seems a little self-centered of a post, but I was looking at news stories and finding them all tiresome.

Glad you are feeling OK. All good wishes, h-g!

I tell myself that if I lost my sense of taste, I would eat healthy food. Personally, I'm not sure I believe me.

Pro-tip, you can crush just about any drug into a hot beverage, or get the drug in liquid form.

But would it be lemony and steamy and make me feel mildly like a commercial?

3 is the kind of thing I'm very curious about.

I haven't had the experience, but a friend who lost her sense of taste for a couple weeks found eating vaguely gross until it came back.

I'm picturing if someone told me that for the next week, whenever I was hungry, I had to mash food up with my hands. Texture but no taste. That would be kind of gross. And annoying.

Given that I've voluntarily eaten at Arby's, I know I won't not eat just because something is gross.

I'd just add horsey sauce.

I think I've read that the loss of smell and taste was characteristic of direct tissue damage from an uncontrolled viral infection, so it was (thankfully!) less of a thing in vaccinated folks - the infection doesn't get that far before the immune response kicks in any more.

If you've eaten anything with horsey sauce, you don't need to worry what's in the vaccine.

I am still uncovided after all this time, and it occurred to me if I do get it it might be less stressful to spend a week in a motel rather than worry about my roommate. But do even basic motels require you to be clear?

You could probably drive out toward Barstow and find a motel where you could get into your room without seeing another person and where there's already a corpse under the bed.

You could probably drive out toward Barstow and find a motel where you could get into your room without seeing another person and where there's already a corpse under the bed.

A friend with covid was telling me yesterday about his loss of taste and smell and how odd the experience is. He only lost it completely for only a day or two and almost immediately started regaining some, but it has been slow going. He described a fantastic smelling orange that then tasted like "the abstract idea of sweet." His lentil soup tasted "savory and clearly sweetened with onions, but without tasting the onions." He also said that even when he was tasting pretty much nothing, cheese was still fantastic due to its texture.

14, 15. Put it down to the drugs beginning to take hold.

I've never lost my sense of taste or smell, but I remember how incredible weird it was when chemo temporarily made most things taste different, if not disgusting. I couldn't stand the taste of chocolate then, and generic diet ginger ale tasted super spicy.

When my daughter was little, she objected to the carbonation in soft drinks. "It's too spicy!" she would say. I found this unbearably cute.

13: maybe you could go to an old-school road motel were the room opens to the outdoors without a hallway.

This was also my fear in a 1 bedroom with Tim. I wasn't sure how to get food safely. I.e. how do you isolate if you have to go into a common area to leave the building or do laundry?

19: My daughter still does. This is probably because we encourage her to try every unsweetened one we see and never offer her sodas. She associates carbonation with mineral water more than coke. It might be the parenting achievement I'm most proud of.

19: Pebbles says "spicy" for any sharp taste: salty, carbonation, acid, capsaicin.

I think I watched that show.

1.5 tbs honey, 1.5 tbs lemon juice, hot water, in a large mug.

You forgot the brandy.

Hovid-Govid

Worst reboot of British Raj loanwords dictionary ever.

I haven't lost my sense of taste and smell either. I was surprised we all tested positive, because our symptoms were average cold symptoms.

If you live with someone who has it, I suspect that you will probably get it. My wife and daughter got it first, and they stayed in separate rooms where I would bring them food. I still got it a couple of days later. Unless you immediately quarantine the second you show any symptoms of being sick, Omicron is so infectious that the odds aren't good.

I'm sure my wife will infect me. She has no inclination towards even remotely doing anything that will stop me getting it. I keep gently moving out of her immediate space and she keeps moving back. I just don't want to get it until after I see someone on Monday about my suspected BCC.

That's kind of maddening.

I feel mostly better except I developed a terrible cough with a massive amount of cement phlegm in my throat. My voice is hoarse from trying to get the wet cement up and out of there.

It's kind of nice that if you're still hoarse when you go back to work, people will be like, "At least we can hear for ourselves that she was really sick."

