Everyone talks so much shit on USA car culture but our testing centers are typically a drive thru where patients are isolated in their cars thereby protecting everyone. Patients swab themselves and then hand the sample over through a few inch opening in the window.
In India - at least in the cities - you don't even need to step out for a Covid test. You can request a technician to come and collect your sample from the comfort of your home, and you'll get the result in a few hours or the next day at most. I'm not sure where the commenter's parents live, but if they live even in a moderate-sized city, they're being unnecessarily paranoid.
Thanks for bringing this up. I will check whether such a facility exists in the village where my parents live.
If you’re curious, they live in Srirangam, Trichy, TamilNadu.
A lot of testing centers / labs such as Lister or Thyrocare can do in person sample collections, such as this one below are available.
Its quite easy to get a test done at home. (Mentioned of lister metropolis because they had come home for some other sample collection and mentioned of this) . You can check aggregator apps as well that provide this list.
So many downsides to that.. how do you get tested if you dont have a car? How do you drive a car when you are very sick? How do you make sure properly do the test on themselves?
Sorry, but I dont find this a good argument in favor of a car-culture at all.
> For each walk-up site, we looked at how many people live within a mile radius and could conceivably walk to the site. You don’t need to look at a map to know that too many people and places are left behind. If you don’t have a car but live in South Los Angeles, chances are you can find a nearby walk-up test site. But if you’re carless in East L.A., there is not a single walk-up option in your community. The entire San Fernando Valley — with a population of almost 2 million — received its first and only walk-up site, in Arleta, in late June.
> After trekking nearly two hours on public transit to get to the testing site in Flatbush, a neighborhood in New York's Brooklyn borough, the 30-year-old taproom manager was surprised to discover a line of cars snaking around the address instead of a line of people. McGrath, who does not own a car, approached a state trooper at the testing site to confirm his suspicions that a vehicle was required to be tested.
> "I walk up to one of the state troopers and he says, 'You can't walk in, you have to have a car,'" McGrath told Business Insider, adding that it appeared as though he was not the first New Yorker to arrive at the testing site on foot.
And here I was thinking that Germany was car-centric... anecdotal evidence, but in my small town there is a testing site in a pharmacy a few hundred meters from my home, and I couldn't imagine that you would have trouble finding a testing site accessible by foot or public transport in larger cities.
I have gotten so many covid tests in the past two years. Some of them are drive thru only but most don't care either way. In DTLA proper the testing centers are mostly for pedestrians.
Services only being available for the middle class car owners is hardly something that has been dealt with in the US. But you would never recognize it if you drive your own car and never had to deal with taking public transit to live your daily life.
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Having a car is not a requirement to get tested. It has made it really easy to get tested though. For what it’s worth, this isn’t our idea as a nation. Korea was doing it before us.
The drive through testing really does offload a lot of stress that would otherwise be placed on physicians and pharmacies. The logistics are a huge win. Locally we’ve had unoccupied parking structures used to house the tests. Even without that you basically just need a parking lot, a couple tents, and a restroom.
If you’re so sick you can’t drive you can have DoorDash or any other delivery service send you an at home test. If you’re too sick for that, you probably should call for medical services and not an antigen test.
I’m in Georgia, which has not offered any support for people during the pandemic beyond what the Federal government provided, and it’s pretty easy to get a test due to the efforts of private companies. If you don’t have a car you can often walk up provided there is a sidewalk. We also have testing available in every chain pharmacy and in dedicated facilities that have sprung up in unoccupied mall space or buildings used by bank branches and fast food establishments that are vacant.
has the type of "swabs" changed? i don't see myself doing the tickle-your-brain type nasal swab i've had done when getting tested (only once when my wife ( a teacher ) was exposed ). My hand would just respectively refuse the order from my brain.
There are various types of PCR tests - I suspect you are referring to a Nasopharyngeal swab - which goes from tip of the nose to base of the ear (and it much smaller than a long Q-Tip) vs a nasal swab that usually gets both nostrils and doesn't go in nearly so far.
