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

yeah, it's why I'm less inclined now to wring my hands over whether I should be meeting a friend in an empty cafe when I've got kids mixing with other kids daily who go on to test positive.

Had some of their best friends test positive but so far we remain negative...

I think I'm gonna maintain my recently tightened practices until I go see my parents (both over 75) next week, and then recalibrate after that, as I don't think I have any non-incidental contact with old people planned after this visit

i'm curious to see how much viral load is involved w/ this virus and how much being vaccinated reduces it, if at all. the knock on Delta was that being vaccinated didn't really reduce the viral load for an infected person for the first few days, but it did clear the infection (and thus stop the vector from transmitting) sooner than in an unvaccinated person, by several days.

but the data of boosted individuals for Delta *did* show a lower viral load and a smaller likelihood of transmitting it. will that carry over to Omicron? I'm guessing "no", and i'm going to go with base assumption that it's like Delta was for unboosted until I hear otherwise.

my dad is still in the hospital pending possible transition to a rehab facility (again), and I'm a wee bit nervous keeping him there if/when these facilities begin to fill up again (which they're not yet in FL).

My older one was nauseated for a couple of days after shot 2 and then complained briefly of chest pains, which scared me a bit.

this must have been scary but fwiw there have been literally zero (0) cases of myocarditis in response to the 5m doses administered to 5-11 year olds in the US in the past month.

No idea of the actual numbers or even if it is teen hyperbole at work, but my daughter told me a "ton" of kids were out today with covid.

Your average 11 year old is 80 pounds so that's only about 25 kids.

xp - there certainly seems to be something going on. We've had two staffers in a week just at the elementary school leading to a quarantine of a total of 30 kids including (joy!) my 6 year old! And guess who it was? Her teacher! Who I now suspect is unvaxed, because she posts pro-life shit on facebook and is married to a cop. And my older one has kids in her class that are quarantined right now as well. And I'm losing track, but I think there was at least one other staffer who didn't lead to a quarantine and one other student who led to a few students quarantining. I don't think there was ever a point with this much COVID-related activity at the school since they first went back in person last year.

My kids are a week out from fully vaxed and the new policy is they won't have to quarantine anymore at that point.

Gettin' my booster tomorrow.

partner gets hers tomorrow, i'm going for friday.
not sure if i get the shot in my already useless and badly surgically beaten up left arm or my good right one?

You can actually have them put it anywhere! I know someone who got it in her breasts, and another who got the shots in his leg.

But I'd get it in the useless arm. My arm hurt the most, and felt a little "off" even a week after I got my booster

ime the thing to consider is not “which arm do I use most” but “which side do I sleep on”

yeah, i guess i'll get it in the same damn damaged arm i've been beating to shit anyway

I've got an aunt who has cancer and has had to ban her own kids from her house because they are a bunch of selfish little morons with anti-vax/anti-mask brainworms. The only person she trusts is my mum, who will take a rapid antigen test on a morning before she will enter her home, otherwise she restricts it grocery doorstep drop-offs, or distanced visits. I'm sort of impressed with how my mum started off the early days of the pandemic with a quite ridiculous and dismissive anti-lockdown mentality ("arr it's just like flu, and that kills loads of people") and with how much she's wised up since.

here we go again:

New - one source tells me new Covid rules are imminent, a version of Plan B inc home working, as early as tomorrow

— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) December 8, 2021

They can't even get dead cats right

Here's a question, UK specific in terms of logistics but I guess open to all from a moral pov:

If all goes well I'll be spending x-mas back in Portugal; this would mean my mum arriving from a different part of Portugal, me and the wife flying in from London, and my wife's family coming in from France. Both of our mums being 60+ my ideal scenario for this would be for everyone to have gotten their booster - but with the NHS announcing they only want the whole population boostered by the end of January and having had my 2nd shot in late July I think it's unlikely I'll get a slot until I have to leave on the 16th. Would it be worth it to try for a walk-in centre? And if that's a possibility, would taking advantage of it make me a cue-jumping cunt?

