Thank you. My grandma tested positive on a Monday around a month ago and went into hospice the following Thursday night, when her oxygen dropped. She passed away the following Saturday morning.

My girlfriend's grandma also passed from COVID a few weeks ago. When it rains it pours, eh?

The whole thing is just horrible to deal with. Not having a chance to say goodbye or go through the grieving process together.

It's just so hard to comprehend how 419k+ other families in the US have experienced similar loss.

Same here. My grandfather died early in the pandemic (May). He tested positive for a period of three weeks and then tested negative a few times. He started feeling better and we were hopeful, but the damage was too great and his heart failed a few weeks later.

I really just can't put my feelings into words.

He was in a physical rehab facility after surgery. When the pandemic hit, visitation was forbidden. Turns out most of the staff were scared and basically abandoned the patients. The specific facility specialized in elderly patients who had severe mobility issues.

He told us on the phone once at the beginning that he was scared because all he heard at night were people screaming for help as they stopped being able breathe as COVID was destroying their lungs. He figured it wasn't long before he caught it. However, no one would sign off on discharging him, and by the time we got the bare minimum to care for him at home and the legal crap sorted out, he caught it.

He lived practically opposite the country to me (I'm in LA, he was in Boston), so I didn't see him very often. He also wasn't the kindest person to me growing up, so I didn't really talk to him all that often either.

With that, it just doesn't feel real that he's gone. There was no funeral, no memorial service, as everything is tabled until after the pandemic. I don't think it'll really set in until I visit my grandmother and he's not there.

And you see the assholes who want to say taking precautions should be a personal choice or are an invasion of their personal freedoms. I wish every single one of them could experience the fear my grandfather did. Stuck in a bed, unable to walk, waiting for a plague to take them as their fellow patients succumb one by one. It's just disgusting.

My grandmother, wearing a full hazmat suit with an oxygen tank, was able to be there with him when he passed.

I'm sorry for you and your family's loss.

I am at the same level of loss-shock as you, I suspect. My mom lives and my grandma lived on the Iron Range in Minnesota, so a very rural area, which seemed to help keep infections at bay for a while.

It's been incredibly hard for my mom, because my grandma was her best friend and her rock. The day she passed, I remember my mom saying "I never got a last hug", which was heart breaking. My mom has MS, so there was no possibility of her visiting her through that whole process.

It's been really hard. I want to see my mom and give her a hug. But I also don't trust the time in between getting the results of a negative test to feel confidant about visiting her.

Hopefully we'll all find some closure once we have a chance to grieve together, properly. There are many memorial/celebration services that have been postponed. I hope we can reach the day where we can hold them safely together.

Thank you for sharing, really, but understand that I could also slip into blind hatred over what I see as the suffering you and your culture have caused (not least being caregivers so scared by the hyped-up risk to younger and healthier people that they abandoned patients?!) but that would not be useful. As the minority opinion I’m also more likely to get flagged or banned, and I do use that handicap as a crutch sometimes (thanks @dang).

Perhaps the best option would be for us to get drunk and rage about this for a few hours or days. I bet I could rant for a lot longer than you, and I bet I understand your position better than you understand mine. Perks of being in the counterculture, I guess.

I feel like your point is probably important somehow. Could you make it with more sensitivity and less indignant contrarianism? Remember that you're replying to someone who has just lost a loved one!

Someone who in their grief also wishes me suffering and an agonizing death, perhaps as revenge:

> I wish every single one of them could experience the fear my grandfather did. Stuck in a bed, unable to walk, waiting for a plague to take them as their fellow patients succumb one by one.

Sensitivity is a nice-to-have, but the goal right now is averting outright war. If none of these bubbles can be cracked open, and everyone just keeps lurching toward violence, where it ends will make today’s tragedy look like mild inconvenience.

Please note I specifically said I wish they could experience the fear. It is not a wish for anyone to experience death, let alone a painful one.

People rarely have to confront the extent of the results of their actions and as a result don't really think on those terms. Personal experience is an effective, often painful teacher.

I can't claim to know your entire perspective, but from the outside, refusing to accept a temporary, minor inconvenience to one's life so we can reduce how many people have to die an agonizing death seems ... selfish, at best.

