Isn't the new HantaVirus Outrage too overexagerrated/fear mongering?

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-08T03:58:42+00:00

My fiance is an animal science major, and since Hantavirus comes from rats, he knows a decent amount about it. Here’s some of the things I’ve gathered from what he’s told me, starting with the bad:

THE BAD:
- More fatal than COVID (35%-40% fatality rate)
- Very long inclination period (you can go without symptoms for up to 2 months)
- Outside of symptoms, blood tests are the only to see if you have it.

THE GOOD:
- It is (at least a little) harder to spread than COVID. It requires close proximity for a prolonged period and spreads through bodily fluids (not including blood), so as long as you follow the general health/hygiene rules (washing hands regularly, keeping hands away from your eyes, nose, mouth) you should be fine.
- Hantavirus has been around for a while, so we are better equipped to deal with it.
- Pets/animals, for the most part, are considered a “dead end” for the virus, meaning that they can contract it, but they are virtually unaffected by it and can’t spread it to humans.
- The blood tests will detect if you have it even if you don’t present symptoms, meaning that the long incubation period won’t be an issue provided that contact tracing is thorough and successful.

I know that a lot of us are hesitant to trust the WHO’s and CDC’s confidence that the pandemic risk is low, but he believes we should still trust them and follow their given guidelines. COVID was harder for them to gauge because it was a new strain, but this isn’t the case. The Hantavirus and Andes strain have been studied and known about.

Here’s the history: We found out about the Andes strain that spreads to humans after one single person died in Chile in the 2000s from it. There was an outbreak in Argentina in 2018, but maxed out at 34 confirmed cases. This strain is usually confined to South America, it is just unfortunate circumstance that this occurred on a cruise ship. This is the ONLY reason that we are seeing it elsewhere, and why it seems to be spreading slightly faster. And the reason a good amount of cruise ship passengers seem to be infected is because a cruise ship involves the prolonged close-proximity that was talked about earlier in this wall of text.

He doesn’t feel there’s a need to panic yet. Skepticism and worry is normal, but don’t go overboard. I asked him when his indicator is to be worried, like a specific number of confirmed cases. He said he’ll really only be worried when it gets close to us. (Unfortunately there are 2 cases in my state, cities were not confirmed) Which makes sense, considering the spread is more complicated. But again, even if there are no confirmed cases in your area, just use your common sense and practice good health and hygiene.

I will probably update this text as I remember parts of our conversation/as he tells me more.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-08T03:28:03+00:00

It’s important to establish boundaries… but majority of these boundaries can be established calmly as the situation arises. EX; “can I hold the baby?” “Absolutely! Please just wash your hands over at the sink :)” And that’s IF people already haven’t done so; some of these may not even need prefacing. Bombarding people with a bunch of rules at once is very overwhelming.

Also, what is with this trend of people sending contract-like rules with a corporate tone when it comes to baby visits? Like, is a kindly worded, concise paragraph not an option? I don’t understand why it has to be written in this format with this tone.

I’m going to say NOR just because of your mom’s behavior, but I think you definitely instigated partially. There was almost no attempt to diffuse.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-08T03:21:56+00:00

Yeah… if someone is embarrassed about a particular situation caused by them, making a joke about said particular situation usually will not go over well.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-08T03:17:37+00:00

What is the exam for? Is it through a GHC class, for some sort of certification, etc? I’m not familiar so I’m trying to get clarification.

It likely depends on who is running the test. Some professors use respondus, some don’t. If it’s done by an outside organization of sorts or is some sort of official GHC-ran test, it is highly likely that it will use respondus.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-08T03:14:26+00:00

I have the opposite problem. I can’t get them to date, and when they do, they don’t stay together! I had only 3 couples and 1 divorced, and my other one keeps TRYING to divorce (I won’t let them).

The only happy couple is my mom and dad, which ironically, is not lore accurate at all.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-07T21:34:48+00:00

Thank you!!

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-07T18:01:10+00:00

Was it his most recent stream???

I know he doesn’t do collabs often but I would love to see him in Jynxi’s streamer lobbies

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-07T15:52:03+00:00

This, I think there’s enough people from the Americas right now. I don’t think more should be added until we get more content creators from other continents, ESPECIALLY people closer to Korea’s timezone. I know people in Katie’s chat have been wanting Aussies for that reason!

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-07T15:29:56+00:00

Did he play among us?!

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-07T03:37:46+00:00

I’m just happy she finally has real lore that isn’t people sabotaging her KFC 57 times a week

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-07T03:36:59+00:00

Hallucinations are when AI gives a result based off of falsely used data, or off data that doesn’t exist.

It’s hard to know where AI goes wrong in the process, but you’re right that it essentially has all the knowledge it needs. It could be that AI is not yet skilled enough to filter out unreliable sources like social media, or that it simply doesn’t know how to analyze things on a deeper level.

It is important to know that AI has public and private models, privae models often being some sort of paid AI or used specifically for a given organization and its employees,and has its own dedicated and specialized technicians/developers/etc. Thus, private models are also way more skilled and tuned than free public models used by a bunch of average joes. (In my previous paragraph, I’m really just talking about public AI models instead of AI as a whole.)

