Latest news with #N95s
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Violet Affleck reveals she and her mom, Jennifer Garner, had very different reactions to the Los Angeles wildfires
Violet Affleck has revealed something about her relationship with one of her famous parents as part of her college experience. The 19-year-old daughter of actors Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck is currently a freshman at Yale University. The younger Affleck recently published an academic research paper in the school's Global Health Review, titled 'A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles.' She began the paper by reflecting on an environmental disaster that she and Garner endured with many other Southern California residents, writing 'I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room.' 'She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings,' Affleck wrote. 'I was surprised at her surprise: as a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when.' The Los Angeles wildfires at the beginning of the year resulted in the loss of thousands of homes and buildings, especially in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena areas. 'As I chatted with adults in the hotel where we'd gone to escape the smoke, though, I found my position to be an uncommon one: people spoke of how long rebuilding would take, how much it would cost, and how tragically odd the whole situation had been,' Affleck wrote. 'The crisis was acute, a burst of bad luck. It had come from a combination of high winds and low rains – what, my little brother asked, did global warming have to do with the speed of the wind?' she continued. 'Outside, people wandered, faces covered by N95s. 'This feels like COVID,' said one wild-eyed woman clutching two leashed Yorkies. 'We're all in masks.'' Affleck addressed air quality and health issues before. Last summer, the then 18-year-old spoke during the public comments portion of a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting and was seen making an impassioned plea in a video shared on X. 'I contracted a post-viral condition in 2019,' Affleck said at the meeting. 'I'm OK now, but I saw first-hand that medicine does not always have answers to the consequences of even minor viruses.' She went on to request 'mask availability, air filtration and far-UVC lights in government facilities, including jails and detention centers, and mask mandates in county medical facilities.' Affleck advocated for free testing and treatment opportunities, while adding 'most importantly the county must oppose mask bans for any reason.' 'They do not keep us safer, they make vulnerable members of our community less safe and make everyone less able to participate in Los Angeles together,' she concluded in her speech. Affleck is the eldest of three children of Garner and Ben Affleck, who married in 2005 and divorced in 2018. Their other children are Seraphina (who goes by Finn), 16 and Samuel, 13.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
How the Pandemic Upended Our Lives
This month marks five years since 'cancel everything' became an American rallying cry. We retreated into our homes for a period of solitude brought on by a global pandemic that many of us thought would last a few weeks but instead redefined how and where we live our lives. Look around your home, and it's not hard to spot vestiges. Maybe you've still got a Peloton or a fire pit or a random bottle of hand sanitizer in your purse. Maybe you moved to Idaho. Here is a sampling of the random stuff I collected during the pandemic that is still lying around my house. A basket of N95s A stack of board games Four raised flower beds A hammock My dog A few days ago, I spotted a tattered, faded sticker on the floor of a Vietnamese restaurant reminding me to 'stand six feet apart.' There are more profound changes, too. The phrase 'hybrid work' barely registered in January 2020. Now it is deeply ingrained in the fabric of office culture, despite pushback from some employers and, more recently, Elon Musk. Sometimes seismic cultural changes with a sudden fury. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, Tom Hanks, America's Dad, announced that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had the disease and the stock market was tanking. Overnight, home became everything. Balconies and windows transformed into kitchenware drum circles to cheer the health care workers. The streets were shockingly silent, lest for the endless, heartbreaking sirens. 