• mean_bean279@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    For a few months basically no one knew how it spread. I look back and think about how it could be seen as overboard, but being cautious and careful is more important in a time when something like Covid was quickly spreading and had these wildly different experiences for people. Especially the first alpha variant which seemed to either kill people, or cause them to not smell/taste and have memory issues. I wasn’t going to fuck with that, and still don’t want to.

    Also, some forget, but there was a lot of videos coming out of China where it started with people running around seemingly trying to infect others and felt very zombie-esque.

    • Bob Robertson IX @discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 months ago

      Same… we’d wipe down our groceries, and anything delivered by mail or UPS would sit on our back porch for a few days before we’d bring it in the house. Was it necessary? Probably not, but our house never got sick - at least not until 2023. So for the next pandemic I won’t mind being overly cautious again.

      • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Yeah I remember it was months in before studies started coming out that it didn’t spread via surfaces. I distinctly remember thinking “shit what am I supposed to do with all these Clorox wipes??”

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          3 months ago

          I wish that message had gotten around a little faster. By summer or fall of 2020, we had a pretty good idea that covid didn’t live well on surfaces, but we still had people gobbling up isopropyl alcohol and causing a shortage. Worse, a few companies made hand sanitizer with methanol as a cheap way to keep up with demand.

    • Wrench@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yep. There were reports that it could live on plastic surfaces for over a week.

      Is it silly in hindsight knowing everything we do today? Sure. But if a new epidemic spreads rapidly again before we have any reliable info on it, I’m going back to wiping things down and washing my hands after touching anything.