at this point i think one does what makes one comfortable.

if u wanna jump the line i support you

i jumped the line for my first shot but then two days later cuomo opened it up to everyone. the powers that be can move the goalposts why can't you?

xxpost Imo, no, if someone is in a high risk group there is no cue-jumping. Everyone (especially in those vulnerable groups) needs a booster, and whether they're first or last in line really shouldn't be a moral concern. If anything, having a number of people in vulnerable groups coming in from multiple countries to meet in one place is probably a more pressing scenario than most face when seeking out a booster. I also assume that boosters, like first doses, don't last forever once opened, and the same use-it-or-lose-it opportunities may apply, and throwing out perfectly good vaccine is a bigger moral infraction than line-jumping.

> having had my 2nd shot in late July I think it's unlikely I'll get a slot until I have to leave on the 16th

it's 3 months now, for over 40s, so not strictly queue jumping. and you can book, you don't need a walk in.

i get the impression they are leaving it up to you to sort out a booster - i've not had a text message yet and my 6 months is up on friday.

I'm 36, a baby by ILX standards :(

Thanks for the input everyone.

There no such thing as queue jumping if a vaccine shot is available at this stage imo

Agree with Deems, they will want you vaccinated, give a walk in a try.

I'm getting boosted and then I'm flying to Florida for wobs to see my (old-ish) parents, who are also boosted, and I'll take a home test before we go but my bf probably won't, and the airline doesn't require any testing for domestic flights although they do require masks in airports and on planes.

Maybe we're being reckless. It's hard to say...hardly anyone here is masking in stores besides the staff (and me), restaurants are full, schools are open...I'm job-searching and all the jobs I'm looking at require 100% in person attendance, no telecommuting available. Shrug?

Reckless for visiting your boosted parents while yourselves being boosted? No. You did your duty.

Everyone's circles are too open at this point to try to contain anything anymore, I think. My sister has two babies and they have to go to daycare so she can go to work, and the daycare had a possible exposure last week so everyone quarantined & got tested...they came back negative, but then the kids went right back to daycare because they have to. No matter how much anyone might personally want to stay locked down, and a few people might be in circumstances where they can keep up tighter boundaries for a while longer...it's not possible for most, I think.

it's also somewhat telling that the biggest social media scolds I know/knew have either got so tired that they eventually started to take greater risk themselves or eventually been exposed as not being as 'responsible' as they pretended to be on social media.

which isn't to say "fuck NPIs forever, let's rawdog this", because I still wear my KN95 everywhere and I frequently rapid test myself and there are certain things I won't do. but at the same token, my mental health declined at an alarming rate this month and even seeing a friend's face had a monumental impact on me which it wouldn't have on Zoom. and my entire household is currently boosted.

enjoy your trip, in orbit!

it's also somewhat telling that the biggest social media scolds I know/knew have either got so tired that they eventually started to take greater risk themselves or eventually been exposed as not being as 'responsible' as they pretended to be on social media.

I just think it's all multidimensional, everybody has things they care about more and things they don't care about much at all, and everybody's out here taking on what they consider acceptable levels of risk for things they care about and skipping things they don't care about, and when we see somebody doing something we personally don't think is worth it, but they do, we naturally see them as a hypocrite ("and they said they were so careful!!!") There is no answer to "what's reckless" that's uniform across people.

In particular, as someone else about to visit older parents, I am obviously with Alfred here that you've done your duty, but for me part of that is that my parents are cool with it! If my parents were like "I want you to hold off visiting us until we know what's up with omicron" I would not think my parents were being unreasonable ninnies denying my kids the pleasure of seeing their grandparents, I would think they were perfectly reasonably setting their own risk levels! People are different from each other.

I think we all just have to judge each other less (within reason -- e.g. somebody who lies about being vaccinated in order to be in a space that's supposed to be for vaccinated people are taking away other people's right to make their own risk decisions.)

yeah within reason for sure. like if someone is exposed to an infected person and doesn't get tested themselves and just resumes hanging with people or warn other people they were around at the time about the exposure, I'm going to have some judgment.