'Schitt's Creek,' 'Tiger King,' knitting, and sourdough starters became central topics of conversation. We planted victory gardens. We worried about toilet paper. Living rooms became classrooms and bedrooms doubled as offices, as our kids and dogs and significant others photo-bombed meetings and the hastily arranged Zoom cocktail hours. (It didn't take too many virtual gatherings to figure out who lived lavishly and who did not.) We formed pandemic pods, making clear who was in our inner circle and who was not. For those without the luxury of a remote job, the transformation took a financial, physical and emotional toll. The specter of illness was palpable: Do you sanitize the groceries? Shed your clothes before stepping back inside? Wear latex gloves? But we were also restless. With interest rates plummeting, buying a house got much, much cheaper and by June those with means embarked on a shopping spree. In 2020, 5.6 million existing homes sold, up from 5.34 million in 2019; and by 2021, sales reached a 15-year high of 6.1 million, according to the National Association of Realtors. The rental market was just as frenzied. In 2021, rents jumped 13.5 percent, more than double the rate of any previous year, with nearly 600,000 apartments getting rented, about 50 percent more than the previous high in 2015, according to Yardi Matrix, a real estate data provider. Americans, untethered, moved locally, but they also set out for places where housing costs were cheaper and the sky was bigger, landing in Boise, Idaho; Austin, Texas; Phoenix, and Nashville. Time both stretched and froze. It was hard to imagine an end to this surreal suspension of reality. It was unfeasible that the world would return to what it once was. But then it did. And here we are, in a landscape that is radically different from January 2020, and yet also the same. Twenty-three million Americans got a cat or dog during the pandemic, or one in five households, according to the ASPCA. I was no exception, buying a puppy when my kids were spiraling and needed something, anything, to happen. We drove three hours to Lancaster, Pa., plucked him from an Amish farmer because there were none to be had locally and named him Bowie. He's curled up on the bed as I write this, weary from his afternoon walk. Not all of my pandemic purchases paid off — the heat lamp that I bought during my outdoor-gathering phase is collecting dust in the garage, a hulking reminder of money misspent and the desperate loneliness I was trying to curb. There are remnants of alternative realities that could have been, like the little canvas basket by my front door, full of N95s I barely use. In a parallel universe, where masks did not become a polarizing political symbol of government overreach, more of us might wear them in flu season, or when we have a cold. The occasional outdoor dining sheds that survived New York City's post-pandemic restrictions are fleeting reminders of that time when the streets belonged to the pedestrians. (But, love them or hate them, those QR code menus are here for the long haul.) But then there are the lasting changes that redefined our expectations of what was possible, like having a career unbound from a location. Today, a third of workers have fully remote jobs, more than double the amount before the pandemic, and 43 percent of workers now spend at least some time working from home, according to the Pew Research Center. The idea that you can leave the United States and log in from Bogotá or Bangkok is hardly novel anymore. Digital nomad visas are available in more than 50 countries, partly because 18 million Americans consider themselves nomadic, up 147 percent from 2019, according to MBO Partners, a company that connects businesses to remote workers. But that doesn't mean it's easy to move. All that pandemic shopping made it much more expensive to find a home because prices and rents rose dramatically and then so did interest rates. Last year, Americans needed to earn $111,000 a year to afford a median priced home, up 46 percent from the start of 2020, according to The landscape is not much better for renters, with nearly half of renters spending more than a third of their income on rent in 2023. We've become a nation both tethered and unbound. Even after the world reopened, we continued to spend significantly more time at home (and alone) than we did before the pandemic, an acceleration of a trend that started two decades ago. Fewer homes sold last year than at any point in the last 30 years. For a solid two and half years, it was completely normal to cancel plans without explanation — a selfless act meant to stop the spread. Now, it feels indulgent to call it a night and stay in. Generation Z came of age under lockdown and now has a reputation as a homebody generation. It's hard to feel wistful for a time of immense loss of life, livelihoods and precious moments. A time that ultimately led to more polarization. But amid a crisis, we had the chance to experiment with a different way of living. Neighborhood Fresh Direct orders and enthusiastic Buy Nothing swaps were little acts of hope that made it feel like we were all in this together. The air cleared. Even the local wildlife tried something new and ventured further afield. Americans, a fiercely individualistic and industrious clan, slowed down and, for a brief moment, had a single, shared experience. And then it vanished, leaving only echoes behind.
