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A variety of reasons really:
I got it very early, back in March 2020 and had severe long covid from it. I had trouble just breathing for the following year and moderate aphasia for nearly three years. I still have mild aphasia and, as a professional communicator, it's been emotionally devastating.
I know the current strains don't cross the blood brain barrier as easily as the earliest strains, but the idea of going back down that road doesn't sound terribly appealing.
My wife was recently diagnosed with a congenital condition and covid could give her a permanent disability or even kill her. We're consulting with doctors, but we're still very much in the uncertainty phase.
Finally, a friend of ours, who's been nearly as cautious as we are, recently got pressured into unmasking at a corporate retreat, got covid and now has (permanent?) heart damage. We all know it's a fluke and just very bad luck, but it's no less traumatizing for her or her family.
There will almost certainly be a time in the near future where we no longer mask for basic activities. We watch things like excess deaths, wastewater analysis and hospitalizations as closely as possible and the situation is clearly improving.
That said, every war has a final victim, and we have no intention of being that person. For now, masking is physically easy, we have a social circle that we trust and honestly don't miss a lot of the excesses we've stepped away from.
I am very sorry to hear that about your family and friends....I know of a couple people who ad Long Form COVID and it was similar. I hope the best for you and your family moving forward! Thank you for sharing.
Where do you find those metrics you're following? I'm also hesitant to drop all precautions as I don't think my mental health could take an extended bout of brain fog. I'm a bit of a hermit anyway, and like you said, masking is easy.
I hardly see masks in public at all anymore, though, so I'm feeling unsure about how to tell if everybody's just acting like it's over when it isn't, or if I'm holding out way longer than necessary.
The data isn't as easy to find as it used to be:
I generally check this every week to get a high-level feel for how the pandemic is going. For months now there's been around a 1% drop every week. You'll notice a slight up-tick this last week, breaking that trend.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
Waste water surveillance is probably the easiest, most accurate way to determine the actual state of the pandemic.
You can generally get some good data here:
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/wastewater-surveillance
Not all waste water data gets sent there, so Google your state ant COVID waste water and you can probably find some universities or state government run trackers that might have better data specific to your area.
Finally, excess mortalities can be a helpful metric to watch as well, but it's more about the overall state of the pandemic, not how any particular week is going.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Awesome, thanks so much!