I wear a mask to buy bagels because the people who make the nice bagels require you to wear one to order bagels even though you order while standing outside at a window.
Protecting the elderly is important too. But really good bagels are hard to find here.
While I am incensed we're treating it as over no matter the facts, I do notice that in California, despite the rates having been medium for like a month, hospitalizations are rising much slower than in the initial omicron wave; right now about 4x less than that peak. And anecdotally, hospitals are nowhere near slammed.
My friend is laid up now, and my roommate a couple of months ago, so it's really getting around, but I didn't feel worried about the life of either.
But of course that's focusing on the broad, mostly able-bodied, population.
Yeah, we've thrown the immune compromised under the bus. Only artisan bagel makers are still trying.
In retrospect I guess it's a lot easier to shut out bad news than for vigilante mobs to form against the VUVs.
5: We need to do a better job getting EvuSheld out to the vulnerable. I also feel like the decent thing to do is to wear masks on public transit and at pharmacies, places where sick people often have to go. That would also probably reduce transmission overall by like 20% so that there would be less of it around. People coughing and sneezing out and about without masks is gross.
I still don't want to get it, because they still keep you out of work between 5-10 days (you can test out early) which is ok if you can work from home, but they dropped COVID pay, so otherwise you are using up your earned time (combined vacation/sick time).
I'm not at all shruggy on a societal level 100k a year in deaths is still worse than the flu. Also, we were far too complacent about people dying from the flu and should stop being shruggy about that. I wish the public health people would get on the passive engineering controls that would allow most people to ignore it, like far uv-c light in airports and hotel function rooms.
10: And it's a giant pain in the ass for scheduling. Like if half the staff and docs in the vascular clinic get it in the course of a few weeks, they can't see patients.
It's my word for "voluntarily unvaccinated." For anyone who may be baffled.
5: I feel like this is wildly overstated. Studies I've seen seem to say that vaccination is quite effective at preventing serious illness and death for most immunocompromised people. Of course if you've just gotten radiation treatment you can't get covid no matter what your vaccination status, but the same is true of essentially *any* infection, and hospitals still have a lot of protections in place for those people. For most immunocompromised people, they're still in much better shape to do ok with covid than a 75-year old. Plus we have effective anti-virals now.
I wonder if part of the difference is wider and rapider availability of Paxlovid, which only got its EUA late December 2021.
Positive tests among friends, family and co-workers were extremely rare in my world before 2022. Now everybody around me is getting it, even with the caseload down locally and nationally.
I'm thinking maybe the cases are being dramatically undercounted in a manner they were not before, and that could be good news if it means that immunity is reducing deaths and hospitalizations (which I believe are much better counted).
The cases are definitely highly undercounted compared to 2020 or 2021; that's the professional consensus. Compared to the omicron wave, I'm not as sure.
The home-base methamphetamine enthusiasts need to visit lots of different pharmacists and probably would benefit from making it harder to match their faces to their IDs.
The UK has really good data from a national survey about actual covid rates. You can't just port that over to the US for many obvious reasons (most notably vaccination rates are different, and they had a smaller BA.1 wave and a bigger BA.2 wave than we did), plus it's a week or two behind the present. But it's genuinely good data if you want to know how many people in the UK actually had covid each week of the pandemic.
In the US your best bet is somehow guesstimating based on wastewater data, but that's very rough and you don't get great data about most of the country.
13: one problem we have in MA is that our 2 shot vaccination rates are high, but we have a lot of older people who didn't get a 3rd shot.
Paxlovid is being overused, tbh. We have lots, so they're giving it out in MA to vaccinated people under 50, and it doesn't do much for those people.
In addition to 14, another big thing is that the BA.1 wave got basically everyone unvaccinated who hadn't gotten it yet. There's really not many people left at all who are totally unexposed.
People are constantly declaring prematurely that we're entering the endemic phase, but this time it might really be true. (Note that endemic disease can still be quite bad; historically it often meant "mostly kills kids.")
It's going to really suck if the endemic phase of covid really is more like you get it once or twice a year rather than every two or three years. It's still not obvious to me whether that's the case. You certainly *can* get reinfected again relatively quickly, but it's still the case that the vast majority of infections are not reinfections (again from the UK survey).
Endemic diseases can also fluctuate in severity based on random evolutionary shifts in the pathogen. Scarlet fever suddenly became massively more deadly in the early nineteenth century, then just as suddenly shifted back a few decades later. There's also some evidence that smallpox may have become more severe around the sixteenth century.
18: The US Census Bureau is continuously doing the Household PULSE survey, which sounds similar to what you're describing. In their Jun 1-13 survey, they estimated 24 million adults with a COVID diagnosis from a medical professional and current COVID symptoms.
It has just been incredibly frustrating how poorly FDA, public health people, and electeds have prioritized in the last year. Truly awful decisions:
* Effort on keeping people masked after widespread vaccine availability
* Zero public messaging about mask quality for covid-fearful
* foot dragging and non-cost/benefit analysis for variant/booster approval
* zero effort on ventilation/filtering/UV
So we make kids wear cloth masks and stay home for weeks when there is one positive, but they can't get vaccinated, no ventilation improvements (which have other benefits too!), no one can get omicron vaccines because "people might not be scared enough of covid! we aren't 100% sure the updated vaccine is _much_better!", and moderate conservatives don't listen to anything public health people say because they pushed NPIs so hard.
