And don’t feel bad, you aren’t kicking anyone while they are down. The possibility of getting sick was something I’ve been ok with for a while.
PCR test was quite unpleasant as expected.
Didn’t know they did both nostrils.
Anyway, 24 hours until happiness or misery.
She is working at two hospitals right now. I guess the first one scheduled her for 22nd. Yesterday she told me the other one scheduled her for tomorrow. So you are right she is getting it this week. It will be a huge relief for both of us and will lower both of our risk profiles tremendously. Her and my business partner are basically the only people I have seen with any regularity for 8 months. She was joking last night that now she can go out and live life and I have to stay home. I think she knows that’s not exactly how it works but that could create an interesting dynamic.
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Best of luck, but FYI, many of the people here aren’t going to be afforded the chance to see our loved ones over the holiday, so maybe downplay the misery/elation angle a bit :)
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I’m going to guess you are negative. I’ve had several PCR tests and the good news is I have gotten used to them and don’t mind them as much. I think the main thing is at least you know what is coming the second time.
And ya like amead said pretty much the whole forum is staying home with whoever we live with (I realize that means being alone for you so I am not equating it).
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Holy cow. You mean we are seeing the beginning of a Thanksgivong based death spike right around when we thought we would? You don’t say. It’s almost as if math is mathing
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Are they enforcing it in LA county? Because I was very discouraged in the Sacramento region last night.
Heres what I saw in the space of 30 minutes. 2 maskless men at a grocery store, being checked out by a clerk at a stand, not being asked to leave. A packed full tae kwon do studio with no mask usage. An “indoor cyber cafe and convenience store” full of maskless kids and adults. City and county police have basically said they will do nothing and of course our case rates are exploding.
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I think most county sheriffs are going on Sean Hannity and bragging about how they won’t enforce it from what I can tell.
Math is definitely a sworn enemy of charlatans. Theorem → Proof is an awfully destructive paradigm for people like Donnie Dumb Dumb who get by on escalating emotional appeals. STOP THE COUNT!
Reading yesterday about how Desantis is fucking up the vaccine rollout in Florida has me back in WAAF mode. If this is left to every state to decide how to do this, we will never know who actually received the vaccine. Who thought they were done after only one dose. So we’re never going to truly reach the required community immunity to be rid of this thing. This is why having a competent national plan and being able to coordinate plans with other countries around the world matters.
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No “authorities” are stopping anything in LA except the wildest maskless parties. The only place I go regularly is the supermarket and I’ve never seen a single maskless person, only a few dicknoses. I could be wrong, but I think somebody going maskless in a supermarket in my area would get harassed immediately. I think the problem here is primarily families and groups of friends getting together plus essential workers in crowded workplaces with lax control policies.
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I fucking hate life right now, it fucking sucks… Fuck Covid, fuck the ‘its just the flu brigade’ fuck everything.
2020 can go down as the year that finally broke my spirits for the human race…
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After I dropped my daughter off at gymnastics yesterday, the image of her walking into the building popped into my head and I realized she forgot a mask. I was relieved when I picked her up later and she had a disposable mask that the gym provided for her. I still don’t love that we’re letting her do this, but at least that made me feel better that they are trying to keep everyone safe.
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Here’s how to think about it.
Question 1: How do you get COVID? Answer: You have close contact with someone who has COVID. Simple.
Question 2: If everyone you have close contact with is immune to COVID (through infection or vaccination), can you catch COVID? Answer: No, you cannot. Hooray! That’s not herd immunity though, that’s just interacting with the world through a bubble of immune people, like a bubble boy.
Question 3: What if I interact with non-immune people? Am I doomed to get COVID? Answer: No! You only catch COVID if you interact with someone who is both not immune and who has COVID. So, what determines whether you get COVID is whether your non-immune close contacts have COVID.
Question 4: Well, do my close contacts have COVID? Answer: I don’t know! The only way they could COVID is through close interaction with non-immune, infected people. Do they interact with any non-immune infected people?
