9 ms·

I live in Kansas and have basically forgotten COVID is a thing. The people who wanted to get vaccinated like me have and those who haven’t, haven’t. Nobody ask

by wincy 5y ago

I live in Kansas and have basically forgotten COVID is a thing. The people who wanted to get vaccinated like me have and those who haven’t, haven’t. Nobody asks about it and no businesses have any sort of mask requirements. Half of the people at the grocery store wear masks and the other half don’t. Everyone seems to be getting along. Next door in Kansas City Missouri I stopped at a gas station and an employee was shouting at a woman to put on a mask, then was yelling at the same woman to leave because she refused to comply. I’m glad she didn’t see me because I literally didn’t think to bring a mask with me and needed to run to the restroom. I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious.

danielvf 5y ago
Pretty much the same story in South Carolina. Outside retail workers, mask usage in my hyper local area is about 2%. Life has been basically completely normal since June 2020.
- 40four 5y ago
  I live in South Carolina as well, and I can confirm (I think you meant 2021 not 2020?). Most people in my city have been going about life as usual since ~ May if this year. Almost nobody wears masks. Everything is open. And guess what? We’re all good! The sky isn’t falling. Hospitals aren’t being overrun. Life is good, and I can remember the last time I worried or had anxiety about Covid. There seems to be a group of people who still believe we can ‘beat’ Covid. That somehow we make it go away, with endless restrictions. In reality, it is here to stay, and we will have to live with it for the rest of our lives.
  - VRay 5y ago
    https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/south-carolina?view=daily-deaths&tab=trend https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/sout... Doesn’t look too bad so far as the USA goes, although if legal gun owners or Mexican cartel members were out there killing 40 people a day, you’d be screaming bloody murder about it
    - NullPrefix 5y ago
      How many people are dying because of obesity? There's an epidemic going on and I hear no bloody murder screams near any McDonald's
      - robflynn 5y ago
        Let me know when a fat person walking into a room makes other people fat.
        NullPrefix 5y ago
        He carries donuts. Frosted with layers or sugar.
  - tzs 5y ago
    South Carolina has had a pretty high number of cases since mid year [1]. Higher than the late 2020/early 2021 surge which was before vaccination. It hasn't been doing all that great on death rates, either [2]. A bit worse than the Southern average, and quite a bit worse than the other regions of the US. South Carolina has now reached the same death total per capita as the Northeast [3], which is quite astounding. The Northeast got there by having a large number of people die early in the first couple of months of the pandemic as it tore through high density communities of especially vulnerable people while we were still trying to figure out basic things like how to treat it and what measures were practical and effective for limiting spread. That should have cemented the Northeast as the US COVID death leader for the rest of the pandemic. But South Carolina in the last couple of months, despite over half the people being vaccinated, as managed to get a death rate that looks almost like an early pandemic Northeast death rate, eliminated the death gap. [1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-normalized&highlight=(None)&show=agg-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=South%20Carolina#states-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-... [2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-normalized&highlight=(None)&show=agg-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=South%20Carolina#states-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-... [3] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-normalized&highlight=(None)&show=agg-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=South%20Carolina#states-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
- frealy 5y ago
