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

feels like things are going off the rails again. My kid's karate class is cancelled because the teacher has Covid. My sister-in-law's workplace is shut down because staff members have Covid. 70 new cases in the school district yesterday.

Yeah, it's getting pretty nuts everywhere. Our town, which is 83% vaccinated for everyone 5 and up, and pretty reliable in terms of masking, just posted a higher single day case count last Friday than at any other single day during the entire pandemic.

I'm in Hawaii, on the trip we were originally going to take in March 2020. One of the few states, like Illinois, that requires masks everywhere. So much is open air, of course, and beach and ocean don't need precautions, not really, but I do see some masking outdoors, here and there. I think COVID while obviously rising is currently modest in count here. Trip here was the longest I've had to wear a mask in a row. Ten or eleven hours? My family that is currently visiting in Australia essentially had to wear a mask for 30+ hours to get there.

I do have a good friend back home, among the most cautious and paranoid of all my friends, who, vaxxed and boosted, tested positive for the first time last week. Tired and fever for a few days, which are also the exact symptoms she had after the first two shots, fwiw.

Ten or eleven hours?

Monday through Friday, five days a week here. One of the biggest things I'm looking forward to about being off work around the holidays is to not have to wear one all day, every day.

Oof. Do you ever get breaks?

I'm hearing lots of things about stuff back home shutting down, either primitively or because of outbreaks.

People are shutting down establishments with clubs and rocks? Seems kinda, um, primitive to me.

xpost - not really? I’m in an open plan area all day, every day, so it’s on all the time (except when I’m taking a drink or a bite to eat). It’s annoying and yet another reason the open plan thing is a terrible idea.

Yeah, lots of Chicago bars and restaurants and closing early for the holidays and hoping for the best next week. Among hospitality folks on Instagram, there are also stories of places *not* closing that have positive-testing employees.

Bleak current city stats:

COVID Daily Update (Resumen Diario de COVID)
Daily averages, updated: December 20
Confirmed Cases (Casos confirmados): 1,776
Tests Conducted (Pruebas realizadas): 29,604
Deaths (Fallecidos): 10
Test Positivity (Tasa de positividad de la prueba): 7.3%https://t.co/UrMNMrLjQU pic.twitter.com/IaFmNkE2e3

— Chicago Department of Public Health - CDPH (@ChiPublicHealth) December 21, 2021

*are closing early

Lol at this take:

Twitter friendos, if you're freaked out & in despair right now, congratulations, you can assess situations accurately. And feel free to vent on this thread. Remember, we *can* do hard things. Now is the time to stick together & help where we can, in constructive & authentic ways.

— 🔀🍃😷💉no hopium zone 🔀🍃😷💉 (@LoboGerda) December 21, 2021

Nothing wrong with feeling freaked out, but weird to position it as a path to lucid thinking

it's called the power of dialectical drinking

Wow, didn't realize that my lifetime of free-floating high anxiety was actually just a manifestation of my ability to see through the Matrix

Judging by mask compliance at the three airports I went through today, we are truly fucked. A year ago I would've thought triple vax, double mask, and daily rapid tests would've been more than enough precaution but today I feel like a reckless fool.

i switched to an N95 today. definitely a lot tighter on my face. but i'm getting used to it.

that's what -- well, never mind.

Just as a report from the ground, the clinic my wife works at was so overwhelmed with patients that they closed the doors around 2 pm. At 8 pm, they finally finished treating all those who had registered by 2.

yeah we are totally fucked

we should probably start a new thread in 2022, this has almost 14K messages

In the span of 13 minutes tonight we learned that my brother’s 3 year-old son tested positive for covid today and my wife’s adopted sister’s 3 year-old also tested positive. In both cases just minor sniffles thus far and no other family members have tested positive yet, but still waiting on results for some. Christmas Eve with my family has now been canceled, other plans are still up in the air. The local school district has quintupled the prior case peak in the last two days. This is just absolutely tearing through us now and, not to say we shouldn’t take additional measures to slow things down, I think we are largely already too late.

starting to hear about a bunch of cancelled NYC shows for APAP and it sucks

possibly insensitive question: does anyone know anyone who has been hospitalized during the omicron run? Because i am hearing about A LOT of people getting positive in the past week but no one who has done anything but just stay home. continuing to hold onto the "best case scenario" hope that this is going to be a massive flu wave that we can bounce back from in january once it sweeps through the population. Unclear about how easy omicron is to be reinfected with.

i am going back and forth to acupuncture and physical therapy and the city is very much on edge. Something like 5% of folks on the subway going maskless and people are straight up staring. therapist telling me that they are getting half of their clients and physicians calling in for the past four days. i don't know if i should be leaving the house or not and for the first time during the pandemic i don't have a lot of choice.

xp to myself: i'm not sure i know anyone who isn't fully vaccinated and most everyone is boosted as well, so that's a definite mitigating factor... right?