I've personally done Nasopharyngeal swabbing in a drive-thru. I will be supervising self-swabbing at a University starting tomorrow. They are very different things. One is a Q-Tip that only gets inserted into the nasal cavity. The tickle-your-brain swab is a different thing entirely. It requires training to do properly (enters approximately 90 degrees to your face) and while I learned how it feels from both sides, I can't imagine someone being asked to self-administer a Nasopharyngeal swab.
Driving to a testing center and sitting in your car could easily use $3 in gas and more of your time. 7-11 is absolutely everywhere here, you don't understand the level of convenience.
I'm in my condo right now, I could go to a 7-11, come back and have my result all within 10 minutes for $3. But yeah car culture in America is great
There is a 7-11 within short walking distance of virtually everybody here in Bangkok. And free delivery too from 7-11 if you order more than 100 baht (around $3)
> If there even is public transportation to speak of
The public transportation here in Bangkok is amazing. It's clean, on time, and affordable
This isn't the typical scenario in the Bay Area where testing centers are walk-in vs. drive through. To ensure testing consistency, swabbing is done by a healthcare worker (e.g., nurse) not by the person being tested. This is my experience across 4-counties here, San Francisco city included.
Net-net, COVID-testing privacy isn't a laudable consequence of the US's car culture, at least not everywhere in the US.
I'm not anti mask but people are way too dismissive of the damage done to children who have to wear masks all the time. Especially when it comes to socializing, learning facial cues, and being able to express emotions.
We really have dropped the ball and turned valid concerns by parents into a political finger pointing shit storm.
> Especially when it comes to socializing, learning facial cues, and being able to express emotions.
Maybe if we raise a generation that doesn't rely on facial cues to recognize emotions as much we'll end up with a society that's more open and understanding to people who struggle with interpreting facial and other non-verbal cues for other reasons, such as autism?
> I'm not anti mask but people are way too dismissive of the damage done to children who have to wear masks all the time
I take you don't have children? I have, and they do regularly socialize, and none of the families I've ever talked with, mentioned any form of damage due to this.
Social isolation during the first wave - that was a real problem; there was concrete suffering.
I actually have an alternative take on this: if society is not able to do something as simple as consistently use a mask, there's no hope to do something that requires concrete sacrifice as mitigating global warming.
> I actually have an alternative take on this: if society is not able to do something as simple as consistently use a mask, there's no hope to do something that requires concrete sacrifice as mitigating global warming.
Let me frame this positively: Covid as a whole did increase the chances that humanity will actually do something as against global warming, and actually survive the next 200 years or so.
Honestly compared to the 1918 pandemic we have actually done an amazing job with covid. Not only have we gotten a new vaccine out for it in record time but mask wearing is also really high by per capita percentages in the vast majority of the world.
I really am baffled that people don't see things with more positivity.
Conditional on these advances in science, technology, and medicine it's quite obvious how badly many Western democratic societies have done (that's not to say there aren't also positive outcomes, and it varies a lot by nation).
Take the US as an example: Would you have guessed that the 'most pandemically prepared country' would lead Western democratic nations in terms of death count? How ready do you view US society to combat future threats like climate change, an even deadlier pandemic, or non-democratic state actors? What does that mean for the Western model of democracy?
The effects of climate change are mostly natural disasters that come and go as normal which the United States deals with regularly. That entire argument is tired and irrelevant. The United States for all it's faults is also likely keeping the most accurate statistics on the whole thing and gave the the mRNA vaccine to the world.
2 out of 3 of what you brought up has nothing to do with covid.
History doesn't stop just cause there's a pandemic.
This argument works both ways: parents who wanted to politicize mask wearing made a far bigger deal of it and over-exaggerated the impacts. I know a fair number of people with small children, including those born during the pandemic, and the only ones who allegedly had problems uncoincidentally have parents who get their “news” from Facebook or Fox. Everyone else barely even mentions it because it’s no harder than all of the other things kids have to get used to, like toilet training or the oppression of wearing clothes.
Eh I'm on the opposite side of it seeing my future mother in law raise a 5 to 7 year old through this whole thing and at first she liked it cause he's more of an introverted quiet kid so it seemed like it helped him at first but then we started to see small social issues with him start to come out and likely due to him basically missing his entire first and second grade. Kid is probably irrevocable fucked up now. The mask thing is just more icing on the cake.