  Here in San Francisco, a.k.a. East Germany the Stasi are very strong. Even 5 year olds now have to show proof of vaccine and wear a mask to enter most private companies. Either masks work or they don't. Either vaccines work or they don't. Pick one asssholes. The mayor herself won't follow her very own draconian covid orders. The governor of California won't follow his very own draconian covid orders. He also won't vaccinate his own daughter. FUCK EVERY PIECE OF LOW-LIFE DEMOCRAT LIBERAL FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT IN SAN FRANCISCO. I know you all are reading this so please go jump off the big beautiful bridge of ours or jump in front of Cal-Train. You people are FUCKING LOSERS. I hope you all get FUCKED! If you somehow survive the next year just wait cause the right wing death squads are coming for you. We will throw you out of planes at 30,000 feet over the fucking ocean. LIBERALS: You ARE FUCKED!
- zapdrive 5y ago
  Being in BC, Canada sucks. I went in to an Apple store to buy the fully loaded MacBook M1 max, with 6000 dollars in my hand (literally). And was told to leave the store because my mask didn't cover my nose. I'm buying a Razer 15 now. And I'm fully vaccinated. Not because I was scared of getting sick (i already contacted COVID twice before the vaccine, including the Delta variant), but because I was shamed into getting it (think about the immunocompromised!!!). And now I'm being told that vaccine doesn't prevent transmission? So now I'm being shamed into wearing a mask. And now the govt is trying to bully the 10% teachers who are not vaccinated. They might lose their jobs if they don't get the shots. Think about the children!!! But wait a minute, the vaccines don't prevent transmission. So even if the teachers get vaccinated, how is it going to help the children?
  - jjwiseman 5y ago
    If you don't understand by now that vaccines significantly reduce transmission, you just need to google "do covid vaccines reduce transmission". The top results are links to the CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and more, all saying that vaccines significantly reduce transmission. Vaccines significantly reduce transmission, so if someone is telling you they don't, you need to re-evaluate whether you should trust that person and any information they're giving you. (P.S. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with airborne transmission that loves nasal passages, so it's probably pretty important that your mask cover your nose. So far, there's no evidence that the virus cares at all about how much money you have in your hand.)
    - ldehaan 5y ago
      You must be young.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      > CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet None of these sources are trusted by the people who don't want the vaccine.
    - lborsato 5y ago
- Panther34543 5y ago
  Where in South Carolina are you?
dragonwriter 5y ago
> I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious. No, 5 miles means you have a different government with a different policy response. (The difference itself doesn't justify either side.) That's just inherent in the existence of political borders.
- dymk 5y ago
  Yeah, that’s the joke
  - bena 5y ago
    It's a bad one. Because it only works if the numbers are the same across both states. But Missouri is doing better than Kansas. So unless the virus is somehow less contagious in Missouri, it seems like Kansas is just being an idiot in this case.
    - anonfornoreason 5y ago
      Depends on your metric. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that Kansas is doing better than Missouri because more people are able to lead the life they want. There are other metrics beside “least fatalities” to factor.
      - captainredbeard 5y ago
        The death rate difference could be due to something as simple as a higher percentage of seniors in the state, for instance, or differing population densities. Hacker News is full of sophists.
        dang 5y ago
        "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Your comment would be just fine without that swipe.
10x-dev 5y ago
I've always found it strange that some Americans focus on politeness above all. Of all the problems in your story, the employee shouting is the least 'wrong'. You've got a woman who won't wear a mask, yourself who sneaked in without a mask, and that's just in that moment of time, but somehow the employee who has to deal with that behavior all day every day is the bad person because they lost their cool. It's one of those 'everyone sucks here' stories.
- dymk 5y ago
  He’s vaccinated, so it seems a little dramatic to be calling OP a bad person and that they suck.
