Do you have any family or friends who are nuts about the Covid?

Kinda me. I am the “nuts” person to most of my friends and acquaintances. I am the fraidiest of cats. I am vaxxed and boosted and occasionally go to uncrowded restaurants, and sometimes to friends’ homes, and I live in a very safe area, but it is annoying to many how much care I take.

The good news is that the only person this inconveniences is me, so they are free to use me as an “extreme” example of irrationality, and I’m sure it makes for good stories. I don’t discuss it unless asked, but I am a bit startled by just how many are irritated by it.

No.

@canidmajor: It sounds like you’re taking reasonable precautions.

Thanks, @jca2, but even I realize I am over cautious. I have had three times in my life where I have spent months (one time, years) with life-threatening conditions, so I am totally freaked about doing it again.
Good thing I have hermitting down to a fine art. :-)

Thankfully no. We are all vaccinated and wear masks when needed but we have returned to normal life as well as we can.

I lost my small family to covid – not the actual virus, but anxiety and panic related to it. I literally lost them, and will never see them again (my sister, mother, and aunt).

How @product?

^ My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer in February 2020, went through treatment, and now she is convinced that she needs to completely isolate herself, her daughter, and her husband from society because she will die if exposed in any way (despite vaccinations, masks, etc). My mother lost her mind completely during all of this, and won’t leave the house because she feels that she will get sick and die. And it gets mixed up in supposed motivations of protecting my sister as well.

Since me and my family have lived a “normal” life through all of this, we’re completely dangerous and there is really no condition that will ease anyone’s mind about getting together. And since there is no such thing as post-pandemic, I have lost all of them forever. My kids lost a grandmother, two aunts, and a cousin to anxiety related to Covid.

To say that I’m resentful and angry with the cycle of anxiety is an understatement.

I also lost my father to Parkinson’s, so this has been a real fun couple of years.

Not to my knowledge. For the most part, among friends and family and people who live in the areas I call home, things are mostly normal except for mask wearing in public. I’ve seen and know people who go a little further than that, but I don’t know anyone who still insists on complete isolation or has let COVID anxiety and panic take over their minds and lives. That said, I have become fairly pessimistic about it all (everything: the new variants, the changes to the way we live our lives, the cycles of anxiety and panic). Lately I have been feeling like none of this is ever going to go away. I guess I’ll only go full pessimist when I hear that schools are shutting down again…

Did your sister and mom get vaccinated?
Are you vaccinated @product?

^ Yes, yes, and yes.

I am so sorry @product.

I am more cautious than most people with regards to Covid. I have lost 4 friends to Covid, and have had 3 friends (who were fully vaccinated) get breakthrough cases, two of whom were hospitalized. One woman is my same age, 58, with no underlying medical conditions. That scares me a lot.

I live with someone who is immune compromised, and several of my friends, and close relatives have very serious medical conditions, and one friend is a two time breast cancer survivor.

One of my closest friends has 3 kids, 2 of whom just became eligible for their vaccines, but her youngest is not old enough. They did complete home isolation and home schooling in 2020 and part of this year. They are now in school, and in theory, all kids here are supposed to wear masks, but I hear all about it, especially from the 11 year old, how some kids, and some teachers are very lax about that. So when I’m around her kids now, I wear a mask, whereas after my friend, her husband and I got our first 2 vaccinations (when her kids were still isolating) I stopped wearing a mask around them, but now that they are back in school, I always mask up around them.

Covid went through our schools pretty rampantly, as well as in the nursing homes here. They were also supposed to be masking, but it was brought in from a patient that was sent for an operation at a hospital, and then it was brought into the nursing home where my friend’s MIL lives, and she and about 20 percent of the patients and staff caught it. And some of my friend’s other friends (who are parents at the same elementary school) also caught it, and got pretty sick.

Some of those people got very lackadaisical about mixing with crowds, and people whose vax status was unknown, and it spread again.

I have 3 relatives in the medical field, 2 in public health (one who used to work for the CDC, and whose current company developed the J&J vaccine) and one who is an ER nurse.

I read a lot, and talk to folks who deal with Covid up close and personal so I take it very seriously, and take a lot more precautions than a lot of people.

I will not eat inside a restaurant and rarely even get take out. I mask up any time I go inside a store, and try to use the self checkout when I can, and I limit my trips to the store. I don’t travel, and I avoid people whose vax status I do not know.

Some of my relatives (with whom I am literally estranged, or for all intents and purposes estranged) are conspiracy theory nuts and rabid antivaxxers. One family within this group, 2 cousins, one of their husbands, and my aunt all got sick with covid, and my aunt had to be hospitalized. They live in Texas, and pretty much everyone they associate with does not follow any covid protocols, and they refuse to get vaccinated. One of them caught covid, and then traveled through five states, stopping at other relatives homes along the way, and that’s how the other 3 (that I am aware of) got it.

Too many people are not taking this seriously, and because of my own personal experiences with having people die, or get sick from covid, I am very cautious and I don’t see that changing anytime soon, even though I am thrice vaxxed.