TWO FUCKING YEARS!
More than that.
I left my old job in January 2020. Started the new one in Feb 2020. It's a 100% remote position. But part of the deal, is as a new employee I had to go into the office for 90 days before I could be let loose to be a remote employee. Well 21 days in or so I started getting a little tired of being in a ghost office by myself. So I asked my manager if I could work a few days from home a week. He got back to me. YES! That would be fine. Come in 2 days a week, and work from home 3 of them.
Then the email.
"As of tomorrow, do not come in any more." It was 100% remote due to covid. HOORAY?
You all know this story. You have lived some version of it.
So I worked over the next years. And I got to do some interesting stuff. I designed the computer workflows for the vaccine clinics we stood up. And volunteered in them. I was careful - myself. Doing the grocery shopping for my family. Masking and the whole works. I built the dashboards that showed COVID admission, treatment, and mortality for our administrators. I was deeply in that data for quite some time.
And over that time I noticed something.
Covid was infecting HUGE amounts of people. But considering those numbers? It was not killing that many.
The way it went was this (and I posted this here at some point) The majority of people that got it either never knew or felt like they had a cold and got over it without medical attention. The majority of the remainder my have come into the hospital out of paranoia, or serious need, but were sent home to "isolate and let the damn thing take it's course". The majority of the remainder from THAT were admitted and taken care of for a few days or a week or two and sent home all better. Then finally the remainder excluding all the above positive outcomes were admitted to ICU. And whatever tiny sliver of folks were left might be intubated.
That last group? A vanishingly small percentage. But you did not want to be in it... because if you got to that point... well it did not typically turn out well.
But my dashboards matched the data we were almost never hearing in the mainstream news. 99.x% of people would survive this disease, just as they would a cold. It could be a terrible disease for those who were the 0.x%. And I would never want to take away the seriousness of that for those who have suffered, and have had loved ones die, or have died themselves.
But the all the same things are true of the FLU as well.
Covid was not really a huge threat. The way it WAS serious was just that it was so contagious that it would produce, just because of the sheer numbers, a lot of sick people, and a certain tiny percentage of those would die.
Anyway... here we are now. The world having set fire to itself because chicken little was SURE the sky was falling. And it is time to build again.
Well, this weekend my inlaws were in town. We did a lot of things together. and in the midst of it?
Yeah. I got the damn coof.
Well... chances are quite good I have what amounts to a mild cold, and survive to see my bitcoin hoard provide security for my family.
But just in case I get intubaed and kick the bucket? I love you guys, and I wish you all well. Consider my lost coins a donation to you all.