  - striking 5y ago
    A more charitable reading is that the people involved in OP's story suck.
    - dymk 5y ago
      That’s a misreading, because GP explicitly calls out OPs behavior as bad.
  - Karawebnetwork 5y ago
    The vaccine protects you but still allows you to carry and spread a viral load. The mask protects people around you but not yourself but limiting the viral load that you can spread. By being a vaccinated unmasked person in a crowd of non-vaccinated people, you possibly become a super spreader.
    - shepherdjerred 5y ago
      The vaccine drastically reduces your chance to spread the virus. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v...
  - 5y ago
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious. In my nearest town (in the UK) there are two supermarkets. In the budget one (Aldi) nobody wears a mask, in the upmarket one (Waitrose) everybody does.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I've noticed that, Waitroses and doctor's surgeries seem to be the last bastion of English mask-wearing. I wonder what the correlation actually is fundamentally? Waitrose's clientele are wealthier and therefore older and more concious of COVID?
  - skrbjc 5y ago
    It's virtue signaling
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      This gets thrown around so much now I automatically dismiss it as a lazy complaint.
Vrondi 5y ago
I'm in a very educated university town, and very few people wear masks here any longer in public.
jeffbee 5y ago
Odd that you have forgotten it since Kansas, if it were it's own country, would have been a top-5 world hotspot for COVID deaths only 6 weeks ago. Is your memory really that short?
swader999 5y ago
It may be a forgotten thing but the new federal mandates are coming that to work you must be vaccinated.
danans 5y ago
In California, except for wearing masks in retail establishments, everything has been back to normal for months. School has been full time in person, and traffic sucks once again.
- colordrops 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it "back to normal". In addition to the mask mandates, which are more bothersome than you make out (e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask), there are other restrictions. Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wind instrument classes.
  - greedo 5y ago
    Isn't the point of doing cardio work to be tired? To stress your lungs and heart? That's why extreme athletes wear masks while doing cardio... I'm sure a little surgical mask isn't as difficult as this: https://www.trainingmask.com https://www.trainingmask.com
    - colordrops 5y ago
      That's not the main part of my comment.
  - danans 5y ago
    > e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask Those restrictions are on their way out: https://abc7news.com/amp/face-masks-mask-mandates-bay-area-indoor-contra-costa/11186798/ https://abc7news.com/amp/face-masks-mask-mandates-bay-area-i... > Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wood wind instrument classes. Not sure where you are but in my very urban CA city, except for testing which is a very good thing IMO, none of these rules are in place. This morning, the parent community met for donuts at the elementary school campus, where kids were playing close-contact basketball. The local middle school jazz band - with plenty of wind instruments - played recently at the local street fair as a fundraiser, and it's clear they had been practicing. Then again, around here vaccine and mask wearing rates are extremely high, so we basically had very little in the way of outbreaks and community transmission. It seems like when a critical majority of people are civically considerate and voluntarily mask and vaccinate, life can go on pretty close to normal.
bshoemaker 5y ago
Lol it's nice that you can just send all the covid patients to the city to get treated and you guys can pretend covid doesn't exist
peeters 5y ago
> I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious. Well, based on case and death counts between the two states, this is true. Kansas has significantly higher case and death rates than Missouri.
oblio 5y ago
Well, apparently Kansas is passing the buck to other places: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29119688&goto=item%3Fid%3D29118534%2329119688 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29119688&goto=item%3Fi...