This is a good summary of what we know about reinfections at this point.
25: Offit's editorial on updating the vaccine was really awful.
I think in general the messaging has conflated personal risk with the public health analysis. In any case, nearly everyone I know has caught COVID in the last three months. No one, I think, has counted as an official test, as they've known from home testing and there's no reporting mechanism, and no one has been sick enough to need a doctor.
I'm still very pregnant, and so I probably know more people (including me) who haven't caught it and really, really don't want to. I also know enough Long Haulers that I think I really don't want to period, vaccinated or not.
Also it looks like my mother in law may have some terrible cancer so.....I don't want any of us to get it because that would make seeing her even more difficult.. I'm pretty overwhelmed by that right now actually, enough that I think right now I am in denial even though I have spent all week on the phone trying to accelerate her diagnosis and care.
I'm still very pregnant, and so I probably know more people (including me) who haven't caught it and really, really don't want to. I also know enough Long Haulers that I think I really don't want to period, vaccinated or not.
Also it looks like my mother in law may have some terrible cancer so.....I don't want any of us to get it because that would make seeing her even more difficult.. I'm pretty overwhelmed by that right now actually, enough that I think right now I am in denial even though I have spent all week on the phone trying to accelerate her diagnosis and care.
Ile - Glad you're still pregnant until you can safely deliver. Wonder if you'll be eligible for a booster in the final trimester. They're fully approved in the US so I bet you could ask a doctor so that you pass on additional antibodies to the fetus.
BUT, very sorry to hear about your MIL and hoping that turns out not to be some terrible cancer.
31: I got a second booster a couple weeks ago! I got a weird mealy mouthed message about how I'd it has been longer than five months since my last dose I should consider a booster. It seemed like no one could really ask me to get one but I could get one as long as I said I felt immunocompromised.
Thank you.
Heebie, in addition to the link teofilo posted, which ends:
"Bottom line
There are myriad reasons we need to do our best to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission and prevent infection. Wearing masks, staying up to date with vaccines, and improved ventilation will help. And, ideally, reinfections would not occur. "
you might want to look at Eric Topol's latest: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-ba5-story
about BA.4/5.
But hey, at this point, I'm past trying to convince anybody to actually care about their own safety and the safety of the people around them. I got my fourth shot back in Feb (lied to get it) and don't feel badly about that at all. And I look forward to getting an Omicron-specific booster in the fall.
The owner of a coffeeshop I frequent (b/c she takes covid seriously, and still hasn't reopened indoor seating -- I also overtip outrageously, b/c I want that coffeeshop to stay in business) said to me: "I haven't got covid yet, and I don't intend to get it". Given the many, many unknowns of Long Covid and the fact that you can get it even though you had a *mild* infection, it would seem wisest to follow her example.
But hey, [insert shruggie]
OP: "just a bad flu" works because the most people who have a mild case do so because they are vaccinated (and boosted). My wife is in the throes of a "mild" case right now, but she's vaxed and doubly boosted. It's not even a "bad flu."
Almost an analogy*, but today's Wordle is just like chasing down a Covid variant:
Wordle 385 6/6*
🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
* Maybe an actual analogy. So shoot me.
I'm not going to shoot you for using an analogy so much as for risking spoiling today's wordle.
34.1 is consistent with the OP, no?
But hey, at this point, I'm past trying to convince anybody to actually care about their own safety and the safety of the people around them...Given the many, many unknowns of Long Covid and the fact that you can get it even though you had a *mild* infection, it would seem wisest to follow her example.
Do you see this level of vigilance as your new permanent status quo?
The price of liberty is eternal half-assed vigilance.
From time to time the tree of liberty must be watered with the grey water from a handwashing station.
Anyway, I think we've more or less settled on an equilibrium with higher rates of infection disease than would be accepted in a better society. But I don't know what to do about it, because I think promoting better public health is clearly hurting Democrats at the polls and my main priority is avoiding a tinpot American Franco.
You're only saying that because humor is a way to deflect the constant stress of a society being destroyed.
Heebie: "Do you see this level of vigilance as your new permanent status quo?"
Yesterday I was walking home from the bus, and reflecting on "jesus, it's gonna be three years soon of this shit". So yeah, I'm getting tired of it too. But *yes*, I see this level of vigilance as a new permanent status quo, until such time as we get better vaccines and antivirals. Why? Contra DaveLMA, I can't see this as "just a bad flu": it's still a pretty new human pathogen, mutating rapidly (despite what we were told early-on), and its effects on all the bodily systems aren't well-understood. But we do know that it affects lots of organs, even in the aftermath of mild cases. And last, new variants are arising that efficiently achieve immune escape. "just a flu" would require that we had enough information about the bug to be able to *predict* the effects of new variants on the population before they spread .... and it's clear we don't have that level of knowledge. All of this convinces me that I'll be wearing a mask in public indoor spaces for a long, long time, ditto not eating indoors in restaurants.
