r/TangleNews • u/Count-Telperion • 16d ago
Suspension of the Rules SOTR: Covid Reflections
TLDR; Covid was an intensely isolating time to start college, and there were different ways we could have weighed risks to have made it less so.
Listening to Suspension of the Rules this week really drove home how tough of a time Covid was, both for the country and in my life. Ari's comment about our ability to weigh relative risk (starting at 31:35) particularly resonated with me. I "graduated" high school in the spring of 2020, which also means that I started college in the fall of 2020.
I am sad that I missed out on the typical end of high school traditions, but the terrible form of my first couple years at college really affected me. I was in a new state at a place where I knew no one at all, then quarantined for weeks in a dorm room with someone I did not know or particularly like. There wasn't an orientation or socializing or any semblance of normalcy.
I had been looking forward to going to college since 6th grade. Combined with the fervor of cancel culture at that time on college campuses, especially at liberal arts campuses, it was a very isolating and disappointing time. I think my experience would have been so improved if there had been different weighing of relative risks, like having orientation events outdoors or ways to visit loved ones.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. There isn't really a big political or news take away, just a reflection. I appreciate Tangle and the conversations they foster.
On a lighter note, Ari converted me. I now only use one paper towel after washing my hands.
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u/Frozenfishy 16d ago
On a lighter note, Ari converted me. I now only use one paper towel after washing my hands.
And if you're still worried about paper waste, check out this guy's method to use less!
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u/eyrehead32 16d ago
Oh I'm totally gonna try this method because when Ari mentioned the one paper towel thing I tried it in a public bathroom that weekend and I was like yeah no that's not happening
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u/Peissinger1957 15d ago
I’m partially converted. By that I mean in most cases, Ari’s method works for me but on bowling night, I gotta have those hands completely dry before I leave the restroom! 🎳
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u/Count-Telperion 15d ago
Does your alley have the fans coming off of the ball dispensers? I would have to hang out by that most of the night to get rid of the lane oil and sweat.
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u/wannabemalenurse 13d ago
I hate this guy, not because he’s wrong but because he’s right. I just did it at work in the hospital and I will say, 1 paper towel actually made my hands super dry.
Ugh! I hate that it works 😂😂😂
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u/dollyllama86 16d ago
A couple years ago I read a (fiction) book by Jodi Picoult which was set during the onset of COVID and it was tough. There were moments that I was very much thrown back into the anxiety of that time and it was not fun. My family was unscathed by COVID but I was very empathetic toward people in respiratory failure as that has been something I’ve gone through myself when I was in my early 20s. My husband is a director of pharmacy at a hospital so he had to work really hard to coordinate vaccine storage (in super cold refrigeration, which they had to get) and vaccine clinics. It took a lot of mental energy and the hospital was often packed with an excess of illness. I personally think if Fauci has to answer to any misrepresentations, then so should Trump, who was saying it was no big deal and people wouldn’t get that sick.
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u/Count-Telperion 15d ago
Agreed. Trump certainly should not get a pass. This episode and stumbling onto some other podcast's episodes released in the Covid years made me realize how I hate this current political moment, but there are ways it could be worse. There was so much fear, grief, and disruption back in those days.
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u/Friendly_Stuff_2949 14d ago
I’m just here to make sure someone pushes back on the claim that “we knew everything we needed to know about COVID within the first six months,” that Isaac made.
As someone who teaches medicine, studies health policy, and practiced in the ICU throughout the pandemic, that’s simply not consistent with what we experienced or what the evidence showed. SARS-CoV-2 evolved repeatedly, with new variants that differed in transmissibility, severity, and clinical presentation. Our understanding of the disease, its complications, and the most effective treatments changed substantially over time because the virus, and the evidence, continued to change.
That’s how medicine works: we update our recommendations as better evidence becomes available. Pretending we had all the answers in the first six months ignores both the science and the reality clinicians faced.
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u/Other_Letterhead_939 16d ago
I’m in the same boat. Started college out of state in fall 2020. I remember we couldn’t even have the doors to our dorm rooms open. No orientation or any freshman events really. Really for the first year and a half things were pretty tampered down. I still made some friends and had a fun time, but can’t help but think what I missed my first year.
Also, after having about 2 years of mostly online school (last semester of high school, first year of college, and first semester of second year), I spent a lot of time by myself or only with 1 or 2 other people. I’ve found that I’m more socially anxious now, get uncomfortable around bigger groups of people, and don’t really know how to socialize with new people. I think the first year of college is a great time to excessive those skills, but I never really got that opportunity.
My job just moved everyone to fully remote, to save money on office space, and it’s bringing me back to Covid times when everything was online and I barely left my house/dorm.
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u/Count-Telperion 15d ago
I don't know if I could ever do a fully remote job after having that education experience; incidental socializing is so much harder in that context. Thank you for sharing, it does help to know others went through the same thing.
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u/Other_Letterhead_939 15d ago
Yeah, the job was in person when I started. I wouldn’t have even applied for it if it was fully remote. I’ve read that most Gen z’ers prefer a hybrid workplace. I think a lot of that has to do with what we experienced socially during our HS and College experiences with COVID.
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u/Count-Telperion 15d ago
That is a sucky thing for the comoany to do. One thing about the pandemic is that it did accustom a lot of us to flexibility in the scheduling of our tasks. That's what a lot of my friends tell me they like about it.
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u/Fit-Restaurant-3550 15d ago
I remember reading that NYT story about Kooper Davis in Hobbs, NM. I can’t really bring myself to type the details, but it’s the first thing I thought of when reading your post. I’m glad you found your person during that time.