by wincy 5y ago

danielvf 5y ago

Pretty much the same story in South Carolina. Outside retail workers, mask usage in my hyper local area is about 2%. Life has been basically completely normal since June 2020.

40four 5y ago
I live in South Carolina as well, and I can confirm (I think you meant 2021 not 2020?). Most people in my city have been going about life as usual since ~ May if this year. Almost nobody wears masks. Everything is open. And guess what? We’re all good! The sky isn’t falling. Hospitals aren’t being overrun. Life is good, and I can remember the last time I worried or had anxiety about Covid. There seems to be a group of people who still believe we can ‘beat’ Covid. That somehow we make it go away, with endless restrictions. In reality, it is here to stay, and we will have to live with it for the rest of our lives.
- VRay 5y ago
  https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/south-carolina?view=daily-deaths&tab=trend https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/sout... Doesn’t look too bad so far as the USA goes, although if legal gun owners or Mexican cartel members were out there killing 40 people a day, you’d be screaming bloody murder about it
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    How many people are dying because of obesity? There's an epidemic going on and I hear no bloody murder screams near any McDonald's
    - robflynn 5y ago
      Let me know when a fat person walking into a room makes other people fat.
      - NullPrefix 5y ago
        He carries donuts. Frosted with layers or sugar.
- tzs 5y ago
  South Carolina has had a pretty high number of cases since mid year [1]. Higher than the late 2020/early 2021 surge which was before vaccination. It hasn't been doing all that great on death rates, either [2]. A bit worse than the Southern average, and quite a bit worse than the other regions of the US. South Carolina has now reached the same death total per capita as the Northeast [3], which is quite astounding. The Northeast got there by having a large number of people die early in the first couple of months of the pandemic as it tore through high density communities of especially vulnerable people while we were still trying to figure out basic things like how to treat it and what measures were practical and effective for limiting spread. That should have cemented the Northeast as the US COVID death leader for the rest of the pandemic. But South Carolina in the last couple of months, despite over half the people being vaccinated, as managed to get a death rate that looks almost like an early pandemic Northeast death rate, eliminated the death gap. [1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-normalized&highlight=(None)&show=agg-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=South%20Carolina#states-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-... [2] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-normalized&highlight=(None)&show=agg-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=South%20Carolina#states-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-... [3] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-normalized&highlight=(None)&show=agg-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=South%20Carolina#states-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
frealy 5y ago
Here in San Francisco, a.k.a. East Germany the Stasi are very strong. Even 5 year olds now have to show proof of vaccine and wear a mask to enter most private companies. Either masks work or they don't. Either vaccines work or they don't. Pick one asssholes. The mayor herself won't follow her very own draconian covid orders. The governor of California won't follow his very own draconian covid orders. He also won't vaccinate his own daughter. FUCK EVERY PIECE OF LOW-LIFE DEMOCRAT LIBERAL FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT IN SAN FRANCISCO. I know you all are reading this so please go jump off the big beautiful bridge of ours or jump in front of Cal-Train. You people are FUCKING LOSERS. I hope you all get FUCKED! If you somehow survive the next year just wait cause the right wing death squads are coming for you. We will throw you out of planes at 30,000 feet over the fucking ocean. LIBERALS: You ARE FUCKED!
zapdrive 5y ago
Being in BC, Canada sucks. I went in to an Apple store to buy the fully loaded MacBook M1 max, with 6000 dollars in my hand (literally). And was told to leave the store because my mask didn't cover my nose. I'm buying a Razer 15 now. And I'm fully vaccinated. Not because I was scared of getting sick (i already contacted COVID twice before the vaccine, including the Delta variant), but because I was shamed into getting it (think about the immunocompromised!!!). And now I'm being told that vaccine doesn't prevent transmission? So now I'm being shamed into wearing a mask. And now the govt is trying to bully the 10% teachers who are not vaccinated. They might lose their jobs if they don't get the shots. Think about the children!!! But wait a minute, the vaccines don't prevent transmission. So even if the teachers get vaccinated, how is it going to help the children?
- jjwiseman 5y ago
  If you don't understand by now that vaccines significantly reduce transmission, you just need to google "do covid vaccines reduce transmission". The top results are links to the CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and more, all saying that vaccines significantly reduce transmission. Vaccines significantly reduce transmission, so if someone is telling you they don't, you need to re-evaluate whether you should trust that person and any information they're giving you. (P.S. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with airborne transmission that loves nasal passages, so it's probably pretty important that your mask cover your nose. So far, there's no evidence that the virus cares at all about how much money you have in your hand.)
  - ldehaan 5y ago
    You must be young.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    > CDC, Nature, New Scientist, the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet None of these sources are trusted by the people who don't want the vaccine.
  - lborsato 5y ago
Panther34543 5y ago
Where in South Carolina are you?

dragonwriter 5y ago

> I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious. No, 5 miles means you have a different government with a different policy response. (The difference itself doesn't justify either side.) That's just inherent in the existence of political borders.

dymk 5y ago
Yeah, that’s the joke
- bena 5y ago
  It's a bad one. Because it only works if the numbers are the same across both states. But Missouri is doing better than Kansas. So unless the virus is somehow less contagious in Missouri, it seems like Kansas is just being an idiot in this case.
  - anonfornoreason 5y ago
    Depends on your metric. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that Kansas is doing better than Missouri because more people are able to lead the life they want. There are other metrics beside “least fatalities” to factor.
    - captainredbeard 5y ago
      The death rate difference could be due to something as simple as a higher percentage of seniors in the state, for instance, or differing population densities. Hacker News is full of sophists.
      - dang 5y ago
        "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Your comment would be just fine without that swipe.