But there are still a massive number of researchers working on this problem, worldwide, so I doo expect things to get better; i just don't see how the state *today* is cause for dropping my guard. Or, that is, dropping it more than I already have (5 days a week, I take the bus/train, drop my mask at the pool to swim, enter grocery stores, etc).
I'm not going to argue that everybody should be doing as I'm doing. But the idea that people aren't wearing masks indoors everywhere .... that's daft. It's the cheapest intervention (after getting boosted) you can possibly perform.
Long covid is not an insignificant risk, but I'm not sure why it should be considered more dangerous than the long- versions of dozens of other virii. It just feels very availability-biased.
Yoyo: indeed, you have a point there. During the pandemic, I learned that there's a long version of the flu, and it does suck. When I was younger, I was cavalier about the flu shot. No more, that's for sure. Ditto, as soon as it was safe to enter the pharmacy, I got the Shingrix shot. The only reason long covid is a big deal, is that covid is spreading like wildfire. If there were a "long cold" from one of the cold viruses, I think I'd be just as concerned. Luckily, it seems that wearing a mask has suppressed flu/cold infections, so it's less of a concern.
Do you know of Bob Wachter? chief of medicine at UCSF? I tend to seee him as a good predictor of where things are going: he has a ton of information, and makes reasoned medical judgments that he shares in his writing. In March he was predicting that he'd be dropping his mask *indoors* soon (b/c cases were still dropping). Recently he started to wear his mask again, and he wrote about his wife getting Long Covid after a mild infection.
I should have written: if there were a "long cold" from one of the cold viruses, and it was both decent-likelihood, and with significant symptoms .....
Last year, covid was the leading cause of death for people 45 to 54. But this year, maybe it will be guns.
43: yeah. I had "long pneumonia" (probably secondary to undiagnosed pertussis, given symptoms) as a teen. It wasn't fun. It's probably part of the reason I've never been a great aerobic athlete. But tbh, I am not sure how to calibrate the "long COVID" stuff. Sometimes it seems scary - and sometimes it seems like an overreaction to the apparently new knowledge that sometimes viruses linger.
I had "near pneumonia" as a kid. I don't know what that meant besides that I didn't have to shovel snow until it went away.
I had asthma, but I'm wondering if it was really that I had a dad who smoked two packs a day. Anyway, I mostly got over it.
The complementary thing that I hadn't realized until Covid is that many of us are asymptomatic for regular old viruses all the time.
I already knew that because it's the justification I got for the rule about not picking my nose.
You've never had symptoms when I've picked your nose, either.
You probably wash your hands well.
It's not hard to see where this is going. Germs keep evolving, the health care system isn't getting easier for the poorer to access, vaccines are getting safer but anti-vaccine sentiment is growing, and there's a huge chunk of the population that is unwilling to make any accommodation to prevent the spread of disease to anyone but themselves. It doesn't seem like people are really anti-doctor. They still go to the hospital when they get sick with covid even if they the covid vaccine is made from microchips coated in poison. It just doesn't seem to occur to many people that dying of infectious disease is the normal human condition, a condition currently held at bay by the work of a few, and not some kind of rare event that you can blithely ignore.
51: same, except 3.5 packs and it wasn't diagnosed as a kid, but as an adult when I had bronchitis from hell and the doctor asked "did you have asthma as a kid? Because I'm hearing a whistle.". So now I have an inhaler.
52: apparently even polio - fucking polio! - is asymptomatic most of the time. It's like our cultural memory is "past diseases were always fatal and thus Covid is not serious" and reality is it's s really variable.
"Fucking Polio" would be a good name for a sexually transmitted disease that sometimes produced paralysis.
"Fucking Polio" would be a good name for a sexually transmitted disease that sometimes produced paralysis.
I have Covid right now, after 2+ years of exceptional caution. I had just started to make business trips (two sets of flights in June, masked at all times except when alone in my hotel room, eating outdoors, and for about an hour indoors both trips for unavoidable work lunches). I was probably one of 8% of attendees wearing my KN94, but nobody hassled me. Although they did look sideways at me for eating outdoors in the Southern heat.
I was being very cautious in part because I have a pregnant SIL, a toddler nephew who JUST got his first vaccine, and I live with a high-risk elder. I got home from all that travel and everything was fine.
Two weeks later I interacted with a family member indoors unmasked and he gave me Covid. I'm cranky at him for having tested only the night before the gathering, not the day of, despite having cold symptoms, but I'm much more cranky at myself for not masking up when I arrived and heard him.
After two days being flat on my back with exhaustion, aches, and 102-degree fever, I'm finally sitting upright again. I'm going to mask for a long time to come after this, both for myself and for others.
I have Covid right now, after 2+ years of exceptional caution. I had just started to make business trips (two sets of flights in June, masked at all times except when alone in my hotel room, eating outdoors, and for about an hour indoors both trips for unavoidable work lunches). I was probably one of 8% of attendees wearing my KN94, but nobody hassled me. Although they did look sideways at me for eating outdoors in the Southern heat.