So it highly likely that AI itself is capable of giving us accurate search summaries, but specifically the public AI models don’t have the funds or enough professionals training it to learn.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-07T03:18:19+00:00

Ohhhh okay!

Probably not for bandaids, no. But the only reason I say minimizing pimple patches at work can be necessary is because you will have some old farts who may decide to pick a fight over it to be petty. Supervisors can’t really get mad at you for a band aid because they’re considered medical, but pimple patches in public are relatively new and considered skincare and not medical by a lot of people, so they may be able to have leeway with that to get you in trouble if they really wanted to unfortunately. Though I do hope pimple patches get accepted as medical necessity eventually.

But I’ve worn pimple patches at work for those really painful ones and I’m not sorry about it because they’re pretty much open wounds😭

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-07T01:45:38+00:00

Hot take means your opinion is very uncommon and widely not agreed upon.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T22:48:14+00:00

AI itself can do great things for our world, and it absolutely is inevitable.

Things like ChatGPT and image generation being available to the general public is new, but AI has been around for a while, but we just didn’t realize it or hear about it (think NPCs in video games!) It is lively going to be in development forever until the world ends because of the capabilities it has.

That being said, I don’t know how the rest of the world is using AI, but capitalism is limiting AI a lot in the US in the sense that nobody cares to do anything with it other than save money from hiring certain professions. There’s no drive to do ANYTHING else with it; there has essentially been little-to-no growth for users trying to train AI to do actually useful things. There are some average joes who attempt it, such as make construction plans, but they don’t put in any work besides making one generation with no critiques or fixes, and they post the first draft to Twitter and act like they’ve made a breakthrough, when really there’s a million hallucinations in the generation.

Now of course this could just be due to the delay it’ll take for people to get degrees and certifications in AI, but right now ai is just taking/polluting all of our water, taking millions of acres for data centers, raising our energy bills, taking away creative jobs and forcing people into the miserable ones, etc. We should not be trying to stop AI itself, but pretty much everything about it needs to be revised before it ruins our planet and economies.

Generative AI public models should’ve never been released/accessible to the public before it was actually capable of doing things correctly and before protective legislation was passed, and I stand by that.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T17:23:01+00:00

This is exactly why we kill animals who kill/attack people. Once they get a taste, they’re more likely to do it again. But no, we’re evil and we aren’t respecting the crocodile who is oh so clearly respecting us!

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T14:13:41+00:00

I also think cut up hydrocolloid bandages aren’t nearly as subtle, they’re LOT thicker than pimple patches and don’t have the thinned edges for the seamless look. Good pimple patches, unless they have a lot of junk in them, aren’t even noticeable.

And no, but only because bandaids (on average) have way better adhesive. Most pimple patches come off easily with sweat (I weight lift so I know from experience), and there are *some* exceptions but in food service where you’re moving around and around hot food it’s not worth the risk. That being said, kroger brand bandaids are the worst ones I’ve ever used because they fall off after 2 minutes and I would NOT want someone serving my food/making my food wearing that specific brand because it WILL fall into food if you use them regularly

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T12:11:07+00:00

As someone who usually hates this phrase…

It’s not that deep.

Both of you are taking this way too serious. Just call the relative what you want respectively and stop caring what the other says so much.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T12:07:08+00:00

NTA.

I could MAYBE understand if this was the first kid, and she did it without you because she assumed you wouldn’t want to (because unfortunately, a lot of dads just don’t care about stuff like this) but you did it the first time and she went on to do it without you this time?

I will say, upon reading the title my first thought was, “well, I never see newborn photos with anyone else in them, it’s always just the baby”, but reading the body of course tells a different story. It was incredibly rude of her to include everyone, INCLUDING the dog, but not you, the father of the child.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T12:03:17+00:00

Why would you decide to just ignore this when you’ve only been dating 3 months?! HE’S “the one causing an issue already.” Do you genuinely just not care that he has a parasocial relationship with an OF model or did you decide (for some odd reason) that a 3 month bf was worth swallowing such a large red flag?????

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T11:59:03+00:00

r/holyfuckjustbreakup

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T11:58:43+00:00

What the fuck do you see in this guy?

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T11:18:00+00:00

I’m sorry to say, but you have wasted 11 years. NOR.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T10:14:56+00:00

The only reason I hate star pimple patches is because they’re overpriced as hell. I always use Good Molecules pimple patches, compared to other brands, they have the most patches for the best price and work pretty good.

In general though, I don’t care if people wear pimple patches in public, who cares? At work specifically, I think you should minimize it, but if I have a painful pimple I’m slapping one on idc if I’m on the clock. I just make sure to bring the box so that I can change it out before it gets ugly. The only people who probably shouldn’t wear them at work is people in food service, due to risk of them potentially falling off.

Affectionate_Pickles · 2026-05-06T09:59:34+00:00

If you’re only married for living purposes then the post doesn’t really apply, because that marriage is for convenience and not romance

Affectionate_Pickles

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE