Thread by @stealthbadger, Dear everyone thinking about visiting family over Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'd like [...]

Dear everyone thinking about visiting family over Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'd like to talk to you about something we share: a little voice inside us. Most of us hear it, the same one that's been welling up since March. /1

It's a little voice, or a feeling. You can't tell when it started, but you sure as hell can tell when it decided to make itself heard, rising up as you're trying to figure out how to occupy yourself in these same four walls for another moment. Rising up and saying "NO MORE!" /2

It's a complete and total emotional rejection of the idea that you have to be cooped up in the same small space with the same people (or alone, as is my case), and the feeling that getting out of this box is the most important thing you could do for your own survival. /3

There's an important truth you need to remember about that voice: IT'S REALLY STUPID ABOUT MOST THINGS. It doesn't care much about risk or consequences, and to the degree that it does care, it doesn't understand them well at all. /4

So I'd like to put it in concrete terms for you. If you have COVID, *probably* one in about 60 of the people you give it to will die. If someone else has COVID, the same probability applies. /5

Imagine holding a gun and pointing it at each person who breathes the air you exhale and pulling the trigger, and (usually) one time out of 60 it will fire. And you don't know when. It could be less, it could be more. YOU DON'T KNOW. /6

But that's not the reality, is it? Instead, you don't know if you have a gun or are pulling that trigger. You don't know if the other people around you are pulling the trigger. You can, however, tell if someone is changing the odds. /7

If someone is yelling in your face, they are pulling that trigger just as fast as they can, whether the gun has a bullet in it or not. If they're wearing a mask, they're often pointing the gun at the ground. Same if they're remaining distant from you. /8

Get this: if they are self-isolating and so are you, then there are no guns being pointed at all! People who are acting as if this virus is real are not only defending themselves, they're defending you. /9

They're not only doing that, they're preventing those they would have otherwise "shot" from passing it on to anyone else. They are doing the Right Thing by themselves, and by you. Don't make their effort wasted. /10

Most importantly, they are mitigating what is becoming a horrible impact on our health care system. I really don't understand why this is a controversial thing, since more than one city is back in the position of having overflow trucks for their morgues, with more to follow. /11

For those of you who find the firearms analogy distasteful, my viewpoint is from someone hearing two nurses who work COVID wards talk about what happened, and what's coming. I feel the analogy is entirely appropriate given what I've heard. /12

There are other places to take this analogy: don't point your breath at anyone (unless they share your living space and therefore probably have the same infection status as you by default), and treat someone doing it to you as a real danger to you and yours. /13

Not as dangerous as a gun, but certainly a threat. We're going to be pushing 200,000 cases a day very VERY soon, lots of hospitalizations just after Thanksgiving, and deaths starting to surge in mid-to-late-December. /14

Most importantly: don't tiptoe around this. You could be wrong (I HOPE I'M WRONG), but we know this is real. Treat it as such. We know people who have gotten sick, and people who have died.

This is not gambling. You do not get another spin at the wheel if you lose. /15

"Why," you may ask, "are you bothering with this thread?"

Because I was struggling with that idiotic voice too, and selfishly, I figured writing this would help me get my head on straight. I wasn't wrong.

Thank you for your time and patience. Stay safe and healthy. /fin

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