I was being very cautious in part because I have a pregnant SIL, a toddler nephew who JUST got his first vaccine, and I live with a high-risk elder. I got home from all that travel and everything was fine.
Two weeks later I interacted with a family member indoors unmasked and he gave me Covid. I'm cranky at him for having tested only the night before the gathering, not the day of, despite having cold symptoms, but I'm much more cranky at myself for not masking up when I arrived and heard him.
After two days being flat on my back with exhaustion, aches, and 102-degree fever, I'm finally sitting upright again. I'm going to mask for a long time to come after this, both for myself and for others.
I have Covid right now, after 2+ years of exceptional caution. I had just started to make business trips (two sets of flights in June, masked at all times except when alone in my hotel room, eating outdoors, and for about an hour indoors both trips for unavoidable work lunches). I was probably one of 8% of attendees wearing my KN94, but nobody hassled me. Although they did look sideways at me for eating outdoors in the Southern heat.
I was being very cautious in part because I have a pregnant SIL, a toddler nephew who JUST got his first vaccine, and I live with a high-risk elder. I got home from all that travel and everything was fine.
Two weeks later I interacted with a family member indoors unmasked and he gave me Covid. I'm cranky at him for having tested only the night before the gathering, not the day of, despite having cold symptoms, but I'm much more cranky at myself for not masking up when I arrived and heard him.
After two days being flat on my back with exhaustion, aches, and 102-degree fever, I'm finally sitting upright again. I'm going to mask for a long time to come after this, both for myself and for others.
And apparently I've forgotten how to post.
Amadea recently had the flu, after having had COVID twice, and it was way worse than either COVID bout. This is one of many reasons "just a bad flu" never really made any sense. The flu can be really bad!
(She's doing fine now. This was a couple weeks ago.)
Witt, I'm so sorry to hear you got the bug, and trust that you won't have inadvertently passed it on to anybody else. And that you'll recover soon. Knock wood. Thank you for the reminder, that we can't just trust even our close relatives to be vigilant: we have to be vigilant ourselves, period.
Ugh.
P.S. "the day of". Indeed. It's the least we can do for each other: the tests are even (so far) free, ffs.
My biggest thing risk-wise is I've been working out at gym without a mask since last year. But the gym requires proof of vaccination.
Thanks. I'm isolating on the third floor with all the windows open, and so far so good as far as the elder is concerned. Nobody else lives here so that's the only risk I have of causing transmission.
P.S. I must say I have a renewed appreciation for music. There is nothing like being unable to do anything for making you feel deeply grateful for the joys and comforts of song. And interviews. I was very entertained to listen to a 2-hour VH1 Storytellers with Tom Waits in the wee hours.
42. Belatedly responding. I didn't mean that the current variants are "just a bad flu." I meant that for most people who are vaxed and boosted they present as that or less. If they hit an unvaxed population they are still very bad news. We've been eating outdoors in the lightly breezy, uncharacteristically wonderful weather here in MA.
Sorry for potentially spoiling yesterday's Wordle. (Today's Wordle on the second guess, btw.)
I feel like most people use the words "flu" and "cold" interchangeably, despite them being pretty different.
||
So we need new baking sheets. I generally am spooked by nonstick coatings. Is there an obvious choice where you're not going to poison yourself and you can still stick it in the dishwasher? People have strong feelings about aluminum and ceramic that I'm trying to tease apart.
|>
Do you put tinfoil down whenever you use them? Or just manage not to burn stuff? Or just scrub a lot?
When practical, we put tin foil down. That doesn't work for cookies. When roasting a spatchcock chicken, I put down parchment paper.
Like 9 times out of 10 when the baking sheet comes out, it's being used to heat up chicken nuggets and it is lined with foil.
I guess I feel a little guilty using tinfoil.
You could try Sarah wrap, but I think the oven will melt it.
Parchment paper is underrated for that kind of thing -- I just did bacon in the oven on sheet pans lined with parchment paper and it worked great. Still disposable, but throwing out paper doesn't feel as bad as foil.
I thought parchment was a type of really thin leather.
Parchment paper is the best. Buy the pre-folded kind (the abominably-named brand If You Care has one) and it's an absolute breeze. I use it for oven-fried potatoes, oven-baked fish, cookies, bars, you name it.
I feel very wary of nonstick coatings but OTOH some reports seem to say that safety/health issues are primarily of concern if you keep using them after they get scratched. Which depending on who cooks and how they use/wash pans in your household could be Week 1 or Year 5.
So:
1. aluminum, then?
2. And then not putting it in the dishwasher?
3. And just going with parchment paper (or whatever) to keep from heavy scrubbing?
Or does it truly not matter and we might as well use our scratched up nasty ones if we're using parchment paper?
For that matter, can we put them in the dishwasher then?
Everything is dishwasher safe if you don't care.
Like Moby, I have a couple of those half-sheet aluminum pans (so, like, big enough that you can't really fit 'em comfortably in the sink, and they cover an entire oven shelf. I don't scrub 'em shiny after use, for sure. Just remove whatever crusty stuff I can. But with parchment paper, you don't get much stuff on 'em to begin with. I guess over time they'll get spotted with baked-on carbonized oil and stuff, but again, b/c I use parchment paper a lot, I doubt that it'll affect the food I bake. Now, when I bake a chicken, I don't use one of these sheets -- I use a heavy griddle -- and similarly for other savory dishes, I think I'd go with a ceramic dish.
