Coronavirus

[Cygnia]

I hope that panel is in hiding...

[Pariah]

Comment of the day from the Book of Face:

 

"Why argue with an anti-vaxxer, when you can just wait?" 

[death tribble]

USA through 750,000 dead

[unclevlad]

US is still seeing 10,000 deaths a week. <sigh>

Someone on my neighborhood app posted a notice from the state, related to crisis conditions due to the ongoing strain from the pandemic.  This, of course, ignited another firestorm;  the post, which started out as a news statement informing us (I hadn't seen it, so I was quite appreciative of the OP) ended up being deleted.  (Which is a separate issue with the mods, but also somewhat understandable.)  

 

The claim resurfaced:  that hospitals get paid more for calling a death from Covid.  GAHHH!!!!!!  SO convenient to spew conspiracy theories, the more wlid, the better, so as to blow off facts that conflict with the distorted reality they live in.

[BarretWallace]

I am having fairly major surgery in a few days.  So far everything is on track.  I'm self-isolating a bit more than usual, my shots are current, etc.  My greatest fear is still that some unvaccinated dingus will take the ICU bed that's currently reserved for me.  At a pre-op appointment on Monday, I asked this question and was assured that this would not happen.  Still, I can't help but be nervous.

 

Mind you, any person needing an ICU bed is going to be suffering and deserving of empathy.  When they are put there through willfully passing up a vaccine that is now widely available, then my empathy is in shorter supply than usual.

[unclevlad]

2 hours ago, BarretWallace said:

When they are put there through willfully passing up a vaccine that is now widely available, then my empathy is in shorter supply than usual.

 

If my empathy was a 1 hour time candle, then for the unvaccinated, it's been lit for about 58 minutes now.

[death tribble]

Spain through 5 million cases and Peru through 200,000 dead.

 

Britain is back below 40,000 new cases a day which is somewhat of a relief.

[Old Man]

Spent some time going back over the first dozen or so pages in this thread.  Memories of a happier time, when none of us had a clue, and casualties were in the hundreds.

[unclevlad]

1 hour ago, Old Man said:

Spent some time going back over the first dozen or so pages in this thread.  Memories of a happier time, when none of us had a clue, and casualties were in the hundreds.

 

Not entirely true.  Some of us expected it to be pretty bad.  It probably is safe to say that none of us expected so much intransigence.

 

And any hope pretty much ended a week after that thread started.  That's the night the NBA shut down.

 

Y'know, I could've gone another 10 years without being reminded of that stretch..............

[Old Man]

For me it was when I went to the store and there was no toilet paper on the shelves… and no food either. That was when s—t got real. 

[unclevlad]

Remember spending CRAZY amounts for disposable masks?  IIRC, I got some masks (before mandates were issued, figured they'd happen) at Walgreens...but just once.  Then I figured, OK, I'll get some TP from Amazon...cuz there wasn't ANY in the stores...and THEY had next to nothing.  Ordered more masks...that orderr, AFAIK, never got shipped.  I think it took 2-3 tries to find a seller that wasn't showing 6-8 week delivery times...figured the chance I'd never see it was too high.  It was kinda amusing...a couple months ago, I saw disposable masks at that same Walgreens, while filling up the usual prescriptions.  $15 for 50.  Again, I'm pretty sure this was before indoor masks were required again...but I figured it was gonna happen.  Even commented to the pharmacy clerk "remember what these USED to run?" and we shared a small laugh.

 

But, yeah, I think the total stripping of those several items was a face-smack on an individual level...but that run, I'm pretty sure, was AFTER everything hit the fan.  Early March, Italy got *hammered* by the first major wave outside China.  That's when we knew the genie was out of the bottle.  That was major news on the 8th and 9th.  NBA shut the season down.  Right after, the NCAA shut down all postseason basketball play.  Other sports followed suit for much of that day.  The NBA's was the jaw dropper.  The NCAA's was a foregone conclusion.  

 

And then, I think, perhaps the icing on the cake.  Trump's press conference, setting up the task force.  Remember that?  It almost seemed like he might DO SOMETHING POSITIVE.  Yeah, we know how long that lasted...but still, it was a major about-face, and if anyone needed it after sports shut down, that made it all Too Real.  

[Pariah]

March 13th, 2020 - Friday the 13th, no less - was when it all hit the fan for me. That's the day we found out we were going to remote learning for the rest of the school year. 

 

What a crapshow that was (and, in some ways, continues to be). 

[tkdguy]

1 hour ago, Pariah said:

March 13th, 2020 - Friday the 13th, no less - was when it all hit the fan for me. That's the day we found out we were going to remote learning for the rest of the school year. 

 

What a crapshow that was (and, in some ways, continues to be). 

