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

mom got her third which is a blessing.

awesome!

my folks are gonna get theirs but stagger the days they get them.

Genuinely no shade at any folks getting their well deserved boosters but I'm going to say it stings a tiny bit while we're still waiting for under 12s to get their first one.

Less than half the population has had a first dose. (My mother is due for the second jab this month.)

I know. I have nieces.

Def not faulting you! Or anyone else, get it when you are eligible, absolutely! Just more bemoaning the stress of watching cases fly around schools (my son's grade had 3 cases last month) while we wait and wait for EUA.

My kids' high school of 3500 has had about 1 or 2 reported cases a week.

Well my sons grade at his school is significantly less than 3500, probably closer to 90, also.. all of them unvaccinated. I will say they did a good job of clearing out the exposed "pods" in a timely fashion and credit them for doing what they could to limit the impacts. Still nerve wracking when it hits that close.

my 12yo is getting vaccinated in a couple of weeks, finally. (this is in the UK.) i'm pretty sure he's already been exposed about a million times but it will be a relief.

via justine, a thread about NZ’s response to their NSW-sourced outbreak:

In real terms, we have saved lives. We have sadly had 1 death in this delta outbreak, bringing our total to 27 deaths from covid. This means that currently, our hospitals are able to operate without overwhelm. We would like to prevent this /4

— Jin Russell (@DrJinRussell) October 5, 2021

I've been wearing KN95s since I've had to go back into the office and I quite like them, for several reasons, but my latest package seems to be varying in size or something. Like every third mask I take out is uncomfortably tight, but it's not even consistent throughout the package. Just odd since I've been using the same kind/brand for several months now and hadn't run into any comfort issues just yet.

Mine fits fine and works really well with Ivermectin
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/F3IAAOSwqShexVeZ/s-l400.jpg

From the NY Times:

The agency has promised to move quickly on the request and has tentatively scheduled a meeting at the end of the month to consider it.

Maybe this is just bad reporting or summarizing, but it's things like this loaded with "tentatively scheduled" and "consider" that makes it feel to me like there is just no sense of urgency.

It's a matter of time. We can expect the EUA by the holidays.

Sure it's coming, but it keeps pushing back. I mean, as of mid-September it was still being said that shots would be going in arms by Halloween. Right.

Hang on, man.

I like to wear the Kimberly-Clark N95 masks that make me look like a duck.

Nothing else to be done at this point, it just feels so much less urgent when the 12-16 year old approval was going through. Maybe it's just the reporting that has changed, I don't know. I just know I'm not the only parent feeling frustrated that everything is blazing forward as if the world is wide open again while this process drags on.

I think it's taking just as long as previous authorizations? The dosage will likely change, so there's that to study. Anyway, know it's coming.

look jon you could just trying writing to Disney to get them to move up those streaming premieres

What the actual fuck is your problem with me?

Posting about my frustration with the process is exactly in line with the spirit and intention of this thread.

I mean, look I get it, I'm probably one of the most despised ilxors on the entire board. I'm not dumb. But it's really weird that you seem to have some sort of obsession with bringing up old shit from completely unrelated threads to throw at me.

lol sorry cheap shot.

which is what we don't have enough of amirite

i really do sincerely doubt that the FDA is like, folding paper airplanes in their offices right now tho? it's pretty easy to assume other people are incompetent idiots and maybe it feels good to think it but it comes across a little bit 'i want to speak to the manager of the FDA'

I have an 11-year-old, I get it. But honestly -- it's OK! She's going to school, she sees her friends, she's gonna go to Thanksgiving -- it is just not the same situation it was last year. The major material difference in her life is we get takeout instead of us eating at a restaurant and I think I mind that more than she does. We can wait a few more months.

My six year has been back in school for four weeks and has caught two different colds--out 4 days so far. We've had to get two negative Covid tests for return to school.

I was kind of hoping that masking and distancing would prevent some of other kinds of illness, but no.

The quarantine on our daughter's group home was lifted late Tuesday. The outbreak topped out with two caregivers testing positive. Yesterday we visited her for the first time since Sept 12. It felt great!

Of the two caregivers, one had symptoms similar to a mild cold, but the other was "so weak I couldn't get out of bed" and her doctor advised her to go to the ER for more complete evaluation, though she chose not to go. She was vaccinated, too.

Good news re visit

A local Catholic university, Dominican, required vaccines and has hit 100% vaccination among students. A neighboring Lutheran university, Concordia, did not, and is hovering around 42% student vaccination. Why the fuck people won't get vaccinated baffles me.

Lol Concordia is Missouri Synod so they’re all anti-vax cultists.

In the past 18 months my wife's uncle died (lewy body dementia), her grandfather died (heart failure), a very close friend's wife - only married for two years - and a former colleague's husband both died of cancer, our dog had to be put to sleep, my wife had her cancerous thyroid removed, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, her mother's husband was diagnosed with one of the non-trivial skin cancers, and my father was diagnosed with alzheimers. Our kitchen is being remodeled but everything is backed up so we've been living in a weird hovel situation for two months, we had a terrifying covid exposure a week and a half ago, and I broke two ribs in a bike accident last Friday. All on top of the entirety of the pandemic.