But really, if you have scratched-up nasty ones, why not just put parchment paper on thosee?
We have one shiny one we only use for baking nice things, like cookies or something. The other one is basically fused to its burned on bits.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I can't believe the comeuppance I just got served for this arrogant post: Ace tested positive for Covid just now. My mom's surgery is this Thursday and I am (was) supposed to go out on Friday to stay with her in the hospital for five days.
I'm now double-masking with a cloth plus KN95, and everyone else is regular masked, and ugh. Who knows.
In vague defense of my arrogance, I have been masking indoors since last week, in order to be safe to see my mom. I really, really did not want to have to cancel this trip.
In your defense, the guy who taunted fate with the unbreakable windows in a high rise really wins the category.
Ugh so sorry Heebie. Best wishes for no catching.
You're probably going to be OK. Best wishes.
So Pokey has cross country practice in the morning. He tested negative. (He's vaccinated and has had Covid twice, fwiw.)
Should we keep him home, or is it still okay since it's outside? When they say this thing is hella transmissible, how much are we re-writing the old quarantine rules?
Oy, I'm so sorry to hear this. I once read that over 70% of the risk of getting cancer is down to bad luck, not genetics, not environment, not lifestyle. Bad. Luck. And measurably so. Take care of yourself and your family, and with any luck, you'll be fine, b/c most people are, and we have to remember that we're not special: we're not outliers.
Get better soon.
"Should we keep him home, or is it still okay since it's outside?"
BA.5 is very, very transmissible (from that Topol link) and much more likely to reinfect. Perhaps a way to ask the question differently is: "How diligent is Pokey at adhering to infection control protocols?" Can they really, really, *really* keep away from other people at this thing? And if transmission does occur, how are they going to feel (not knowing whether it was due to them) ?
If it were me, I'd stay away, esp. b/c we're on the rising side of this new surge. Nobody knows what the future portends, unlike (at least) on the descending side.
Pokey is very diligent, but I'd feel bad asking him to run in a mask. Conventional wisdom used to be that as long as you're not very close to people outdoors, it's essentially a free place to be unmasked and feel normal. That's what I'm wondering here...
I guess he can stay home. It's a week. It doesn't matter that much. We're good at lockdowns. I mostly just am trying to figure out if I can possibly test negative all week long. Also it's in the 100°s all week long - not very great for turning off the AC and going with open windows all week long.
Ooh, that's tough. I would assume he has it, and I'd ask him to wear a mask. Pebbles' best friend caught COVID from her dad but wore a mask during the last week of school before she tested positive. Didn't pass it on to other kids (once she was symptomatic she stayed home.)
But I have NO idea whether that's sensible. How is Ace feeling?
It sounds too hot to run regardless.
Ace is feeling fine - it was the absolute faintest of positive tests.
I hate this kind of limbo so much.
So we have as much faith as ever in KN95 masks? We don't think that these escalating-in-slipperiness variants can get past them significantly more easily?
(Honestly, if I got it in two weeks I would not care. I just really want to take this trip in particular.)
I've not heard of any new problems with the masks.
Ok, that's good. It starts to seem like some sort of noxious fume that will definitely, definitely get you.
I actually have relied on these for hospital visits and airports/flights
% coming from luck depends on the variance of the environmental factors
Can you isolate Ace in one room with an air filter and furnace filters over the central air vents until you leave? Or isolate yourself in such a room?
115: We could potentially talk about isolating Ace. I feel kinda bad because they've been gone for two weeks, and seem a bit needy and wanting to be close.
For me to isolate, I just feel extremely guilty about dumping the extra days of single-parenting on Jammies, since if it works, then I go out of town at the end of it for another five days.
My dad thinks the line is so faint that it's worth getting a PCR test tomorrow, so now I'm entertaining false hopes.
I get the KF-94 masks that are made in Korea. Koreans have smaller faces than me though, so they are a bit tight.
Covid has been good for a few things. I caught my 300,000th Pokémon today.
Re: N95 masks, Ile is spot-on. Masks work by a physical mechanism, and that's not going to change for covid. It's purely physics.
We all have different ways of dealing with uncertainty, with risk. I feel that somehow you're trying to figure out how to negotiate with it, hoping that if you do enough things to mollify it, you'll emerge unscathed. I might be misreading. Perhaps it would be wisest to just give up on the idea of entering that hospital: you can't really know you'll be safe, not just for your mom, but for all the other patients, some of whom will be immunocompromised. I know it sucks, and honestly, I feel the pain of giving up things in life too. And "really? three years now? really?" And all that. But I feel like somehow, it's worth being .... "resigned" about these sorts of things. Maybe not at the beginning, but at some point in the course of a series of events, just being resigned to seeing it out on the possible worse-case course, can make it easier to deal with. So that instead of a faint line on a test meaning "limbo", it means "we've tested positive, and we need to wait thru the required period, b/c we really don't know, and that's why there are such fixed periods".