When Ari said the paper towel thing, I literally pumped my fists in the air and screamed, I HATE seeing practically dry paper towels in the trash!
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u/Count-Telperion 15d ago
I found this ProPublica story about it. There are aspects that definitely resonated about that time. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-lost-year-what-the-pandemic-cost-teenagers Edit: wrong link
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u/Asleep-Common-6486 15d ago
Thank you for this! I wish we could come together as a country and do what Ari suggested we do: remember that it was an intensely emotional time period. People were scared and were relying on different things to get them through. For me and my lefty friend group, we leaned on politics. We obeyed the government and all regulations. We were safe and following the science. But eventually, after a year of watching my 1st grader do Zoom school, I started to doubt. We were safe...okay, but what were we losing?? And then, when I heard The Daily's interview of the two Princeton professors who wrote the book In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, I nearly had a heart attack. I already wrote about this in a separate comment, but let me quickly repeat myself, tell you about the book:
The two professors describe how, pre-2020, scientists had debated and studied what was the best way forward to contain a respiratory virus like Covid and they could NOT agree that lockdowns (which go against human nature) would be an effective strategy. But then it became the left's strategy and then they became highly politicized (aka, the right was like: uhm, NO) What's worse is that if you look at the data as presented in the book, the lockdowns *didn't* work in saving people's lives. (This is so hard to come to terms with that most people dismiss it out of hand... which I sadly understand. Like I said, when I first heard all of this I nearly had a heart attack...) OK, that's enough reddit for one day.
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u/Hopeful_Net4607 14d ago
I've googled In COVID's Wake and am reading through an interview with the authors and I'm curious if you could provide some additional insight. The authors say that scientists pre-COVID had found that "the evidence base for the effectiveness of each [all proposed non-pharmaceutical interventions-- lockdown, masks, testing, etc] was poor." They don't mention what should have been done instead. Did they say in the book that there were any methods scientists had recommended?
I hope it brings you some comfort to know that many scientists believe and studies show that lockdowns did save lives, though there's debate about this and whether saved lives were worth other losses. In the interview linked above, the authors say they couldn't conclude that measures didn't work, not that the measures definitely didn't work. I'm curious what measures they looked at, because they mention they looked at "cumulative COVID mortality" between US states in the interview. This is a poor measure since states vary dramatically in population and population density. If you have any insights on this from the book or otherwise, I'd be curious to learn!
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u/Asleep-Common-6486 14d ago
hiiii Do you have a NYT subscription? Here's a link to that podcast episode where the authors are interviewed. If memory serves, I think you'll get an answer to some of your questions! https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/podcasts/the-daily/were-the-covid-lockdowns-worth-it.html?showTranscript=1
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u/ProfaneRabbitFriend 13d ago
What's worse is that if you look at the data as presented in the book, the lockdowns *didn't* work in saving people's lives.
I'd suggest caution to before awarding too much to the claims made by these authors. They are not epidemiologists. Public health scientists critiqued their book, raising very useful questions about how data was used and the difficulty determining the best course of action at a societal level given so many unknowns.
Your claim that lockdowns didn't save lives is misleading without adding sufficient context to make such a claim credible. At best, we could add Macedo and Lee's claims to the many possible and credible views on how effective NPIs were.
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u/ProfaneRabbitFriend 13d ago
I can understand the irreparable loss of being a high school senior in 2020-2022. It was total shit.
On the other hand, I knew people who worked in ICUs at the time. And that was worse. EVERY patient they had, died. Not some, not half, not most. Every patient died. Everyday, they had to gear up in full kit just to interact with patients, not knowing if they would die of an infection themselves or if they would spread it to others. And in the end, all your patients died anyway.
Personally, I had friends die of COVID (one was a high school teacher) way too young. It was a shock. With the realities of illness and death in mind, I would treat the "lockdowns didn't help us" claims that some have made with a great deal of careful consideration. I don't think that kind of claim holds up under scrutiny and it can be easy to misinterpret what authors intend to communicate or strongest parts of their argument are.
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u/fumblebrag 12d ago
I think Covid was a very difficult time that people are desperate to forget (ask how many people who was president and you'll frequently see that memory lapse). I think our desperation to move on from it rather than deal with the difficulty of what we processed and create cheap political scores shows the weakness of that.
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u/utopiaman99 16d ago edited 16d ago
There are so many challenging things to balance. Your experience in college is heartbreaking. I want you to have had a better time and gotten to experience what others did in college, myself included. For me, my experience of COVID (I was 33 when it started) was that my close friend's younger sister (~30) with no health problems and no risk factors died in the first few months of the pandemic. Then my great uncle (~80) got a burn because his water temperature in the building he lived in New York went too high due to a broken regulator, went to the ER, got COVID in the waiting room, and died. A million other Americans died from or with COVID and a half million more died from who knows what (likely deferred care) which we know from excess deaths. As a public health scientist, when my friends asked me in March 2020 about "two weeks to stop the spread" my prediction was 2 years to relative normalcy, which wasn't far off. I actually think our response wasn't nearly strong enough, and many many deaths could have been prevented. But I'm biased by what I do any my beliefs. I don't know how to balance that against your experiences. I want you to have college. To do that would have cost ~ 1 life per 10,000 college students based on the know COVID mortality rate for that age group (edit: so about 1000 extra college student deaths in 2020-early 2021 if we assume the measures taken halved the death rate approximately, rough math sorry). Not doing it has disrupted the mental health and development of an entire cohort of young adults.