I myself am a person who suffers from depression issues that have only been magnified by isolation. And yet here I am, following the guidelines as best I can. I'm not at much of a risk of dying from COVID, but if I got it and infected someone who ended up dying from it - I'd never forgive myself.

Thanks for the reply. And er, good that you don’t actually want to go as far as killing me - there’s some wild shit out there right now. I would still be in favor of arguing about all the details over drinks, but for now I’ll just offer the roughest outline of the other perspective, which is:

Refusing to accept a temporarily increased risk of disease, and instead dramatically increasing the chance that your fellow humans will be crushed under the boot of fascism is... also selfish at best.

Ah, you're one of the ones who actually is rational about things.

Put it this way: your liberty to spread your germs ends just where my nose begins. Else we're just permitting tyranny by another route.

Currently there's a very infectious and deadly germ on the loose, so -under the above rule- everyone's freedom becomes more constrained than we'd ideally like.

It's certainly evil; but it's not the human evil of fascism causing it, but rather the natural world evil of a pandemic.

I wonder if that helps any?

You exhale viruses. You exhale CO2. The campaign to remake society in response to these threats is, in its purest essence, a campaign to redefine the free human as a toxic animal. If successful, it will then be used to justify slavery and murder.

And to borrow a page from the global warming folks, we’re not going to wait and see whether that hunch is right, because by then it will be too late. It’s time to end this.

That didn't happen last time?

The USA actually dealt with a similar situation just over 100 years ago in 1918, and people did similar things, and the USA came through just fine as a nation (albeit 600000 citizens lighter :-( ) .

Are you able to come out and make your point, or are you constraint to vague phrases with threatening words?

Just as a tip: this is super annoying and not very clever.

If you don’t already understand that argument as a perfectly obvious concern, we will probably not agree. It is obvious to hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people all over the world.

I recommend you look for conversations outside your usual bubble, and when you find someone to ask questions of, don’t pair the questions with insults.

I don't think I can excuse abandoning patients, but not all caregivers are young and healthy; so some of them would have reason to fear for their safety, or the safety of those they live with, or not want to spread disease among their patients.

Lots of stuff went wrong, and it's tragic that Teknoman117's grandfather couldn't get discharged quickly. It would have been better to be at home without appropriate mobility care than to be in a facility without appropriate mobility care and an active outbreak.

My grandma too. A week from first positive test to dying. It must have been very scary for her. No funeral. I found the part that continually makes me melancholy is all of these people alone in the hospital, separated from family, and feeling themselves get worse and worse.

That number does seem like a lot but in the same time period several million people died from other causes. Death is quite natural.

Death is quite natural, but the fact that a single pathogen, which other "western" nations managed to get under control has become the second leading cause of death in the United States is a horrific thing.

Heart disease is a systemic issue of our lifestyle and diet, and we don't know how to prevent cancer. A pathogen is fairly simple by comparison - if you don't catch it you can't die from it. Prevent the spread and people won't die from it.

See: Australia, New Zealand

Except other western countries haven't "gotten it under control"... they are all having second waves and resurgences with or without large lockdowns and with or without draconian processes.

> fairly simple

Until you start looking at how many lives are saved vs the second and third tier effects. Higher suicide rates from losing jobs and stress? People in third world countries dying from a cratered world economy? etc.

COVID needs to be handled and those more affected by it need protected. More hospital prep and masks around grandma... but the "fascist" and unproven shutdowns which by any measurements not only don't work but - as mentioned - causes more damage than it prevents?

nowhere near as simple as you proclaim it to be.

Lockdowns, social distancing and masking – done consistently – do work. Even the half-measures lockdowns the US has gone through has stopped the entire medical system from collapsing, and at times it has been very close. In NYC in the first wave, it did.

But that isn't what has happened in the US, largely for political reasons.

There are no good options, only less worse ones, and aggressive lockdowns have got Australia, for example, back to work. The cumulative cost of the US's failure to grasp the nettle and just shut everything down for two months properly back last March is enormous.

and yet states that didn't - and aren't - locking down - like Florida - are doing fine. Or better than states that have extensive lockdowns like New York, New Jersey and California...

> Political reasons ... aggressive lockdowns in Australia

Locking down a small country like Australia is much different than locking down a country like the US. Australia is only 20% smaller than the US yet has 10% of the population. The layout is different. Temperature. Density. etc.

https://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/united-states.au...

