Synchronized randomness.

Pls don’t repost this.

The second wave happened because they relaxed the stay at home order.

Also, Influenza causes visible symptoms within one to four days, while COVID-19 victims can be either asymptomatic for at LEAST two weeks (if not up to a month or more) or simply never have any symptoms at all, ever, and be unknowingly infecting everyone around them for a completely indeterminate amount of time!

In addition, Influenza sufferers would stop being contagious about five to seven days after first showing symptoms, but with COVID-19, you may not stop being contagious for weeks after fully fighting off the infection—that is, if you even start having symptoms at all.

Even if you don’t develop symptoms of COVID-19 while carrying it, you are still highly contagious, and it’s believed that you may be even more contagious than those who do show symptoms.

Originally, tests were showing around 60% of carriers did not show any symptoms, but it is now apparent that even up to 90% of carriers may never even know they’re infected without being tested.

They don’t have anywhere near the amount of resources to test everyone for it, even just the people who are showing symptoms and actively seeking to be tested, let alone asymptomatic carriers who wouldn’t have a reason to believe they’d need to be tested!

This is a disease that by its very nature is impossible to properly track and contain.

Once you had Influenza and survived, you would become immune to it—HOWEVER, with COVID-19, not only is there no evidence that people who have survived become immune to reinfection by it, but there is actually significant evidence to the contrary! Beating COVID-19 may not keep you from getting it again!

And even if you do beat it, COVID-19 leaves you with permanent lung damage and in some cases vascular damage, kidney damage, liver damage, and neurological damage, which may last for decades if not the rest of your life! Which, of course, means that should you get infected with it again, or infected by something similar, your body will have a much lower chance of successfully fighting it!

COVID-19 is not Influenza. It is several times worse than Influenza, and it is people’s failure to understand this that will cause the further impending waves of it to be much more deadly than the second waves of Influenza.

Officials are now saying that they expect COVID-19 to last into 2022, with a theoretical vaccine only being developed and mass produced by 2021, and that’s if things go well. There’s no guarantee that we’ll actually find a vaccine that soon, or be able to produce and distribute it widely enough to completely curb successive waves of it.

And, if course, that’s not accounting for the fact that there are different strains of COVID-19, and a vaccine that works on one may not work on another, just like yearly flu vaccines.

Wearing masks, social distancing, and other sanitary measures are not going to be going away any time soon, nor should they.

catonhottinroof

Charles Levier (French, 1920-2003) - French Town Scene with Figures

gustave-loiseau

Gustave Loiseau (French, 1865-1935) - The Seine at Pontoise, 

Winter in Bruges, Belgium (by Twan Verrijt)

*wakes up feeling ugly* oh god I have to be funny today

Lake Misurina, Italy (by Nadia Nasr)

One of my favourite Welcome to Night Vale quotes- beautiful and spooky and lovely.

Aspen Forest - Colorado, USA (by Chad Galloway)

“She’s a street dog from Malta.  A rescue agency dumped her on a friend then stopped answering the phone.  I volunteered to babysit for a couple days, even though I’m not big on small dogs.  And for some reason she really took a liking to me.  She kept trying to climb up on me.  I was like: ‘What is this thing?’  Her eyes were bugging out of her head.  She was peeing everywhere.  Her nails were two inches long.  And her teeth were falling out so she looked like a vampire.  When I took her to the vet, we found out her heart was enlarged.  Her lungs were filled with fluid.  And she needed all her teeth pulled out.  On the way home I stopped by a store.  I wanted to get a small bag to carry her in, just while she recovered.  But deep down I knew.  If I’m buying a bag for a dog, there’s always going to be a dog in the bag.” (Berlin, Germany)

“I quit my job for the first three months of this year and travelled with my husband.  It wasn’t exactly a mid-life crisis, but it was definitely a point in time.  I had just been going through the motions.  Getting through day-to-day.  And suddenly I realized that there were so many cultures and parts of the world that I hadn’t experienced first hand.  I’d been on vacations, but never more than two weeks.  This was something different.  It was a long enough time that days drifted into one another.  We couldn’t tell weekends from weekdays.  There was no routine.  We walked around a lot.  We met a lot of great people.  We were on a really tight budget, so we didn’t do anything fancy.  But there was a lot of peace: existing in the moment, forgetting about the future, not getting caught up in the ‘what if’s.’  I had thought that three months would be enough to get the traveling bug out of my system.  But then I came back to London, and I hit the rat race, and everything is driven by money.  There’s always this feeling of not having achieved enough.  Of putting in one hundred percent and still being behind.  Of living toward a paycheck, knowing that paycheck will determine what you can do to be happy.  I do want the security.  I just wish I could retain some of that sanity I felt while traveling.  It’s so hard to find peace in this environment.  You’re being pulled by so many small things, things so small that you don’t even notice, until you step away from them completely.” (London, England)