I'm sorry, I know it sucks.
heebie: "My dad thinks the line is so faint that it's worth getting a PCR test tomorrow, so now I'm entertaining false hopes."
https://www.today.com/health/health/faint-line-covid-19-test-positive-rcna34641
"It's not a super-sensitive test, meaning you've got to have a good amount of virus there just to get the home antigen test to work at all," Garner said. Keeping that in mind, "any line early in the infectious process implies that somebody is very contagious."
But that doesn't mean it's always easy to read. "Sometimes it's not quite a line; it can be like a fuzz," Mathers said. "But if you see a line there, it's there."
119: I'm still at 86,000. How do you do that?
120: Heebie doesn't have a positive test, Ace does. There's no required wait period for non-positive (if it stays that way) members of the same house.
That was my understanding, too. That there are false negatives, but not false positives. But my dad said it's not impossible, just very rare. 0.05% or something?
123: That makes me lean towards letting Pokey go to cross country. It is outside, after all, and we can keep testing him.
Right now my plan is to mask up, test daily, and go get a PCR test on the last day or so before traveling, and if that all stays negative, to keep the trip.
I'm definitely tired and bouncing all over the place, mentally. I should crash.
I'm sorry about Ace feeling needy. That makes it extra hard. Are they old enough for you to level with them about your desire to go see their grandmother and the reasons etc?
Oh yeah, definitely. 9 years old. I think they'll be pretty good about keeping some distance. I just feel guilty about subjecting then to complete isolation.
Heebie - a minor thing about masks.
KN95s are a standard, but there is no regulation to ensure quality. This guy in Texas did a lot of testing and has a good explanations. He also sells masks.
https://www.armbrustusa.com/pages/mask-testing
KF94 - Korean boat-style mask with side loops over the ears regulated by the Korean equivalent of the FDA. Masknerd Aaron Collins put together a spreadsheet with recs.
N95s are osha - regulated with elastic straps over the head. Big kids might be able to wear these, but they don't make them for younger kids, because they are to protect people from occupational work hazards, and little kids aren't supposed to have jobs - let alone dangerous jobs.
P100 has a higher standard of filtration, but I think they are uncomfortable.
If you want to go hard core and look like darth Vader, you could go for a washable elastomeric respirator, something like this.
https://breathesafeair.com/castle-grade-g-series-review/
During the initial N95 shortage, Yale was using reusable respirators.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/coronavirus-masks-elastomeric-respirators.html
Thanks, BG. We do actually have a stash of proper N95 masks, which I at least will use.
Flipper died a natural death, he caught a nasty virus.
Then there was the ever present mask-testing re-saleist.
They were all in love with dyin', they were doin' it in Texas.
The 'rona goes on forever and the coughing never ends?
Oh, heebie, I'm so sorry, how unfair and frustrating.
If it's any consolation, my KF94s kept me safe for days and days in New Orleans where basically NO ONE was masked, in hot heavy humid air where there was singing and loud talking and all kinds of higher-risk behavior, and for several days in Chicago, including even in the hotel gym. Being genuinely diligent about them is the trick, I think. If you're taking it upon yourself to mask at home, I think that will help a lot.
Heebie, in your specific position I'd strongly consider getting an elastomeric respirator to wear in the house. (I actually had one when the pandemic first started, but sent it to a friend going through chemo). You could also try fit-testing your N95, though that sounds kind of complicated.
the overwhelming big big BIG reason to not buy any new nonstick is that the manufacturing creates amazingly intense and lasting pollution in the communities where it occurs. yes, the industry has purportedly moved on from the astonishingly toxic prior compounds/processes - but their new ways are not very old and frankly i'd be surprised if they didn't turn out to be the same or differently awful.
used nonstick is more likely to be degraded and therefore pose a risk to you and your family.
and anyone is susceptible to absentmindedly leaving nonstick to overheat and whooo howdy baby you do *not* want to breathe in those fumes no siree.
get conventional cookware and use parchment paper, please!
My hobby is glassbolwing. Teflon tools with a box fan to waft away the phosgene are common-- I don't have a pair of those myself, can live with the faint marks from steel.
Also, I haven't informed myself about ceramic nonsticks-- are theose also fluorocarbon? Just don't know.
Witt; sorry to hear about your Covid case, and glad that you're feeling better.
Heebie -- finger's crossed that you're able to make the trip.
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My fridge-freezer has failed, on the hottest day of the year with temperatures expected to remain high for the next week.
Disaster. All fresh food ruined. No milk for my son's breakfast. No way of keeping anything else I buy cold.
Probably take a week or more to get repaired.
Fuck.
>
I mean, 140 was me. I didn't break anyone's fridge. My current fridge is close to 30 years old, so I'm often nervous when it makes a funny noise.
We've had a fridge fail and it sucks a lot. Sympathies to ttaM.
Ugh, ttaM, that stinks. Last time my fridge failed it was summer and I'd been away and I thought it was a power outage. Cleaned out the whole thing, got some new groceries...turned out it was the death throes and it worked for another 8 hours before conking out for good and ruining the new food overnight. I hope you're able to get a repair/replacement without too much more angst and agita.
