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

Get well soon, fella!

My workplace is all in on coming back February no matter what.

Nearly 90k new cases today, lol. However, hospitalisations and deaths slowing and/or falling?

UK, right? admissions are up 10% on a week ago, which is neither slowing or falling relative to the week before that, but it isn't growing as fast as cases (up 30% on a week ago). deaths are down 6% fwiw.

update, kids and I have all tested negative, still waiting for my wife's results. We'll keep an eye on potential symptoms anyway (tho I feel like death on toast because I got both a booster and flu shot yesterday)

_Nearly 90k new cases today, lol. However, hospitalisations and deaths slowing and/or falling?_


UK, right? admissions are up 10% on a week ago, which is neither slowing or falling relative to the week before that, but it isn't growing as fast as cases (up 30% on a week ago). deaths are down 6% fwiw.

Now that both my kids are fully vaxxed and my wife and I are both boosted (as is everyone else in my family) I said fuck everything and went to my firm's holiday party at a hotel/casino. It was a sea of humanity like I have not experienced in two years. I don't really know what else to wait for, it's just not going away, at least not for a very long time.

fair enough. if you're not mixing about with vulnerable people for the next week or so it's hard to see the harm.

i mean i am kind of surprised that a workplace is hosting a 'sea of humanity' party at this point but hey

and i am assuming you are doing rapid tests

Went to a work holiday party last night. Stayed outside most of the time, and when I went into the house to get food or whatever I masked up. There were only three other people masking inside and everybody there works in an art museum and are normally careful. Seeing all those people maskless indoors made me realize how bad Omicron is going to hit. Careful people are tired of being careful.

Careful people are tired of being careful because it's not clear what we are being careful for/until anymore. First it was until we flatten the curve, then it was until vaccines are available to the vunerable, then it was until they were available to all adults, then it was until they were available to teenagers, then younger kids, then boosters, so now what? Just be careful forever? What outcome is it that people are waiting for? What is the end goal?

Rapid tests are super hard to come by in the US or at least my area.

I’ve canceled any social events this week because I travel Wednesday to see my parents and I don’t particularly want to catch/give them omicron, seeing as how it has landed in DC and cases are the highest they’ve been in early a year. I don’t care if it’s “mild” they’re old and I don’t know what will happen. After my Christmas visit I’ll go back to normal social activities.

The goal of being careful is to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed.

Careful people are tired of being careful because it's not clear what we are being careful for/until anymore.

yeah i mean we’re all gonna die eventually anyway!

well, not me, but most people

I think it's perfectly fair to say that even people of robust good will and respectable amounts of empathy can get tired of hearing "just a little while longer."

Like, everyone has heard "for a little while longer" so many times in the last two years

This very thread can trace the journey from

Why does any building except a hospital need to get built right now?

to

I am not *bleaching* my fucking *vegetables*.

And back again.

Like, if you're still leaving your groceries outside for two days and then wiping them down with Clorox, or microwaving your mail, um, okay. Different people will make different risk calculations.

As noted, we had an exposure scare a couple days ago. We took it seriously and (I believe) acted appropriately. So it's not like the only options are total dicknosing vs. absolute sequestration forever.

Yeah, rapid tests are disappearing quick around here too. We had a few left at home, but figured we should try and stock up on some more for the holidays. I didn’t go super nuts looking so this is no exhaustive survey, but I hit up five pharmacies yesterday and they were all out at every one of them. My wife hit up another three before she found some at a nearby CVS, but there you were limited to 1 box/2 tests per customer. I went back later to grab another one for us but, but, uh they are hard to find.

We have a local independent pharmacy* with curbside rapid tests - you schedule online, you text them when you get there, they come out to the car. Very convenient

* = You know, the indie pharmacies are so much REALer than the major pharmacies. CVS sold out long ago, but the indies remember when it was about the MUSIC, maaan

man alive - now that Cow_Art has answered the question you've been asking is it possible that you will stop asking it?

My wife's "hope" is that we inevitably catch it on our trip next week and then have the rest of our handful of days off to recover once we get home. I know a few parents who are getting their kids boosted *on* vacation because they didn't want to risk doing it in the days right before finals. In fact, I know a few people who strategically scheduled doses, which shows how things have changed, from a mad scramble to get vaxxed in spring of 2021 to a more selective search of convenience.

If there's any positive to covid becoming a regular/annual thing it's that maybe going forward we'll hit a rhythm and more people feeling sick and especially testing positive will be able/allowed to stay home and not spread it as much as sick people have spread colds and flus around each season.

I bought BinaxNOW and iHealth home tests. They any good?

it really does seem like there's a chance that boosted/vaxxed individuals might experience omicron as something milder than the flu which would just be a stupendous outcome. the problem is the sheer number of people all getting it at once, and even a tiny percentage of such a vast number needing care overwhelming health "systems" (lol). Not to mention long covid of course, which is unknown w omicron at this point but you'd hope that a milder disease would result in less of it. All speculation of course but i find a perverse satisfaction in exploring the facets of this shit (much to my wife's chagrin. she never wants to hear about covid again)

xpost not tried them; give us your tasting notes once you've jotted them down

I’ve used Binax Now before, seems to be reliable.

If they taste anything like Ramazzotti, I'm buying stock.

Binax is for sure. I don't know how accurate compared to a pro PCR, but they're easy to use. The one time I had any concerns I used a Binax for immediate results (negative) and then went in for a PCR for more rigorous confirmation (negative). My friend who tested positive did the same thing, immediate at home test in advance of a PCR test, which caught a positive even though the at-home results were negative.