(i had to warn people twice, it wasn't the greatest, but they were appreciative, and fortunately I never got infected either time)

I mean I'm not trying to scold people on this board, I'm more just talking about a process I myself have had to undergo, as a person who has not felt starved of human contact during the pandemic (because I live with my nuclear family, in an neighborhood where it's pretty easy/possible to socialize with people outdoors, because I rarely go to bars anyway, and probably for a hundred temperamental reasons as well) that when people make decisions different from mine it's not because they're shit at calculating probabilities, it's because they are authentically getting something out of it that they have a right to decide they need.

But I mean it's limited, if I'm to be honest. When people are like "yes the basketball team is playing to a full arena but if I have to wear a mask while I'm at the basketball game, I'm not really at the basketball game," I roll my eyes. Maybe that's bad, I dunno. That's where I am at the moment.

JPMORGAN’s 2022 outlook is out:

“Our view is that 2022 will be the year of a full global recovery, an end of the pandemic, and a return to normal economic and market conditions we had prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. .. Our 2022 price target for the S&P 500 is 5050.” [Kolanovic] pic.twitter.com/086vMUzl36

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) December 8, 2021

what a jpmoran

My biggest gripe is really just the level of burden being put on kids who are themselves very low risk. I didn't think it was justified even before they were vaccinated, but now that they can be vaccinated I think we need a clear path to no NPIs in schools (I mean more ventilation, fine, that's great anyway, but no more distanced lunch, masks, changes in the way instruction is done etc.).

"a clear path to NPIs in schools" = require vaccinations for everyone imo oh you just wanted things that could actually happen, you say? hmm

Based on what we've heard about Omicron so far (acknowledging that even that is far from settled), this is where I start thinking that it's maybe not a great idea that (for the most part) our politicians are still basing most decisions on raw case totals.

Hypothesizing that Omicron is less severe and significantly reduces the odds of death and hospitalization, but is more transmissible and is slightly more likely to escape vaccines and boosters. On the one hand, great, less people dying is wonderful news! On the other hand, this comes with a (as long as I'm hypothesizing) ten-fold increase in cases. So the decision makers look at the rather terrifying case numbers and start back in with the restrictions - indoor dining shuts down, schools go remote, etc. We maybe "slow the spread" again, but we are back to kids struggling with being isolated from their peers, more people losing their jobs, small business bearing the brunt again if they even managed to survive the first time - all the cons that come with shutdowns and restrictions. Is that a net win for a variant that is less deadly?

tl;dr - I don't really trust our politicians to make smart decisions on this Omicron news and things feel rather bleak again

Obviously that whole hypothetical assumes Omicron does end up replacing Delta as the prime variant here, which clearly is not where we are now.

So the decision makers look at the rather terrifying case numbers and start back in with the restrictions - indoor dining shuts down, schools go remote, etc.

There's no chance this happens in the U.S. Again, we're still dealing with Delta and these things didn't happen.

You aren’t wrong! But watching schools shut down extracurricular activities and hearing about a few companies that have kicked back to fully remote just today has me wondering….

"a clear path to NPIs in schools" = require vaccinations for everyone imo oh you just wanted things that could actually happen, you say? hmm

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 9 December 2021 00:12 (three hours ago) link

I wouldn't object to this, but I've felt for a while it was an unnecessary hurdle given that unvaccinated kids have about the same risk as vaccinated adults, possibly less, and we remove plenty of NPIs for vaccinated adults.

the same risk of transmission?

Lower risk of transmission

right. a higher risk of transmission than vaccinated kids though, presumably.

at a certain point you have to decide if you want to go round and round with closures and quarantines forever or just require vaccination for in-person imo

and then you can dispense with the fiction that NPI achieves anything in schools which is questionable at best imo

Questionable that it’s fiction?

questionable that they achieve anything in schools