 

I actually didn't mind remote learning, since I worked with small groups. My biggest problem was the way the company reopened. The admins kept trying to get me to teach onsite even before I was eligible for the vaccine. After I got vaccinated I couldn't refuse, but I got sent to a different center, and all my regular students were reassigned to other teachers. That was one of the reasons I quit.

[Old Man]

1 hour ago, tkdguy said:

 

I actually didn't mind remote learning, since I worked with small groups. My biggest problem was the way the company reopened. The admins kept trying to get me to teach onsite even before I was eligible for the vaccine. After I got vaccinated I couldn't refuse, but I got sent to a different center, and all my regular students were reassigned to other teachers. That was one of the reasons I quit.

 

One silver lining of the pandemic, if you can call it that, is that Americans in general seem to have become less tolerant of abusive management.

 

While remote learning was a real charlie foxtrot, I count myself very lucky that my own offspring were old enough and self directed enough to be able to do remote learning at all.  Many of their friends simply didn't participate.  If I'd had first graders during the pandemic I'd have gone mad.

[Pariah]

Imma just leave this here....

 

As Florida’s DeSantis descends into anti-vaxx Crazyville, Miami-Dade Schools follows the data

[Joe Walsh]

The week of March 22nd, 2020, I was on a business trip. We were all monitoring the news. Ohio shut down, there was talk of other states shutting down. Then I got home and stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things and....the parking lot was completely full mid-afternoon on a Friday. People were coming out with their carts loaded with canned goods, paper products...anything they could get their hands on. I went in to see how bad it was, and the place had just about been emptied out. Desperate people were zooming from aisle to aisle, looking for things to buy. Arguments and fights were breaking out over who would get the last whatever.

 

That's when I knew it was going to be a long, hard, terrible slog.

 

[Dr. MID-Nite]

I was in Las Vegas when the pandemic hit. They shut everything down and we had to leave.

[Cancer]

My employer went to full remote instruction about a week and a half before the end of the term, and I certainly wasn't ready.  It being late in a very busy term I had been paying only modest attention to the world around, though the big wave of deaths up in Snohomish County (just north of us, and the first substantial parcel of casualties in the Lower 48) made it clear that this one was real and it was here.  It wasn't until after winter quarter ended that I could start reading the literature (and review my old epidemiology notes, from when I was at the cancer research center writing the population microsimulation model for evaluating cancer screening strategies) and start perceiving the true fundamental nature of the utter incompetence of the occupant of the Oval Office for dealing with a force of nature rather than something he sleaze out from under with a Chapter 11.

 

Then two months later the cop murdered Floyd on camera and the nature of the situation changed again.  Seattle's East Precinct HQ is literally two blocks from one corner of campus, and in the student housing there they kept their windows closed to keep the tear gas out.  As much as I would have liked to have participated in the marches and civil disorder (the set-up cried out for three-man slingshot teams, which I could have equipped and trained), being in a high-risk demographic and having as good a grasp as possible of what those risks were kept me at home nine miles away.  Then Spring Quarter finally ended, and it was time to get something like prepared for the teaching I had to do in the subsequent fall, as opposed to the raw extemporization I'd been throwing together from mid-March through mid-June.

[Cygnia]

This is the one year anniversary of my COVID diagnosis, right after a now ex-friend revealed herself to be toxic and abusive and I didn't have a place of safety when it happened.

[Simon]

Just got a Pfizer booster shot....now I wait to see if my reaction is similar to when I got the J&J initially (I had a strong immune response to that one).  I'm banking on it being similar, so feeling free to eat and drink as much as I want this afternoon with the expectation that it'll be "free" calories (last time I gained the uncanny ability to throw up food that I hadn't even eaten yet).

[unclevlad]

Just scheduled a combo shot...booster, and flu.  Late morning tomorrow.

[Old Man]

I got the shingles and DTAP boosters last week.  Had some myalgia the following day.  Probably not as bad as actual shingles or lockjaw though.

 

Trying to figure out when I can squeeze in a third covid shot on the off chance it knocks me down like the second did.  Probably next week.

[Simon]

10 minutes ago, Old Man said:

I got the shingles and DTAP boosters last week.  Had some myalgia the following day.  Probably not as bad as actual shingles or lockjaw though.

Having had shingles multiple times, I can pretty strongly state that your reaction was nowhere near as bad

 

I’m planning on going in for my shot on my 50th birthday next year

[Cygnia]

Hubby got shingles this summer and thought it was poison ivy.

[unclevlad]

By this time tomorrow, more or less, we will pass an awful marker.

 

5,000,000 people dying from Covid-19.

 

And in less than 2 weeks, we will surpass 250,000,000 cases.

 

I don't track or mark most of the statistics much any more, but these 2 strike me.  It feels appropriate to note them.  Light a candle.  Spend time reflecting.  Pray, if you like.