Seems like an understatement to say "it really does seem like there's a chance" -- that's the most likely outcome and we don't have reason yet to believe otherwise.

I'm also at the point where I think placing an neverending burden on the populace and especially on children to avoid "overwhelming health systems" is invalid. How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

Alfred, yes. If you get a negative result, test again in 2 days (because false negative rate is high). If you get a positive, go get a PCR test (because false positive rate is very low but not zero).

How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

This is what you after the pandemic.

Thanks, Jaq!

i would like to be less flippant than man alive about this but i am also struggling to see how meaningful our private decisions are toward public health when the new variant is this transmissible

don’t worry my plans were canceled this weekend and i’m gonna try to take a test before i travel to see my parents (testing is a hot mess in nyc, afaict they scaled it back bc there was little demand after the dawn of the vaccines and now they’re overloaded)

I’ve canceled any social events this week because I travel Wednesday to see my parents and I don’t particularly want to catch/give them omicron, seeing as how it has landed in DC and cases are the highest they’ve been in early a year. I don’t care if it’s “mild” they’re old and I don’t know what will happen. After my Christmas visit I’ll go back to normal social activities.

I'm also at the point where I think placing an neverending burden on the populace and especially on children to avoid "overwhelming health systems" is invalid. How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Friday, December 17, 2021 9:32 AM

why is "overwhelming health systems" in quotes like it's not real? this is like "dress for the job you want, not the one you have" but for hospital capacity. if you don't care anymore you can just say so instead of trying to rationalize it.

I was really looking forward to seeing August Wilson’s How I Learned what I Learned this weekend. I had optimistically bought the tickets a while ago.

harbl those cancer patients whose appointments were delayed by months because of covid were just going to die anyway sheesh. can't believe you hate children this much

man alive: won't somebody think of my the children?

covid: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p1007-covid-19-orphaned-children.html

i too have had it up to here with the neverending burden of missing law firm holiday parties

b-b-but jewel was playing!

why is "overwhelming health systems" in quotes like it's not real?

Otm this particular bit was infuriating

After last year I tried to get my fun in this summer, after I got jabbed and testing started to become more available. Christmas is usually when I see friends less and family more, so I'm being more careful again - but obviously for others it's the other way round, or they didn't get a chance to do much when rates were low, or they've had it already and are fed up to the back teeth of being careful.

In the UK our record numbers of cases will take about 10 days at least to appear in any hospitalisation data, so I'm not breathing out just yet.

My other half is hoping to see his sister for the first time since pre-covid this year, likewise me with another family member so I'm gritting my teeth and keeping my head down. And avoiding my once-jabbed-but-then-became-anti-vax(?!) relatives.

Seeing a lot of stuff about 'relying on LFTs' at the moment, to the tune of 'they tell you if you're currently infectious, but this can change within less than a day'. There's a lot of burden on even the best-intentioned and most able people to manage their interactions.

i too have had it up to here with the neverending burden of missing law firm holiday parties

Uh, anecdotally, sounds like at home rapid tests are about to be a huge problem in the short term. Co-workers around me are frantically chasing them down today, almost everyone is completely sold out. One co-worker is driving 3-1/2 hours to Central Illinois tonight to pick some up.

We are incredibly fucked.

Home tests have graduated to the new toilet paper.

Just extra galling that not only do we have to pay $25 a pop for what other countries get for significantly less (or free!) but now we have to fight over them too.

Should maybe split the difference and stock up on kleenex. If you're triple vaxxed but going through tissues like crazy, that's practically a positive covid test.

I mean, what could go wrong with millions of people about to travel all over the country with no access to even simple at home tests? Surely this is all fine.

How about we stop running health systems with just barely enough capacity instead? How about we come up with some real plans for surge capacity when needed?

Health care systems consist mainly of trained and licensed health care professionals, not beds or ventilators. You can't surge them. No one is going to go through med school plus residency or nursing school and stay licensed if there are no jobs for them in the field unless there's a pandemic or other health crisis. You can't conjure trained people out of thin air or 'crash course' them into swift competence.

interested (not really!) in what the "let's just do it and be legends" poster thinks will happen to US health infrastructure if we spend a couple of weeks with 1m cases a day in a population which is 17% boosted.

re: rapid tests ihealth and binax are good. ihealth is cheaper for now. binax is the oldest. it's not clear they're as reliable for omicron as previous strains, but they're much better than nothing (and nothing will likely be the alternative as PCR testing capacity is exceeded over the next week or two).

reminder that very roughly rapid tests give you a yes/no answer to the question "am i infectious to other people".

Checking out how the rapid antigen test landscape has changed over the past year (not much), really like this figure from "Comparative analyses of all FDA EUA-approved rapid antigen tests and RT-PCR for COVID-19 quarantine and surveillance-based isolation"https://t.co/WbEmxV0kiR pic.twitter.com/UYmYhMNQEP

— alex rubinsteyn (@iskander) December 6, 2021

assuming you're a young healthy person not at risk of complications that's probably the question you want an answer to.

PCR tests tell you "do i have covid?", which is important to know if your symptoms are severe, but not the same thing.

I want an easy test that tells me if I recently *had* covid.

guy in radio this morning was an ex-doctor (83yo) who volunteered to do covid jabs and had reached 3000 during the two waves. so there is some elasticity there in terms of helthcare supply.