Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

I just got my appointment too! Venting COVID fears on ILX gets results!!

get in

I am happy for ilxors getting the shots. I got almost 20 questions deep on the NY website and realized I'm going to be very far down the list.

balls deep in a vax beef

in five weeks I'll be able to fulfill that promise, Tracer

I'm happy to report my wife will get her first shot tomorrow, but I also have no idea when I will qualify for one.

Someone upthread voiced my most recent personal COVID-related concern, which is that the lower risk people (like myself) will understandably be waiting longer for the vaccine while the vaccinated population starts slowly returning to normal life and mixing it up with other people, but even if/as the infection rates drop, it seems like the risk to the unvaccinated will rise given how decreasingly-isolated people will become over the next few months. Like...it would really suck to have been such an overcautious stickler for a year only to wind up catching the bug just as we're collectively coming out of this shit.

I'm happy to wait, but I'm honestly getting overwhelmed to see just how long its going to be. As detailed in the outbreak thread, due to some weird political decision, my city is specifically excluded from being eligible for county-wide mass vax sites, so we're at the mercy of our local public health department. As of yesterday, they are limited to healthcare workers and those over the age of 70. They seem to be lowering the bar by one year of age per week (it was 71 last week, 72 the week before, etc), so it looks like I've got about 26 weeks to wait.

ymmv, of course, and I get it, but this might be overthinking, OL. How will risks rise for the unvaccinated?

I mean my understanding (which may be incorrect) is that vaccinated people can still be carriers? And if they're returning to anything resembling normal life/interactions, I would think their chances of being carriers will rise even while they themselves should be fine. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong (it happens often).

We can at least take solace, jon, that our new infection numbers have been astounding low.

Yeah, the infection numbers are great news, without a doubt.

I mean my understanding (which may be incorrect) is that vaccinated people can still be carriers?

Anthony Fauci said last week on CNN that “it is conceivable, maybe likely,” that vaccinated people can get infected with the coronavirus and then spread it to someone else, and that more will be known about this likelihood “in some time, as we do some follow-up studies.” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had been no more definitive on Meet the Press a few days before, where she told the host, “We don’t have a lot of data yet to inform exactly the question that you’re asking.”

I know I ain't returning to 100% normal after my second jab. We're still required to mask in my county, and even if we aren't I still am. Vaccinating means I can sit outside at restaurants and bars with some degree of reassurance, visit relatives, etc.

I think the "can" does a lot of work in that sentence. A lot of things can happen. For example, it's never been conclusively proven that COVID can't transmit via surfaces, but we no longer wipe down our groceries and mail.

I've been pretty chill about getting my vaccine whenever I get it but a close family member has been diagnosed with a serious illness so I suddenly got anxious to jump the queue (have seen them once in the past year+), not that I can or that it would practically make much difference in terms of being able to see them. I suddenly realise this lost time is lost time and we're not always going to be able to make it up.

Vaccinating means I can sit outside at restaurants and bars with some degree of reassurance, visit relatives, etc.

Indeed, like I think I muttered upthread -- mid-April can't be here soon enough when it comes to my family finally hanging out again. Very likely by that point too the vaccination numbers in the city itself will be massive.

I think most people on here aren't going to do anything really crazy for the time being, but to OL's point, folks in Austin, TX at least are already running wild. I went to both an open air mall and a food court over the weekend, and they were utterly packed. Despite our best efforts, there are tons of people who are throwing caution to the wind.

Yeah, it seems like there's some willful misunderstanding going on wrt the guidelines for what's okay and what isn't once we're vaccinated. Which will likely be to the detriment of those who are still waiting to get jabbed.

what im curious to find out is what the infection/risk curve will look like if it turns out that the vaccinated can carry & transmit, but are maybe less infectious due to lower viral loads (which is what seems to make common sense to my ignoramus brain)

part of the misunderstanding rests with the CDC, which, understandably, has been conservative about what vaccinated people can do. They're finally getting that you have to give these people some hope and the skeptical a reason to get vaccinated.

big congrats to all the vaxxed and appointments-for-vax people itt, btw. my partner has an appt in a couple weeks and it still seems so unreal, definitely gonna be some happytears on that day