It's funny: My dad gets straight up laryngitis, where he can't produce sound at all, about once a year.

I get mild laryngitis now and then, where I'm scratchy, and once or twice I've lost the ability to make all sound altogether.

But then I left home and it appeared that losing your voice is not the common symptom I thought it was. I thought it was almost on par with having an allergy symptom. But I can't remember the last time someone (besides my dad) lost their voice.

Or maybe people just stay home sick because they can't talk anyway? How often do you all lose your voice?

Never.

I thought it was just a sitcom plot device.

Next you're going to tell me that you don't have a souffle in the oven right now.

No. My cousin who I've never met before from an unidentified eastern European country is about to move in with us.

Anyway, I recall music teachers saying they lost their voice, but they could talk. They just couldn't sing without sounding horrible.

It turns out your cousin is actually identical to you. You wouldn't think so because you tend to wear earth tones while he wears bright colors, and you have different walking gaits. But with a little clever scheming, those obstacles can be overcome.

Also we don't know which one of you is the father, so you'll both have to raise me.

That was a movie, not a sitcom.

Unless it was both.

My sister's household is advancing in covidness. Her youngest is the only one without symptoms now.

I have literally lost my voice once in my life. I've had phlegmy colds with sore throats that made me sound weird and made talking hurt fairly often, and I thought losing my voice was just sort of that but worse. Then I was at work, kind of sick, once (ages ago, I was still at law firms) and I picked up the phone to call a cab to go home and nothing came out. I figured out a loud whisper that let me communicate after a little bit, but my voice was completely gone.

So, anecdotally, it does happen but super infrequently.

That explains it! I must be a music teacher.

My voice is hoarse from trying to get the wet cement up and out of there.

You misspelled semen, heebs.

eeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwww

33: same here. I've had sore throats often enough, but at worst they make swallowing and talking painful. I've never felt unable to talk at a normal volume at all.

Heebie, Walt, glad to hear that you're doing okay.

Fingers crossed Ttam.

I guess I lose my voice at the tail end of a bad cold about half the time, but I don't get sick all that often in the first place (feel a bit jinxy saying this!). So maybe every few years?

Appreciating the Omicron liveblogging. Makes me feel better about when my luck runs out.

I've never lost my voice - it's been thready and phlegmy but not what I understand laryngitis to be. It gets strained a lot lately - mask teaching plus apparently that periodic sore throat/swollen glands thing is strep.

Is there a good thing to send to a house with covid and three kids (all elementary school age) have covid? Like pears? Cured meat? Board games?

I sent my sister's family dinner from their favorite local restaurant.

I guess I'd have to ask them first. Or warn.

The nice thing about pears is that you can ease them into your life at your own pace regardless of when they arrive.

49: Gift card for food delivery covering many restaurants, like Grubhub?

51: yeah, it wasn't a surprise. It was "tell me what you want and I'll handle it.". The niece and nephew were very happy.

Pears it is then.

Maybe I'll talk to my uninfected sister. She pays attention to what other people say.

Wait, there's an Omicron 2 now? Kind of? Just saw a patch of worried tweets, no additional context.

I guess there must be whole bunches of variants around.

BA.2 has been around for a while, it was first in the news as "stealth omicron" because it doesn't have the "S gene dropout" that made it so easy to tell Omicron from Delta in many standard PCR tests. There's some reasons to think it's slightly more contagious (it was taking over from BA.1 in Denmark?), but as far as I've seen it's not sufficiently different from Omicron to really bother distinguishing between them as a lay person. It's not like you're going to get BA.1 and then BA.2 in quick succession like could happen with Delta and Omicron.

Like pears.

But I want pears

If you have a brother, he can have them mailed to you.

There are pears in the mail if you want some.

There is one thing I'm really confused about with BA.1 and BA.2, which is they seem to be awfully distantly related to have both descended a common ancestor in October. So either I'm misunderstanding something about genetics (very likely!) or there's something interesting going on (e.g. if you buy the mouse theory maybe there were multiple jumps from mice to people).

I should go to the basement and see if the mice are coughing.