Honestly the only thing I'm kind of feeling hopeful about is seeing my 6 year old starting first grade and getting to play with kids in person after being stuck at home with two introverted old people for 530 days. Last year we would have been absolutely horrified at the thought but this year, even though things are objectively worse, it's really the only real hope for the future I'm able to see on a regular basis. Once he gets vaccinated it's going to be a massive positive shift.

jfc joygoat, that's a lot. sending you and yours some good juju.

xxp They seem unpleasant. Everyone knows ELCA is where it's at.

xxxp Fucking hell, jg. Respectfully for the grief of everyone involved, that is an absolute meat-grinder of a time.

joygoat, that's terrible. Wishing for some other bright spots you can latch on to.

joygoat my heart aches for you, that is brutal :(. well wishes to you

Dittos, Joygoat

thanks all - two years ago any one of these things would have like a striking singular moment but they've all sort of blurred into one giant pile of things, you know?

I guess the gist of where I was going was inspired by eephus!:

I have an 11-year-old, I get it. But honestly -- it's OK! She's going to school, she sees her friends, she's gonna go to Thanksgiving -- it is just not the same situation it was last year.

Kid is in school, it's OK! That had a huge impact on us, so long as he doesn't get covid between now and whenever he can actually get vaccinated. But we live in a place where the precincts around his school went 80%+ for Biden last year and everyone seems quite eager for their kids to wear masks in schools. And there's a family from kenya living next door for a year and their son is my kid's class and they just want to play together all the time which is so good for him. Very different feeling from last year.

really sorry to hear about all that joygoat, i can't imagine. take care

Unfortunately, I can imagine what all that feels like. It's kind of like those Ironman triathlons, except it's less physical, and more emotionally and psychically draining. Hang in there, joygoat. Better days will come.

better days to you

So...I waited a while to get vaccinated because I barely leave the house. I got my second shot on 9/10. And a week later, I started coughing up blood. Not a lot, but, like, threads of blood in my phlegm, especially first thing in the morning. Naturally, I was somewhat disturbed by this, so after about four days of it, I went to my doctor, who sent me to get a chest X-ray. That was on a Wednesday. The urgent care clinic I went to three days after that, on Saturday, took more than two weeks to get my results back from the lab, and finally faxed them to my doctor last night. But meanwhile, the blood stopped the day after I'd first gone to the doctor. I was in the shower and I coughed up a pretty good-sized red-brown lump, and there's been no problem since. And my X-rays were negative - no sign of lung cancer or anything else. But it sure feels like the blood clot - or whatever the hell it was - was a reaction to the COVID vaccine. And I had no other reaction: none of the fatigue, or sore arm, or swelling, or fever, or anything else anybody has reported.

Weird indeed. Maybe just a strange outlier?

Will be getting my booster shot tomorrow.

Damn, unperson. Be well.

Ned, be prepared!

xpost - Oh wow, that sounds stressful, but I'm glad you are doing better and that it doesn't seem to be anything severe.

Huh, that's weird. Honestly, the one time I ever had anything like that happen was when I had pneumonia. After a night spent more or less banished to the basement, feeling like shit and coughing, waiting for my giant antibiotic to kick in, I finally coughed up this huge, gross ... well, basically what you described, unperson. And after that I was mostly all better.

Some time around the start of the pandemic I began giving myself a haircut. I figured I had the clippers, I don't have too much hair and I keep it pretty short, anyway, so how hard can it be? It turns out (in my case) not that hard. A few youtube videos later I was off to the races and have been cutting my own hair ever since, with pretty consistent results. There's something satisfying about giving yourself a haircut every few weeks, or whenever you feel like it, really. Keeps you feeling nice and tidy in the face of so much out of your control. Well, today it finally happened. I spaced out and forgot which clipper attachment I had on the clippers, and before I knew it, the damage was done. For the first time since March 2020 it actually *looks* like I gave myself a haircut, in the worst possible way. Like, scissors and no mirror bad. Like someone pulled a prank bad. Like I just got out of the hospital for a procedure bad. OK, maybe not quite as bad as all that, but still not good. Though honestly, I find it pretty funny. It was perhaps inevitable, and I have no one to blame but myself. I wonder if my family will even notice? It's just about hat season, anyway.

Go like Monster-era Stipe and let it all go!

Got my booster this morning, along with a flu shot. Amazing how simple an experience it is, didn’t even feel a jab.

I'm going to start airbrushing a streak across my eyes and no one will even notice my hair.

i started shaving my own head in apr 2020 and have just been a soccer hooligan looking ass dude ever since, honestly fine with it

has definitely led to some confusion as my employee badge is like a cheery bearded guy with a full head of hair, not someone that'll glass you for chatting up his uhhh bird or w/e