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Event links mentioned and transcripts:

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Atheopagan Saturday Mixer - June 5 - 10:15am PDT:  https://www.facebook.com/events/748671529133222/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22surface%22%3A%22group%22%7D]%7D

 

Atheopagan Sex Salon:  https://www.facebook.com/events/458783078686816/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22surface%22%3A%22group%22%7D]%7D

 

Free Spirit Gathering 2021 Online: https://www.fsgonline.org

 

S2E20 TRANSCRIPT:

Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Mark. 

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.. 

Mark: Today we're going to talk about the reopening after the waning of the COVID-19 pandemic obviously the pandemic isn't over and there are certainly causes for concern in many places about reopening too soon or places elsewhere in the world where the, the pandemic is still very much raging but in many parts of the United States with the advent of the vaccination and so forth we're talking about reopening and going back to some of the activities that we weren't able to do during the shutdowns. And so today we're going to talk about that and what we think it means for us and what we'd like to retain from what we learned during the pandemic and some hopes for what we'll get to do soon.

Yucca: We certainly are not saying that the pandemic is over or that it's gone or anything like that, but we're in such a different place than we were a year ago today. We're just looking at very different futures. And. I would still really encourage people to be very, very thoughtful about their activities.

But knowing that, if you've got the vaccine, if you're going to go spend time with people who also have been vaccinated, that the options of how to be safe are much, much greater than they used to be. Yeah. 

Mark: Yes. I mean, we all know what the safe practices are now, you know, wear a mask, practice, safe social distancing, wash your hands. Particularly if you're not feeling well put a mask on and try to avoid contact with other people. It's not rocket science. And it works. We know that it works not only because we had far fewer fatalities from COVID than we would have if we hadn't shut down by a factor of hundreds of thousands of deaths.

But also because we have indicators from other diseases that were stopped in their tracks last year, I was, we were just talking Before we were recording and the United States only had 2,300 cases of flu last year that were reported. Now, ordinarily we have 32,000 deaths from flu and millions of cases, but there were only 2300 cases reported throughout the entire country.

So that's social distancing and mask wearing prevented people from transmitting influenza, which is a deadly disease.

Yucca: Yeah. And in our household, our immediate household of four, which includes two very young children, we weren't sick at all.  And with little people are very good at getting sick and spreading sicknesses, nothing. And. That's because we, they weren't sharing snot with their, with other children.

That's a big one. Right. But we also, weren't taking them to stores where they would be touching the shopping carts and then putting their hands in their mouths and then jumping on top of grownups and coughing in their faces, which is just all normal primate behavior. right.

Mark: Right, right. Nothing wrong with it. And actually it does help to build a stronger immune systems in children to be exposed to a lot of different contaminants like that when they're very young. But of course, when something, this deadly is going around, you kind of have to make that take a back seat to safety.

Yucca: Yeah, so we said eat plenty of dirt. 

Mark: Okay