Seems like a deliberate attempt to manufacture consent for the purported end of the pandemic in front of millions of viewers on national TV. I know I’m just stating the obvious, but wouldn’t want to remind people about how thousands of people are still dying from COVID in the US in the most recent weeks or how 800,000 people have officially died from COVID under the Biden administration (which the Biden admin continually tries to attribute to the Trump admin when they’re both complicit).

I mean the overwhelming majority of people (including most leftists) already treat it as over, but ya know.

If you live in the US, the rapid tests are absurdly expensive–like sometimes $10 per test. Which also isn’t great because rapid tests have a not-insignificant false negative rate, and, well, sometimes you just get a shitty test that straight up doesn’t even work (i.e. the control line doesn’t even show up).

I recently used this site in the UK to purchase some FlowFlex tests: https://www.visionpharmacy.com/products/flowflex-antigen-rapid-covid-test-1-test-kit

I believe there’s a flat rate for worldwide shipping is £19.99, which is currently just under $26 USD. So larger purchases make more sense if you can swing it or split the cost of an order with someone else. So if you purchased like 50 tests, that would be like a little under $2.50 per test. Free shipping on orders over £50. I also used the discount code WELCOME10 to get an extra 10% off.

My recent order had an expiration date on the tests of October 2025, so, pretty good! But your mileage may vary.

As for why I suggest FlowFlex specifically, well, when the other two people in my household got COVID at the beginning of the year, on the very first day of both of them having symptoms, FlowFlex immediately showed a positive test for both of them. I’m pretty sure the quick detection was a big reason why I avoided getting infected myself (obviously the bigger reason was because of quarantining, but I digress).

My understanding is that FlowFlex is also one of the better rapid tests out there. An excerpt from their site:

The performance of the Flowflex COVID-19 Antigen Home Test was established in an all-comers clinical study conducted between March 2021 and May 2021 with 172 nasal swabs self-collected or pair-collected by another study participant from 108 individual symptomatic patients (within 7 days of onset) suspected of COVID-19 and 64 asymptomatic patients. All subjects were screened for the presence or absence of COVID-19 symptoms within two weeks of study enrollment. The Flowflex COVID-19 Antigen Home Test was compared to an FDA authorized molecular SARS-CoV-2 test. The Flowflex COVID-19 Antigen Home Test correctly identified 93% of positive specimens and 100% of negative specimens.

Obviously a few years old, so idk how well this holds up against the current dominant variants out there. I am unfortunately having trouble finding the original study, and I know anecdotes only count for so much, but yeah, these are the best rapid tests I’ve used so far.

Very cool that this is happening in big cities, too. Remember to for the Democrats to keep the fascist Republicans out of office! Pay no attention to the fascism already happening under the Democrats!

Also, I’m sure the recent overturning of the Chevron deference couldn’t possibly stifle efforts to fight any potential pandemics (say, H5N1) even further. :yea:

Jeez, that’s grotesque. Seems like the decision to hold an event extremely repugnant like that at a synagogue was also deliberate so then the Zionists could cry antisemitism at the inevitable protests, too.

I think many of us who are still being cautious have thought about letting our guard down at some point. Hell, I kind of did that briefly during the summer of 2021, after I got “fully vaccinated” and bought into the fantasy that the vaccine rollout would end the pandemic. And then I stumbled onto COVID cautious twitter and got exposed more and more to disability justice, and got very cautious again shortly after that, a few months before the first wave of Omicron hit.

In general, though, I do understand why some well-meaning people do give up their precautions and go “back to normal”. There is definitely a social pressure to conform and get “back to normal” from family, friends, acquaintances, etc. I’d argue that there is an economic pressure to do so, too. I’ve heard increasingly more stories of people getting fired for still taking precautions or being threatened with termination for doing so. So it does feel like there is increasingly more coercion to get “back to normal”.

I’m not sure if I can keep this level of caution up in perpetuity. I’m still holding out for a nasal or sterilizing vaccine, if such a thing is even possible. But idk how well that would work, since I’m assuming not everyone would take it and some immunocompromised people would probably be unable to take it. I’m waiting for that and/or an actual treatment/cure for long COVID, but again, not sure how practical that is, and even if it comes to fruition, I’m guessing it would cost an arm and a leg and fuck over a bunch of vulnerable people because of the expense.

Then again, there’s a part of me that honestly thinks that we’re going to get more and more pandemics, since climate change and animal agriculture, among other things, are increasingly upping the risk of that happening. And that I should just get used to living like this because, whether from COVID or forest fires or some other pandemic, I think society will face a reckoning that makes them finally acknowledge that masks are effective. And maybe leftists should adopt them anyways for privacy/surveillance reasons.

And I also just think it’s extremely fucked and depraved that most people are now okay or indifferent with living with a disease that disproportionately kills disabled and immunocompromised people. And shit like the CDC director passing it off as good news that most people dying had multiple comorbidities. Just straight up eugenics shit getting normalized in the mainstream. It is extremely depressing to me that most people are seemingly okay with accepting yet another cause of mass death and suffering (one that is actually much worse than usual, COVID is still like the #4 killer in the US), as if nothing can possibly be done at all, and that we have no choice but to accept it.

And I’m sorry to tell anyone who thinks they’re immune to bad outcomes from COVID, but no, you’re not. Many people who were previously “healthy” are now suffering from long COVID. And basically no one is permanently able-bodied–almost all of us are going to experience some disability in our lives at some point. And it’s up to you if you’re willing to roll the dice on a novel virus that has already killed and disabled millions, is still killing about 1,000 people per week in the US during a pandemic “lull” (and even that is certainly an undercount because we stopped giving a shit about tracking data), has only short-lasting immunity at best, and lots of evidence that each reinfection increases the likelihood of adverse health effects.

The head of the WHO has literally been on record saying that 1 in 10 infections leads to long COVID, and that hundreds of millions of people in the world, at this rate, will need long-term care in the coming years from that alone. Just extremely grim stuff.

Oh god, that sounds awful, you have my sympathies. And I’ve always hated all of that “team building” shit, even before the pandemic. And especially now because it usually entails eating out at a restaurant or going to a bar, and I just turn all that shit down now for obvious reasons.

Years ago, I used to get all bazinga about the Steam winter sales, until I realized I was never playing most of those games and wasn’t “saving” money at all.

Oh damn, I didn’t realize you were saying you had the same exact scenario happen to you lol, I thought you were just saying you didn’t buy anything on Black Friday. Did you have your social credit score deducted for this transgression against consumerism?

There was actually another person who also didn’t buy anything, so I think it was received better than it otherwise would have been, lol

I work in a bullshit office job and I had a meeting where someone did an icebreaker by asking what we all bought for Black Friday :agony-limitless:

I proudly said I bought nothing :gigachad:

It’s real fun how Bill Gates is routinely referred to as an expert outside of his lane (intellectual property/stealing from workers), including pandemics, and he’s probably the single person who should have the most blame in the catastrophic pandemic response. He’s the one who convinced Oxford to sell their vaccine for big pharma, after they had the original intent to make it open source for the world.

The fact that this business tyrant who was reviled by many in the public has now rebranded himself as a “good” billionaire really shows he has the best PR that money can buy.

Bill Gates most certainly does, he routinely expresses concern about shit like Africa and their “rapid population growth” and the like, there’s no way he isn’t an ecofascist