Anthony Fauci said last week on CNN that “it is conceivable, maybe likely,” that vaccinated people can get infected with the coronavirus and then spread it to someone else, and that more will be known about this likelihood “in some time, as we do some follow-up studies.”

this is strictly true. it is almost certain that some people who have been vaccinated can get it and give it to someone else. and it's true that the situation is a little murky so more studies will tell us more.

but this quote omits to mention that all the evidence we have is that is very unlikely that will happen (which is exactly why the CDC are telling vaccinated people they can visit unvaccinated people).

i don't know if fauci said more and they cut it, or he didn't mention that. i'm starting to get the feeling his "anything is possible" shtick is a less useful method of public health comms in march 2021 than it was in march 2020.

all the evidence we have is that is very unlikely that will happen often (missed an important word)

so it looks like I've got about 26 weeks to wait.

a month ago you should you had 18 months to wait iirc, so that's progress.

p.s. i promise you it won't be 26 weeks.

should = thought

but this quote omits to mention that all the evidence we have is that is very unlikely that will happen (which is exactly why the CDC are telling vaccinated people they can visit unvaccinated people).

I don't think it will either. Scientists hate dealing with absolutes, though, and Fauci, et. al. want to avoid the scenes in Austin that Moodles described.

Thank u, caek. My gf has gotten her first jab and she's eager to start loosening restrictions (particularly since pretty much her whole immediate family has been fully vaxxed at this point) but also understandably concerned about the fact that I remain unjabbed. It's so hard to know how to navigate all this shit.

xp yeah i have no idea what the right way to communicate this stuff is. but i do get the feeling fauci has started to err on the side of the side of the logical positivists, which is ... probably doing more harm than good, and is no consistent with the rest of the federal government at this point.

cannot type today, sorry

p.s. i promise you it won't be 26 weeks.

Allow me to introduce you to Illinois politicians and their ability to fuck up anything. It's a problem when the county, state and local politicians all despise each other.

it will not be 26 weeks. you're assuming the rate of vaccination stays the same and that they continue expanding eligibility by a year a week.

I don't disagree with you at all and I'm very hopeful that the rate increases. However, our most recent official communication explicitly states that our public health department has been told not to expect any increase in doses being suppled throughout the rest of March, if not longer.

So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for now.

Those of you with the second jab under, say, 55: any debilitating side effects? My second jab is on the morning before a road trip.

A really interesting piece on how the public health messaging around the virus

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/how-public-health-messaging-backfired/618147/

This is what they have to say on vaccines

Take the messaging and public conversation around transmission risks from vaccinated people. It is, of course, important to be alert to such considerations: Many vaccines are “leaky” in that they prevent disease or severe disease, but not infection and transmission. In fact, completely blocking all infection—what’s often called “sterilizing immunity”—is a difficult goal, and something even many highly effective vaccines don’t attain, but that doesn’t stop them from being extremely useful.

As Paul Sax, an infectious-disease doctor at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, put it in early December, it would be enormously surprising “if these highly effective vaccines didn’t also make people less likely to transmit.” From multiple studies, we already knew that asymptomatic individuals—those who never developed COVID-19 despite being infected—were much less likely to transmit the virus. The vaccine trials were reporting 95 percent reductions in any form of symptomatic disease. In December, we learned that Moderna had swabbed some portion of trial participants to detect asymptomatic, silent infections, and found an almost two-thirds reduction even in such cases. The good news kept pouring in. Multiple studies found that, even in those few cases where breakthrough disease occurred in vaccinated people, their viral loads were lower—which correlates with lower rates of transmission. Data from vaccinated populations further confirmed what many experts expected all along: Of course these vaccines reduce transmission.
And yet, from the beginning, a good chunk of the public-facing messaging and news articles implied or claimed that vaccines won’t protect you against infecting other people or that we didn’t know if they would, when both were false. I found myself trying to convince people in my own social network that vaccines weren’t useless against transmission, and being bombarded on social media with claims that they were.