Question 5: I’ll ask the questions here! Do my close contacts interact with non-immune infected people? Answer: I don’t know! If you tried to figure this out in real life, the number of contacts you’d have to look at would increase at a sharply exponential rate, and it would be impossible to come up with a real answer. The bottom line is that, assuming you live in the US, the only way you can get COVID is if the virus can trace a chain from a sick person coming into the country, through a chain of close contacts between non-immune people, to you. If you only interact with one non-immune person and that person only interacts with one non-immune person, and so on, then the virus has to follow a very, very narrow path to get from Patient Zero to you. I like your chances. On the other hand, if you interact with lots of non-immune people and they, etc., etc., then the virus has a pretty much open field to come at you. The first thing is herd immunity. The second is North Dakota.
Question 6: OK, well lots of my coworkers have COVID. I’m in the clear, right? Answer: Err, not so much. There’s two problems here. First, while it actually is helpful to you if lots of your contacts are immune, you probably interact with people who aren’t your coworkers. You still get sacked if the left side of the line holds up but the right side is wide open. But all other things being equal, it’s better to have solid blockers on at least one side.
Question 7: But? Answer: But. If your coworkers gained immunity because your boss boosted a crate full of vaccine and dosed everyone, you’re actually in a good spot. If, however, they gained immunity via infection, it suggests that your community is in the grips of a raging COVID outbreak. That’s very bad news. If you think back a bit, the concept of herd immunity is based on layers of defense. To get from Patient Zero to you, or to almost anyone else, the virus has to make a bunch of specific moves to trace a path of non-immune people, and the odds are that it will miss some of them and you’ll be fine. In an outbreak situation, the virus is already everywhere! We’re not talking about a sick person landing in a plane seven states away, we’re talking about everyone around you. Your food delivery guy. The pharmacist. Your coworker who hasn’t gotten it yet.
Ultimately, herd immunity is a function of both real immunity and separation from infection. If you’re a bunch of hops away from anyone with the virus and a lot of the people between you are immune, you’re pretty safe. Without both conditions though, you’re not. Very concretely, if you assume that the herd immunity threshold is 60%, and you reach that level through uncontrolled spread, the virus doesn’t magically pack it up at 60%. The reason is that, even though the population has herd immunity, very few people in the population have any separation from the virus, because everyone’s sick. At that point, you’re safe from Patient Zero touching down in an airport seven states away and indirectly infecting you through a long chain of transmission, but actually, you’re fucked, because if you look back at Question 1, the way you ultimately catch COVID is through close contact with an infected person, and most of the people you might interact with are carriers due to the uncontrolled spread. Herd immunity is setting up 40 layers of defense that the virus will have to penetrate to infect you, and it doesn’t help you if you build 38 layers around where the virus already is. None of those will help you.
This, ultimately, is why people say that herd immunity means vaccines. Vaccines make people immune without making them sick. Obviously that’s good for the people getting vaccinated, but it’s also critically important for all their close contacts. If one of your close contacts gets a vaccine, that closes off one path for the virus to get to you. If one of your close contacts gets COVID, then that’s the virus walking one of the paths that leads to you.
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The good news is that a lot of what DeSantis is being criticized for is actually good and people are just writing outraged nonsense because that’s what they’re paid to do. Obviously, obviously, single-dosing people is nuts and no one should do that, but the Daily Beast article is all about how terrible it is to prioritize healthcare workers and elderly people in institutional settings for vaccination, but that’s obviously the correct thing to be doing, and actually is what the CDC specifically recommends.
Bill Lee has fucked it up pretty good in Tennessee too, essentially ZERO doses have been administered so far and the state is #1 in per-capita transmission rates.
The state got an initial 975 dose shipment of the Pfizer’s vaccine on Monday, but said in a news release it was storing it as an emergency backup supply should any hospital’s first shipment be damaged.
meanwhile…
Yeah but because I live overseas, I can only afford to see my family once a year and that time is Christmas/New Year’s.
If I don’t see them then I won’t be able to see them until December 2021.
I feel ya - no judgement just trying to keep everyone as positive as possible as we all slide deeper into the abyss.
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