10x-dev 5y ago

I've always found it strange that some Americans focus on politeness above all. Of all the problems in your story, the employee shouting is the least 'wrong'. You've got a woman who won't wear a mask, yourself who sneaked in without a mask, and that's just in that moment of time, but somehow the employee who has to deal with that behavior all day every day is the bad person because they lost their cool. It's one of those 'everyone sucks here' stories.

dymk 5y ago
He’s vaccinated, so it seems a little dramatic to be calling OP a bad person and that they suck.
- striking 5y ago
  A more charitable reading is that the people involved in OP's story suck.
  - dymk 5y ago
    That’s a misreading, because GP explicitly calls out OPs behavior as bad.
- Karawebnetwork 5y ago
  The vaccine protects you but still allows you to carry and spread a viral load. The mask protects people around you but not yourself but limiting the viral load that you can spread. By being a vaccinated unmasked person in a crowd of non-vaccinated people, you possibly become a super spreader.
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    The vaccine drastically reduces your chance to spread the virus. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.13.21260393v...
- 5y ago

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious. In my nearest town (in the UK) there are two supermarkets. In the budget one (Aldi) nobody wears a mask, in the upmarket one (Waitrose) everybody does.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
I've noticed that, Waitroses and doctor's surgeries seem to be the last bastion of English mask-wearing. I wonder what the correlation actually is fundamentally? Waitrose's clientele are wealthier and therefore older and more concious of COVID?
- skrbjc 5y ago
  It's virtue signaling
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    This gets thrown around so much now I automatically dismiss it as a lazy complaint.

Vrondi 5y ago

I'm in a very educated university town, and very few people wear masks here any longer in public.

jeffbee 5y ago

Odd that you have forgotten it since Kansas, if it were it's own country, would have been a top-5 world hotspot for COVID deaths only 6 weeks ago. Is your memory really that short?

swader999 5y ago

It may be a forgotten thing but the new federal mandates are coming that to work you must be vaccinated.

danans 5y ago

In California, except for wearing masks in retail establishments, everything has been back to normal for months. School has been full time in person, and traffic sucks once again.

colordrops 5y ago
I wouldn't call it "back to normal". In addition to the mask mandates, which are more bothersome than you make out (e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask), there are other restrictions. Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wind instrument classes.
- greedo 5y ago
  Isn't the point of doing cardio work to be tired? To stress your lungs and heart? That's why extreme athletes wear masks while doing cardio... I'm sure a little surgical mask isn't as difficult as this: https://www.trainingmask.com https://www.trainingmask.com
  - colordrops 5y ago
    That's not the main part of my comment.
- danans 5y ago
  > e.g. it's pretty tiring to do cardio at the gym with a mask Those restrictions are on their way out: https://abc7news.com/amp/face-masks-mask-mandates-bay-area-indoor-contra-costa/11186798/ https://abc7news.com/amp/face-masks-mask-mandates-bay-area-i... > Parents aren't allowed on our school campus, we don't have any in-person school events, kids get tested once a week, kids have to stay at 3 feet from each other at school, no wood wind instrument classes. Not sure where you are but in my very urban CA city, except for testing which is a very good thing IMO, none of these rules are in place. This morning, the parent community met for donuts at the elementary school campus, where kids were playing close-contact basketball. The local middle school jazz band - with plenty of wind instruments - played recently at the local street fair as a fundraiser, and it's clear they had been practicing. Then again, around here vaccine and mask wearing rates are extremely high, so we basically had very little in the way of outbreaks and community transmission. It seems like when a critical majority of people are civically considerate and voluntarily mask and vaccinate, life can go on pretty close to normal.

bshoemaker 5y ago

Lol it's nice that you can just send all the covid patients to the city to get treated and you guys can pretend covid doesn't exist

peeters 5y ago

> I guess 5 miles difference magically makes COVID much more contagious. Well, based on case and death counts between the two states, this is true. Kansas has significantly higher case and death rates than Missouri.

oblio 5y ago

Well, apparently Kansas is passing the buck to other places: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29119688&goto=item%3Fid%3D29118534%2329119688 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29119688&goto=item%3Fi...