I'm supposed to be flying up to Scotland after Christmas, which is why I'm furious I'm still having come into work this week - especially as there's been numerous cases there in the last week or so.

I'm supposed to be relocating to Scotland in early January, and we've idiotically invited a vaccine-hesitant friend for Xmas. Why did we do that?! Fingers crossed really, I think they're fairly cautious at least. Resolution for 2022: think before you act.

forks, I am in PT currently for my foot had similar thoughts regarding whether I should be going or not. Therapist said all her patients were vaxxed fwiw, but they aren't checking status or that it's 3 v 2 shots. I cancelled my appt for tomorrow, mostly because I am going to see my parents and wanted to give a chance for any symptoms to develop before I show up. But I am planning on picking up again next week because it is actually helping. You gotta take care of other aspects of your health, too.

I don't know if schoolkids in the US are wearing masks or not but they certainly aren't here and I've got to travel on buses with the little bastards every morning... oh, and if their parents are with then they don't wear masks either.

xp yeah, the pt is making a huge difference for me. i won't be around much of anyone for the next two weeks but my partner, so I gotta focus on getting my mobility back i think. it's scary! not sleeping too well.

possibly insensitive question: does anyone know anyone who has been hospitalized during the omicron run?

an antimask/antivax city councilman in my city just died of covid the other day, but given the timing i guess it was probably a pre-omicron case

I know one NYer who has more than the mild sniffles we keep hearing about - he’s got more like classic flu symptoms - but not hospitalized and who knows which variant it was. This person was 2x vaxxed but not boosted, for the record

everyone i know who has it is 1) boosted 2) experiencing it as a cold

idk if we’ll know for sure about hospitalizations for another week or so but admittedly i don’t know anything

Same. Xpost.

anecdotal though it is, it's calming to hear my experience and perspective on this echoed. i also dig that nobody knows anything. We all gotta wait another few weeks to find out if omicron makes you grow horns in week three. but it seems unlikely.

Everyone I know is really blue. We’ve run out of resilience. The world feels small and fragile.

— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) December 17, 2021

forks, I for one welcome our horny future

Terry Southern to thread!

fwiw I barely know anyone that tested positive at all during the March 2020 to December 2021 span. Very few adults, a few more college aged kids; of the two I know of with long symptoms, both are college age. Even I found out only belatedly that l I had it at some point (likely March 2020). I don't know anyone that was hospitalized for it, thank goodness, though friends of friends had parents or relatives die. My most cautious friend tested positive this week. My least cautious friend has never tested positive, despite many around him in his industry testing positive over the months. It all remains so confusing and mysterious, no rhyme or reason.

Just got an email from the memory care place my mom lives in Indiana - multiple staff tested positive. No residents have tested positive yet, but it seems inevitable now.

That's rough.

Josh, we know exactly zero people who have gotten the virus or tested positive. In the 23 months from January 2020 (when we visited New York for a medical conference just before things got serious) to last week, we didn't even have a close scare.

Note: We still don't know anyone who has gotten the virus or tested positive. We only know that a staff member at my son's school tested positive, and that someone at my wife's work lunch did as well. Those both happened on the same day last week. In both cases we don't know who it was, merely that there was such a person.

I don't know what to make of this. I think we've been decently careful, and so have most of the people in our orbit. But clearly the bug has its own plans.

One of the most cautious people I know caught it while out getting a booster shot last week.

I don't know if schoolkids in the US are wearing masks or not

In Seattle, the indoor mask mandate was only lifted for six weeks (at the start of July), and remained in place on public transport through even that window. Buses, trams, and each train carriage have mask dispensers by the door as you board. As of September, there's also a vax mandate to enter any indoor business with seating.

Other posters ittaos report different experiences.

Positive cases have only just begun in my extended circle. First my gf's niece last week (boostered) and now we just found out that her friend/our neighbor was with someone who tested positive. And my gf was just with her friend over the weekend. So now we're pushing xmas plans back a day just so we can be on the safe side when we test.

It will be a supreme irony when, after being super careful for two years and quitting a job that wanted me to come back to a crowded office, I ultimately wind up catching this shit. Or maybe that's just called 'life in the 2020s'.

I mean unless you were planning on being the same level of being super careful for the rest of said decade, I don’t think “ultimately” getting it counts as supreme irony no

being

I'm in the UK. Apart from my friend who died last winter, my circle has avoided any cases generally until October this year. It's been rife since - most people vaxxed and not very ill, except one healthy, sensible, vaxxed person who has only been able to work sporadically since, due to long-lasting effects.

Dude on the f train straight up eating an Egg McMuffin like it’s 2006 and not the andromeda strain

the McDonald's will kill him before COVID.

It’s like 5% just not giving a fuck in each car. Everyone is too strained to be the person who makes it a thing.