This!

Right, but my father made the same comment about Britain about a month or more ago. i.e. Why are we always comparing our graph of how we are doing compared to Italy and Spain, when those are countries where the people see their government as a joke. We should be comparing ourselves to e.g. Germany.

Even in places like New York or London, antibody testing suggests that the immunity rate is something like 10-20%

That means that the original R0 of perhaps 3, translates to an R of something more like 2.5 instead - i.e. still growing exponentially.

Or a place doing masks, social distancing goes from an R0 of 0.7 to an R0 of 0.6 - i.e. decreasing anyway.

Seriously herd immunity is not the story in those places.

The actual reason the places with the biggest levels of infection have seen the sharpest drops is that the scariest infection rates lead to the largest degree of social distancing - both mandated and voluntary.

This.

It's amazing how often I've read things like "It's hard to transmit it outside your family, it's ok if you're with someone less than 15 minutes." The answer to these is to say something like "Well in that case we don't need to worry as it'll just die out in the first few families it infects in Wuhan and never get over here."

The real problem is more and more mothers had to start working outside the home so children have been growing up with tired, overwhelmed, stressed-out parents. Plus divorce. Now kids are raised by the internet.

Counterpoint to this would naturally be Germany and Japan, who have two of the oldest populations in the world.

Yep having to wait 3 days for a dvd to arrive in the post builds so much character.

I make my own DVDs from scratch.

I think I called exactly this reason on day 1 of this thread, as to why we were most likely fooked.

I have a funny story for/about you that I have been sitting on for years. Maybe I'll post it later today.

society really took a beating once we stopped canning our own fruits and vegetables for winter and making our own condiments

my grandma used to can a whole bunch of jams - strawberry apricot etc for the winter and then mail us some. it was glorious, couldn't compare to anything store-bought

the craft is lost now

“Lost.” Lol, jesus christ. This is not forgotten knowledge.

Nope, it’s lost. No one ever cans or sews or has any knowledge of anything except the Kardashians any more.

Truly, society is doomed.

Every time people complain about society going soft it's like I can't believe it's a bad thing. Yeah alright I don't know how to drive a manual transmission and tough guys on 2+2 call me a pussy every once in awhile. If that's the trade-off for living in air conditioning and not getting shot in Normandy, ok yeah sign me up.

I mix my Heinz ketchup with cayenne pepper. Does that count as making my own condiments?

Equating driving stick with the old days is a new one. I have push button start and manual transmission. How's that even work!?

In the old days sometimes all we'd get is cayenne pepper for dinner

Soft!

You ate what?

We ate sand.

C'mon, man! Grow a pair

Push button start is pretty fancy, I still have to turn the key in my car, so it sounds like you're richer AND manlier than me. Nice going!

And we liked it, damn it.

when i was a kid we only had one game

stare at the sun

/snl

I used to walk 2 miles in the snow with holes in my shoes to get to school.

As a kid, I had to harvest potatos from the ground with my bare hands.

If you didn't tote boiling oats, you are soft af.

To come back to the thread topic, excessive AC usage might not be advisable Corona-wise though. Those outbreaks in meat processing plants in different countries (I heard of US, Netherlands, and Germany) seem to indicate that imo. The conditions are different Corona-wise I would say, but a common factor is the (necessary) controlled cold climate. The main problem is the workplace though; I guess you can still crank it up at home!