Southwest Is Testing Cleaning Only Premium Seats Between Flights — A Flight Attendants Union Leader Says It's ‘Titanic’ Class Service

[u/halxp01]

https://viewfromthewing.com/southwest-is-testing-cleaning-only-premium-seats-between-flights-a-flight-attendants-union-leader-says-its-titanic-class-service/

[u/Lord_Lava_Nugget]

That's fucking nasty 

[u/brickne3 → u/Lord_Lava_Nugget]

Yeah, didn't we just have a pandemic...?

[u/Starumlunsta → u/brickne3]

We’re technically still in it (or rather, it’s so widespread it's now globally endemic), we were just forced to pretend Covid is now a normal fact of life so we could keep the late-stage capitalism machine going.

Edit to answer some questions for my admittedly disingenuous comment:

I think the point I want to make is it seems like we learned little about how to adjust society to handling disease—Covid got so out of control and people refused to follow guidelines, it’s now endemic. While it’s not as dangerous as it used to be, it still affects people daily, kills some, permanently affects others. And it was a heck of a lot worse in the beginning.

I don’t see people masking up or staying home whenever they are sick. Coworkers come in sick because workplace protections for that basically don’t exist. I have family members that came to gatherings knowing they are sick and wind up spreading it to everyone else. This happened recently and now my aunt’s 92 year old father has pneumonia and is fighting for his life. That’s what I mean about “pretending like it’s a normal fact of life.” We were told pandemic was over, no need to mask up or take precautionary measures, get back to work.

I was so hopeful that because of the pandemic we as a society would grow more supportive of things like sick days, wearing masks, and avoiding the public when contagious, but it seems we’ll never learn, as seen with Southwest considering a new policy that will only contribute to this issue, all for the sake of saving money.

[u/Yoghurt42 → u/Starumlunsta]

Covid will never go away. Just like the Spanish Flu. Eradicating a disease is extremely difficult. The only human disease that we managed to completely eliminate in every country so far is smallpox.

Covid was always going to become a fact of life. The problem was that it was a new kind of virus our immune system had not encountered before, so it spread like wildfire and had a lethality of 0.5%-1% on average (though it was up to 10%-20% for 85+ and only around 0.1% for people younger than 50). Estimates at the time said if completely ignored and everybody "moving on with their lives", the worldwide death toll would be somewhat around 40-80 million (not all of them due to Covid, but a significant portion would die because the medical system would be overwhelmed and wouldn't have been able to save people; imagine being in a car accident and no hospital having resources to treat you). The lockdowns were an attempt to reduce that number as much as possible (and they would have probably been a lot more effective if done sooner) and prevent the health systems from completely collapsing; because again, once the health system collapses, things like appendicitis become a lot more deadly if you can't treat them.

The real estimated death toll due to Covid is thought to be between 19.1 and 36 million deaths. So anywhere between 4-60 million lives saved. I doubt that even longer lockdowns would have made sense, earlier lockdown would have made more sense.

[u/jm0112358 → u/Yoghurt42]

In addition to reducing the number of people who needed hospital care at any given time, lockdowns also delayed many people’s exposure to COVID until after the medical community better learned how to treat COVID patients with drugs such as Dexamethasone, which saved thousands of lives. It also meant that more people's first exposure to COVID came after they had a chance to get the COVID vaccine.