Ah, here we go, an estimate that BA.1 and BA.2 separated around August. https://twitter.com/Gab_H_R/status/1484867109922525184?s=20

How is everyone holding up?

I think I'm trying to figure out how the "new normal" is actually going to look and feel at this point. It's such a mess. There is not a foreseeable future in which everyone isn't constantly disoriented.

(Exaggerated for rhetorical effect and bitter grumbling, obvs, but disorientation has been the dominant feeling I've had for the whole pandemic: in part because of how the U.S. handled it, in part because of certain qualities of the virus itself.)

We're doing fine here. Today is the last day of the kids' isolation so they'll be back to school tomorrow. Amadea's last day was actually yesterday but she's still not feeling great so she's going to keep isolating for a couple more days. Her dad and I are still testing negative.

I don't think this is the new normal, though, especially not right now with Omicron just starting its precipitous decline. I think the actual new normal will look pretty much like the old normal, but it might take another year or two to get there. Probably with a couple more variant waves first.

Which old normal?

Probably post-Trump, pre-COVID. There's no going back to the real Before Times.

"Post-Trump" in the sense of "living in Trump's world" rather than after him.

I'd settle for going back to like July 2021. That was fine.

One thing that's really apparent from studying past pandemics is that they usually don't lead to major immediate changes in society that persist once the initial shock wears off. Repeated waves over many years can eventually lead to big changes but it takes a long time and isn't inevitable.

Another thing that's really apparent is that the response to a new pandemic is always exactly the same: a confused mess with lots of denial and lots of resistance to whatever countermeasures authorities try. (The effectiveness of the countermeasures and the actual health outcomes vary a lot, of course.)

I don't think "a couple more variant waves" in the next year or two is compatible with "it'll return to the old normal." If we get another variant wave in the next year, then I think you should expect we'll get a new variant wave more years than not. If there's an omicron-style wave every winter, then the new normal isn't going to look like the old normal. (I think we will get back to the old normal pretty quickly, but that because I *don't* think we'll get variant waves like Omicron for many years. But I'm not sure about that at all.)

Presumably, if the waves keep coming, eventually you're left with a smaller vulnerable population just from who died in the last wave.

72: But here's a guy on Twitter with a gloomier take! "Most people are wildly underestimating how both large and rhetorically violent this anti-vaccine movement is. They are a gigantic, one-issue political movement that will eventually coalesce behind one candidate and make extreme demands before 2024." I am... skeptical about how bad this is likely to be, but part of the disorientation I feel is having so limited, brittle, and distorted a view of what everyone else out there is doing and thinking, even when I stay off social media.

78: It's not about people dying, it's about people missing work. Look at what's going on in schools, look at all the supply chain stuff.

The rhetorical violence is not the only thing.

I'm not good at distinguishing writers with the same name, so when I read Twitter I do it under the presumption that everyone named [Ben|Matt|Noah|Dylan|Brian|Ryan|Liz] is bad.

77/78: Yeah, I don't think any subsequent variant waves are going to be quite like Omicron. And there may not be any that are very significant at all.

I'm a little worried that we'll be getting Omicron-like waves over and over again from reverse zoonosis events. Mouse covid, then deer covid, then rat covid, all different enough that they escape the existing immunity.

79: The antivaxxers are disturbing but as a political movement they're not exactly new. It's mostly the same group of low-trust right-wing lunatics who brought us President Trump (and might again).

Trump being pro-vax might cause a few bumps in forming that coalition. But I suspect they'll find a way around it.

Consistency has never been their strong suit.

Because they aren't little mimes.

Or children of the little mime.

||
Hey, two more days to submit comments on the Biden Administration's family reunification task force. I perused a few of the most recent comments and yiiiiiikes, um, I think we can do better.
|>

We just made one stupid pun in response to our own stupid pun. I'm not sure.

83. Spanish Flu was technically just another variant.

The antivaxxers are disturbing but as a political movement they're not exactly new.

In fact we discussed Republican anti-vaccination sentiment right here back in 2018 or so.