What went wrong? The same thing that’s going wrong right now with the reporting on whether vaccines will protect recipients against the new viral variants. Some outlets emphasize the worst or misinterpret the research. Some public-health officials are wary of encouraging the relaxation of any precautions. Some prominent experts on social media—even those with seemingly solid credentials—tend to respond to everything with alarm and sirens. So the message that got heard was that vaccines will not prevent transmission, or that they won’t work against new variants, or that we don’t know if they will. What the public needs to hear, though, is that based on existing data, we expect them to work fairly well—but we’ll learn more about precisely how effective they’ll be over time, and that tweaks may make them even better.

A year into the pandemic, we’re still repeating the same mistakes.

Yeah, it's disappointing to see that the same mistakes about messaging are being made.

This is how I break it down to an extent

I'm glad to see @CDCgov making good recommendations.

However, it's key that we communicate that these are *short* term recommendations until we get SARS-CoV-2 under much better control, with larger numbers of people vaccinated. Once we're there, these requirements will relax. pic.twitter.com/ItPwbJztmR

— Kristian G. Andersen (@K_G_Andersen) March 8, 2021

i'm starting to get the feeling his "anything is possible" shtick is a less useful method of public health comms in march 2021 than it was in march 2020

Yeah, messaging has to be modified based on the audience. Fire and brimstone was completely necessary (and I was doing it myself) last March, because most of us truly had no idea what we were dealing with.

today, we know more, and we're fatigued, and the last thing we want to do is finally get the virus under control only to have people so over-programmed to stay in and reduce risk that they're unwilling to return to their previous lives.

one of my friends already got his second shot and he's not even willing to see other vaccinated people (other than me, since I've been in his social bubble) because he's convinced that the vaccines don't work on the variants (which isn't even entirely true) and that all vaccinated can carry and transmit the disease at lethal doses still (which is unlikely).

I mean, I'm sure I'm far from alone in this, but my mental health is going to take a severe beating this summer when, after a full year of this already, I gotta watch shit go back to near normal while we're still locked inside.

Unless we are really wrong about the way this virus works (and I'm not saying that's impossible), large-scale vaccination is going to mean the virus has a much harder time spreading in the community (it's just completely implausible the vaccine doesn't substantially reduce transmission, what people are asking is whether it lowers transmission all the way to zero.) So the hope is that by summer, COVID is just not that widespread, making things much safer even for people who don't have the jab yet. That's not inevitable but it's a perfectly reasonable optimistic scenario.

jon, even if you don't figure among the people vaccinated by summer -- a worst-case scenario -- many hundreds of thousands around you will have been. And you don't have to be locked inside.

jon, i've read your pots about your local situation. but i'm going to keep saying this every time you post like that just so anyone lurking doesn't think it's correct: if you an adult and you live in the US it's very, very likely you will be able to get vaccinated before the summer.

i've read your pots

https://images.app.goo.gl/kGmYKxbLQgMZc6hk6

Those of you with the second jab under, say, 55: any debilitating side effects? My second jab is on the morning before a road trip.

I got messed up for a couple of days from the second Moderna shot (no problems on the first) - nausea, exhaustion, abdominal cramps, and an outbreak of chills and seizure-like full body shakes at 3am, 18 hours after the jab. But no-one else I know who got done the same day had that degree of reaction.

Have you had any problems with past vaccinations or things of the sort? I've also heard that younger people are more likely to have adverse reactions than older people, fwiw.

Nope. I've also heard that the younger you are, the likelier the side effects. My parents, both over 65, experienced at worst mild fatigue for a few hours.

xpost - I mean, we'll see.

Ultimately, I'm just really struggling with the huge gulf between the optimism and hope we're hearing from national leaders and the Biden administration and the bleak, downright doom and gloom from local politicians. I've no doubt my mood would be different were the emails filling my inbox lacking in statements like "we have not yet been presented with an implementation plan and corresponding vaccines to carry out this objective." I mean, my innate pessimism is one thing, but when this is the messaging your local leaders are sending out in March 2021, it's not hard to see why one might be skeptical and gloomy.

Nah, I don't usually - sometimes an afternoon of feeling a flu shot slightly, sometimes no.

how bad were the seizure like body shakes?

i had everything *but* that in your description above.

xxp, but I'm telling you 1) you're wrong. you're not interpreting the full set of information you're getting correctly. 2) publicly posting stuff that is wrong about public health is harmful, so i'm going to keep correcting you.