It can still function as an icebox.
J Robot: can you post what kind of elastomeric respirator you got? I'm thinking of upgrading to one, hence my question. [I use a www.gatapack.com silicone mask, but am not completely satisfied with the skin-seal, would like better.]
We went and got PCR tests this morning, and the results came back an hour or so ago: Ace and Pokey are both positive. Jammies prodded me out of my mom-guilt and into a hotel for the next three days. So now I'm a few blocks away, feeling very weird but not necessarily regretting it.
Yikes, Matt, that's one of my nightmares. So sorry.
Heebie: three cheers for Jammies. These are difficult times. Cheering for you and your mom.
ttam, if you can access dry ice it works v well inside an insulated space - maybe just the essentials inside the freezer compartment? we used it to transport the constituents of my stepdaughter's & step son in-law's wedding cake from sf to portland during a heat wave, my better half had used some kind of insulation board material to turn the car trunk into a cooler, with dry ice. worked a treat!
then i had to perfectly smoothly cover five cakes with buttercream in an unconditioned apartment in appx 95° f heat (at like 4 a.m.!) & as i took them out of the fridge for each thin coat, the temp differential btwn the bcream on the cake & that in the bowl (sitting in an ice bath!) was so great that the bcream just laminated off lol possibly one of my most stressful culinary moments & i've put in my time as a line cook in some whack kitchens! my god to that entire wedding was insane. elope people it's the only sane choice.
heebie so glad jammies insisted & you are safely tucked away in a hotel - take out & masking ftw!
I went and got a few bags of pre-packaged ice from the store and put them in the freezer with some milk and a few other perishables. I think it'll keep the milk from going off if we just top up the ice, but I wouldn't trust it for meat or fish, I don't think.
Everything else in the fridge will have to get binned, though. I stuck a thermometer in there and it was almost 80F _inside_.
Ugh, that sucks, ttaM. Seconding the dry ice as a stopgap until you get a working fridge.
So if one can re-catch BA.5 in as little as 4 weeks...I'm getting a little vertiginous at the idea of shutting down life every month. There's a menstrual cycle joke to be made there.
Also in the past five days, four of the families I'm closest too all have covid, and none of us caught it from each other. Plus the kids' swim instructor and speech therapist. That makes almost everyone we are interacting with in any way right now.
The thing I can't get over is how big the underestimate in the news cycle is. It's no surprise whatsoever - nobody reports home tests - but when I posted this thread, I genuinely thought we were in a slow increase in cases, and now I realize we were nearing escape velocity.
(Just to be a little obnoxiously true to the OP, I'm still pretty shruggy about the dangers to myself and my own family. Just willing to go further to protect others.)
I'm rather confused about how to square it feeling like everyone I know has it with the wastewater numbers that still have January as just so much bigger than any other wave:
https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
I'm happy to protect others, but at this point I'm wondering what me not doing something will do to protect others. Unless that other is really isolated, I'm not sure I'm a noticeable extra risk by standing with them in an elevator or whatever.
157: Post-holiday pooping is different.
Unless that other is really isolated
I agree with this. I'm not extending any extra effort to protect the general unmasked petri dish of my town. (Well, insofar as we're locking down while actually testing positive.)
157: I just saw a tweet about that from Ed Yong. People pooping BA.2 are still dropping faster than people pooping BA.5 are increasing.
I'm looking now at wastewater biodata, and Austin is as high as it was in January, apparently.
Ah, yeah, it looks like the northeast got the January wave significantly worse than other regions. Also the south is on the leading edge for BA.5.
Now I'm half second thoughts about my midyear resolution to start going to the bar again.
The head bartender bought the bar during covid.
Isn't that a thing where the cold places have bigger winter waves and the hot places bigger summer waves? Maybe I should go to the bar.
I think this was less about winter and more about proximity to international airports, like the initial wave.
UPETGI: Are you in the MWRA area, or was that just an example? I thought you were farther away.
(The state just shifted to only reporting case/hospitalization numbers weekly, so I'm denied some of my chart-obsessing time, ugh).
I don't think the BA.5 reinfection thing is about getting BA.5 over and over, just that it's so hot on the heels of BA.2 and sufficiently different that it's easy to have had one of those and then BA.5. Nothing I've seen has given me the sense that BA.5 produces less immunity to *itself* than any other flavor.
168: I am no longer actually in the MWRA area and have felt a void in data tracking. I do have public water (the next town over is well water) but private sewer, aka a septic system.
Heebie - do you have a link to Texas-based Wastewater? Is it just Austin that is tracking it?
You have a septic system? Only really rural areas, like less than one house per 5 acres, have that here.
Maybe our rocky soil is poor at absorbing poops.
Part of my town has sewer. The mill town near me would have it. The famous historic town next to me does have some, but the expensive town with with lots of 2 acre lots that's only 30 minutes from Boston has private sewerage.
They want to expand sewer in the walkable-ish business district, but some people are afraid that this will open the way for development.
I mean, wouldn't it be nice to develop a walkable area?