Working from home the most I had to wear the mask is flying somewhere and I fucking haaaate it. And I say this as a trans person that enjoyed for once not being misgendered in public. The truth is me and my very liberal girlfriend are fucking over it and we don't care anymore. We're triple vaxed and fuck it. We've been going clubbing at maskless down town LA parties for months now and haven't caught it yet.
The fact that kids have to do more than I do as an adult is baffling to me. I legitimately feel bad for them.
My wife is a teacher, and we know a bunch of other teachers, and I'd like to say please do not give up on this kid — they're more resilient than adults often think, and family support is really important, even if it might not seem like it's doing anything now. The problems you described sound like they're more due to other pandemic-related disruption rather than wearing a mask and whatever you can do to be there for him is going to make a difference.
> The fact that kids have to do more than I do as an adult is baffling to me. I legitimately feel bad for them.
I completely agree. Our national policy has basically been to write off children to keep high-risk businesses open for adults and I would in a heartbeat take a blanket vaccination mandate and other risk mitigation measures for high-risk businesses explicitly based on the goal of keeping normal schooling open (e.g. link high-risk activities like indoor dining or drinking being open to community spread rates).
Gonna go with everyone. Every day I see some parent go "my kids have no problem wearing masks".
Thing is I realized recently that as a kid with a bpd mother one reason I grew up as a shy nerdy shut in was because any time I did anything it would cause a giant fight with my mom so I just gave up and stopped trying. Now I realize it fucked me up in multiple ways being like that. I imagine it's much the same with a lot of these kids. They have zero agency to go against it.
Regardless of how you or I feel about the usefulness of masks this is a side benefit to many parents and schools. Schools want kids that just bend over and take whatever flavor of capricious BS they're producing on a given week. Few parents want kids with agency and critical thinking skills because you can't just lie to them to get them to do what you want. Everyone says they want critical thinking but look at their actions.
Honestly one reason I don't want kids is that I don't want to deal with schools, parents, and the whole infrastructure of child rearing in today's day. Even five generations ago you had 5 kids and just fed and clothed them..maybe sent them to school if you could but generally they helped you out at home and then went to work and got married and became largely independent by age 20. In today's era the entire concept of raising children is exhausting and not really sustainable. Society wants you to put in literally 10x the amount of hours into child rearing in contrast to what my great grandmother had to deal with.
And everyone acts so insanely self righteous and judgy about it.
Not really, individual package developers don't have as much inmediate control over the repository's state as they do with NPM. Packages go through a review by one of the trusted developers and sometimes automated QA and testing (including as of late reproducibility testing, i.e. does the source match the binary?), before being uploaded to the repository.
If you can't trust the team behind the distro, then sure, your supply chain is compromised, but it's significantly less likely for a single package developer to cause any damage, as all the big distros have rather extensive policy and procedures to prevent such things.
I use Gentoo which uses portage the package manager and the way portage works is it pulls source then compiles. Source is rarely checked by everyone. Small packages exist as well. Many Linux distro simply barrow binaries from "trusted" sources. The entire eco system is really a deck of cards.
This is a false equivalence brought up every time anyone mentions how vulnerable the npm/gems/pip ecosystems are to supply chain attacks.
Linux code is always reviewed before deployment, goes through many eyeballs, people are careful about this. The same is not true of npm, or any of the other services (as this event clearly shows).
Parts of the Linux stack equivalent to colors and faker are carefully audited and reviewed by multiple people? That sounds to me like elevating them to important bits in a false equivalence.
When it comes to security (among other things), one simply cannot say that all the important bits are in the kernel. If that were the case, there would not be an issue to discuss here.
Shells do have actual value. In Hawaii all the good ones have been taken from near the shore by now. It's typical to find some pristine ones only a few inches in diameter being sold for thousands.
Some were. But your point is valid; a company will move to what _most_ customers want. A FOSS application can keep servicing the (perhaps smaller) original crowd of users.