Locking down Australia would be like locking down one of our less densely populated states - not only does the President not have the ability to do it - he's a President not a King... but locking down the country make zero sense for a virus with a 99%+ survival rate.

again... we can take precautions to protect our hospitals and to "flatten the curve" (which we are loooooong past) and to protect the vulnerable (old, existing conditions, etc)... but locking down America? Coast to coast? No chance this side of turning the President into a Dictator - which was never on the table for Trump and definitely not for Biden.

> Locking down Australia would be like locking down one of our less densely populated states

This is very wrong. Australia is very, very dense, where people live: it just has a lot of absolutely uninhabited land. Functionally Australia is almost entirely urban.

Didn’t a person literally get arrested for trying to publish the real numbers of deaths in Florida?

Yea, Florida is not "doing fine" by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that they don't want to report numbers that show them not doing fine, as the entire state is funded by tourism.

They seem to be doing a pretty good job with vaccination though, so there's that!

Australia has had recorded zero locally acquired cases for more than 7 days now. At one point, Melbourne recorded 700 cases in a day, after several months of hard lockdown, it's down to 1 case in 30 days.

There's also no indication that the suicide rate in 2020 changed significantly from previous years (https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/data/co...)

You know that it's summer in Australia now, right?

Yep, and Melbourne had it's "second wave" in the middle of winter. Locked down and got it under control. We've had the opportunity for things to go pear shaped, but due to decisive action, an educated and thinking public and fairly strict enforcement we've got no community transmission. The only issue we have is that our methods of isolating people returning to the country are proving to be somewhat inadequate with people like cleaners picking up the virus from the isolation facilities (Hotels). These issues are being improved and it looks like we are going to continue to be virus free.

Meanwhile in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter surges correlate with latitude, after a quiet summer. There’s a pretty obvious pattern: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81419-w

And depression can be a slow killer, I’m more interested in the 2020 numbers for strokes and heart attacks. People have been hesitating in emergencies for almost an entire year (and counting).

Living on the border of two such western countries, I'd like to point out that they are definitely taking measures (currently lockdowns) to keep things under control, the lockdowns have a very measurable effect on R, and the death rate in both countries is something like 1-2 orders of magnitude less than the USA.

Basically you're trying to control R. As long as you keep R under 1, you can increase and reduce measures to keep the disease under control. If R goes too far over 1, you bleeped up, and you need to resort to a lockdown to get it back under control.

The theory a lot of (european) western countries are working on is that they want to allow as much freedom as possible, but keep the worst of the disease out.

I'm not entirely convinced this is actually the strategy that optimizes freedom though. It might be better to use the method some asian countries used: close the borders, do maximum effort lockdowns anytime the virus shows up at all; and you might have less days total in lockdown or restrictions, and more days where you are free to go out and eat indoors etc.

The one huge tragic problem with that plan is that when we surrender our freedoms “temporarily” to the government, they never give them back! Or at least we do not trust they will give them back, based on vast experience (see: Patriot Act), so this plan cannot work.

The naïveté on display here is staggering. "You can vote your way into fascism, but you have to shoot your way out."

In other comments people pointed out that New Zealand followed this more stringent strategy.

Right now, they're all outside enjoying summer with almost normal freedoms, while we're still stuck indoors. I must admit I'm jealous!

I don't think the Kiwis are currently preparing to shoot their way out of anything right at the moment. Probably because they're pretty much free to do whatever they want.

I will grant that New Zealand had an easier time of it as an island nation with a low population density, but it does give you pause for thought. Maybe we all could do better next time when the next pandemic rolls around.

Theory vs Practice. Who's more free right now?

Oh for sure. Grieving over death in 2020 is just all around a bad experience.

But I think it's fair to say that the excess deaths [1] in 2020 have certainly amplified the reality of death, especially within the context of a shared experience. My grandma was otherwise healthy and I had had a lot of conversations with her about how much we looked forward to seeing each other once the pandemic was "over".

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Right, that's my point is that death sucks and it happens a lot. Obviously we would love to prevent all the death we can but just living is not always a good trade off. My grandma for example hasn't been allowed visitors for basically a year and says she would rather be dead.

Death rate in my country has roughly doubled. This tends to ruffle some feathers.