungFlu tests. all those tests can tell you is that you have some variant of kungflu but not which one.
I thought I might have the Omicron variant last week. I was feeling fine with no symptoms which seems to be the main characteristics of Omcron. I looked into testing for Omicron and you really need to parse the wording to find out that there are only a couple places doing really specialized tests that can identify Omicron.
I get the impression that theyare just guessing how many people actually have it.
Re these tests that Brandon is sending out, are they PCR tests? You do know that PCR is the gold standard of Kungflu testing, right? It is what 90% of all tests have been for the past couple years.
If they are, by the time they are available they will be illegal. Effective Jan 1 FDA will withdraw the emergency use authorization (they were never "approved") for PCR tests.
After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only
https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html
Reason? It doesn't work and can't distinguish between kungflu, common flu, or even common cold!
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Maybe we should wall off the northeast. They seem more dangerous than the illegals.
It's OK. We don't expect them to be anything less than cripplingly neurotic.
We need a nose swab for that. We could lure them in with Woody Allen screenings.
And soon the city will just be Dominican and Chinese illegals. Take a nice hard look at the census figures.
Nice T-shirt, but what they are really suffering from is Stockholm Syndrome.
"At some point all the checking and rechecking is a mental disorder"
Not just that: most Covid "mitigation," "stopping the spread," etc. etc. Anti-alarmists on this very blog called it way back in 2020. But of course, the mental disorder is itself carefully cultivated and serves a purpose.
Yes, I dont get the waiting in line for hours thing. Theres a lot I dont get these days.
I do love the T-Shirt.
These people have a mental disorder.
Good grief. From the social group who has nothing better to worry about - like where their next meal is coming from.
I wish I could find someone with full blown Covid so they can infect me and have done with it. This constant harping is monotonous. My sister and family are now under quarantine as my eldest niece was exposed at school. Symptoms are mainly runny nose, headache, sore throat, sinus congestion and pressure. Gee, sounds like a garden variety head cold to me.
Side benefit: now they don't have to suffer Christmas with the relatives from hell!
If he were to say it today a former Chicago mayor might say, "Never let a crisis go....".
Major league baseball players are an unfudgeable database. They're famous people, so their deaths get reported. Deaths for the last five years:
2017: 98
2018: 98
2019: 100
2020: 114
2021: 99 (to date)
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2021-deaths.shtml
NYC is a very schizo place. After flying in from Florida, I had a local couple cancel dinner out of fear of the latest covid. The majority of locals are masked even walking the streets. And there are long lines outside of clinics and popup testing tents. It took me a day to figure out what they were lining up to do. On the other hand, the surviving restaurants are mostly packed. The requirement that you show proof of vaccination is widely treated as a meaningless formality. On two occasions I flashed a picture of my grandson. And there is a building boom underway, even as work from home persists and a significant number of residents vacate for points south. In short, there seems to be a distinct divide between those who are living in perpetual fear and those who have moved on.
if only people would go on cruises with their sniffles and runny noses
sea air will do them good - can also jump off boats as mood takes them
Seen on social media earlier today:
White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients predicts a winter of severe illness and death for Americans who decide to not take the vaccination for the CCP virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.
“For the unvaccinated: you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death,” said Zients during a White House COVID-19 update Friday. “For yourselves, your families and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm.”
Catastrophism at work.
The slightest sniffle, in my case, turns out to be Covid. I have it now. I caught it at a NYC Christmas party. And you know what? It”s a relief. I don’t have to worry anymore, the worst seems to have passed and I have heightened immunity. Win-win-win.
Despite receiving negative tests, some people keep burning through at-home coronavirus swabs just to stay calm....
Severe mental illness at work
Is it "important to normalize" that? How much fear and anxiety should a person simply accept as just the way it feels to be human? The psychiatrist tells us our bad feels are "OK." Fine. But how should we live? How can we flourish?
By not obsessing about tiny little threats. By finding something real to do with your life, so you don't spend it desperately searching for ways in which you are "threatened" or a "victim"..
I'm pretty sure that the number of Americans under the age of 70 killed by Covid is less than 1% of the population of Americans under the age of 70.
If you score "increasing my chance of death by 1%" as a "major threat", you need to get your head straight
My wife calls them Covid cucu's. And cucu they are.
Yesterday, John Hinderacker posted a very amusing post on this topic on “Powerline,” effectively satirizing this current hysteria.
Check it out. Its titled “Omicronmania.”
Antibody testing should have been widely available and cheap a year ago but are not. Those people lining up for tests in NYC have chosen standing in freezing weather over getting vaccinated. Another angry speech from Sleepy Coughing Joe ain’t changing any other minds. Those New Yorkers would love to confirm their immunity status if that was an option.
Woody Allen needs to make a new movie about neurotic New Yorkers during the time of pandemic.
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...
Antibody testing should have been widely available and cheap a year ago but are not. Those people lining up for tests in NYC have chosen standing in freezing weather over getting vaccinated.
A lot of them ARE vaccinated, they are just scared to death that they have the new variant that the vaccine doesn't stop. The media and the Biden administration are scaring people to death. My Mom who has 3 shots is scared out of her mind because she thinks she is going to catch it from going out in public. The media sucks.
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