Yes. And it is walkable, and the town master plan includes developing better water treatment, because businesses said they would expand in that area, but there are some vocal people who complain to the board of selectmen about it. My water bill is way cheaper than if I were on MWRA water.
I don't think most people care, but there are some people who do.
https://www.friendsofwestacton.org/post/overview
I also think some people are worried about chemicals in water treatment facilities.
That's ridiculous. The chemicals are in the vaccines.
177: while the vaccination rate isn't as high as it was in my old town, it's still 90 plus percent - even for kids.
I was joking. Obviously, the chemicals are in the ivermectin. You don't get to run a worldwide conspiracy without being adaptable.
Nothing I've seen has given me the sense that BA.5 produces less immunity to *itself* than any other flavor.
Right, BA.5 has increased immune escape to other variants but not to itself. The thing about being reinfected every few weeks is based on hypothetical new variants with increased immune escape emerging regularly, not something that's actually been observed (or is very plausible).
The thing about being reinfected every few weeks is based on hypothetical new variants with increased immune escape emerging regularly, not something that's actually been observed (or is very plausible).
I agree that isn't likely to project indefinitely, but isn't that what's happened?
In four short months, four Omicron sub-lineages have come and gone in the U.S. Currently, BA.4/5 made a fast entrance and now accounts for more than 70% of tests.
There has been a rapid-fire sequence of variants, but they've varied in transmissibility/immune escape. Very few people have gotten all four.
148: I honestly don't remember, but I think it was a Honeywell half-mask respirator because that was the only one I found in stock.
There has been a rapid-fire sequence of variants, but they've varied in transmissibility/immune escape. Very few people have gotten all four.
Yes, it would be a vast overstatement to say that people are regularly getting reinfected after 4-6 weeks. But the sequence of Omicron variants clearly have behaved differently than the prior waves
In unvaccinated persons, the estimated protection against reinfection was 86% within a year after the initial infection and 69% beyond a year. In vaccinated persons, vaccination more than 1 year after the primary infection increased protection to approximately 94%, a level at which it remained for more than 6 months.
OT: My wife figured out about the mouse.
183: However:
Effectiveness of a previous pre-Omicron infection against symptomatic BA.4/BA.5 reinfection was 15.1% (95% CI: -47.1 to 50.9%), and against any BA.4/BA.5 reinfection irrespective of symptoms was 28.3% (95% CI: 11.4 to 41.9%). Effectiveness of a previous Omicron infection against symptomatic BA.4/BA.5 reinfection was 76.1% (95% CI: 54.9 to 87.3%), and against any BA.4/BA.5 reinfection was 79.7% (95% CI: 74.3 to 83.9%).
That's a preprint so the usual caveats apply, but if that result holds up it seems like a big deal.
They'll have trouble with peer review because you can't find a reviewer when everyone is an author.
They may have to look outside of Qatar for reviewers, true.
I have never once said that place name correctly.
Moby: "I'm not sure I'm a noticeable extra risk by standing with them in an elevator or whatever."
I thought about your comment a lot. And in the end, I have to agree with you: once I know I'm infected, y'know, I have to say, I really DGAF about all the unmasked, dicknoses, and generally covidiots. I mean, really, they can get sick and die, I can't be bothered. If they'd hurry up and do it, it'd actually be a great help. What I do care about, are:
1. not transmitting the bug to somebody I care about
2. not getting it in the first place
#1 for obvious reasons. #2, b/c "long covid". I was thinking about it today: when many Americans heard about Hillary having a 70% lock on the election, they responded by not voting. I feel like this is an example of Americans "negotiating with the Gods of Probability". And it's a foolish thing to do. Once the odds of a bad (or really bad) thing happening get sufficiently big enough, the idea that you're going to change your behaviour only slightly, *only slightly* so that you can avoid that bad outcome, when you don't *actually* know what affects the distribution of outcomes, is a little mad. Maybe a lot mad. Or foolish. Or stupid, I don't know.
I look to Bob Wachter and his prognostications a lot. And I don't try to "be more permissive than Wachter" -- again, it seems to me that if there's a direction to go, in being at variance with recognized authorities, it is *always* in the direction of greater vigilance, greater restriction.
And again, fuck if I care if every unmasked person on the bus/train gets covid. I really DGAF. My actions are purely self-interested.
Almost no one is masked here in public. It's so rare in anyway under 80, that in the store I assume people with masks have symptoms or a positive test or something. Looking back, I can't really remember when masking when from relatively common to almost non-existent. I think it was before the end of the school year. It was after the January wave had mostly receded.
There was a political battle over this. It was lost. There's no chance re-fighting it will bring a different outcome unless there's a big wave of dead or hospitalized people.
"There was a political battle over this. It was lost."
Very accurate. I remember in December, I used to yell at dicknoses on public transit. In Feb I got my 4th shot, and now? I look at them and sneer (under my mask). Fuck 'em. Frankly, I think the death tool it'd take to change behaviour is vastly higher than what we've already experienced: high enough that it'd come close to societal breakdown.
They're not going back. And hell, if they'd all just hurry up and die, I wouldn't be sad about it.