Coronavirus Tales

That and immunity wanes. People need boosters after six months.

Germany has slightly higher vaccination rates than Greece, but we're setting new infection records daily. We're currently doubling infection numbers every 2 weeks. Deaths are still a good distance away from what the were last winter, but hospitals all over are at or about to reach critical capacity (also thanks to less medical personnel that last winter for various reasons).

Boosters have been recommended for 70+ for quite a while now, and they just expanded the recommendation to all adults. No recommendation yet for any vaccination of kids under 12. Outbreaks at kindergartens and schools are some of the main reasons for the crazy numbers.

I’m happy to report that my only symptoms following my booster were a bit of fatigue and muscle soreness—nothing like my initial reaction from the j and j shot.

Definitely happy to be done with the low grade anxiety about waning immune response.

Or simply 70% of 12+ simply isn't high enough to keep numbers in check against Delta...

I thought I had seen data that it is not. I think it needs to be above 80% because of Delta.

Yes I was a little tired the next day after my booster and actually took a short nap in the afternoon. Other than that nothing else.

garion333 wrote:
Roo wrote:

So, we're at 70% vaccinated in Greece. 12 year olds and up can get Pfizer or Moderna. And our cases are shooting up and up and up, without any kind of explanation. We already have a *huge* number of limits compared to the U.S. in terms of going inside anywhere that's not a doctor's office/pharmacy/supermarket means getting your vaccine status and ID checked (we have a QR code app).

And yet...our big surge before was 3000 cases per day, and we just hit 7000 cases per day (population 10.5 M).

They're not talking about closing schools, they're mostly talking about more ways to keep the unvaccinated in their homes.

I am hoping they follow the U.S. again with letting kids get the vaccine. My older kids are fully vaccinated, while my five year old is not.

Wow, yeah, that's a big ol spike. Has your country recently seen a bunch of bad weather that kept folks inside? That could be a driver.

Or simply 70% of 12+ simply isn't high enough to keep numbers in check against Delta...

Is it from vaccine wearing off around 3-6 month time period?

3rd jab of Pfizer done. I eagerly await my magnetic powers and internal messages from Bill Gates delivered via microchip.

Scheduled for my booster next week. I am slightly concerned that we are still being given the OG vaccine given that version of the virus is no longer in circulation. Spike proteins are probably not that different, but am hoping we see a new version of the vaccine once the next booster is needed.

The variants are just that, variants. They still carry many of the markers that the vaccines were built for. Should not be an issue. But here is the CDC bulletin on the topic.

Hobear wrote:
garion333 wrote:
Roo wrote:

So, we're at 70% vaccinated in Greece. 12 year olds and up can get Pfizer or Moderna. And our cases are shooting up and up and up, without any kind of explanation. We already have a *huge* number of limits compared to the U.S. in terms of going inside anywhere that's not a doctor's office/pharmacy/supermarket means getting your vaccine status and ID checked (we have a QR code app).

And yet...our big surge before was 3000 cases per day, and we just hit 7000 cases per day (population 10.5 M).

They're not talking about closing schools, they're mostly talking about more ways to keep the unvaccinated in their homes.

I am hoping they follow the U.S. again with letting kids get the vaccine. My older kids are fully vaccinated, while my five year old is not.

Wow, yeah, that's a big ol spike. Has your country recently seen a bunch of bad weather that kept folks inside? That could be a driver.

Or simply 70% of 12+ simply isn't high enough to keep numbers in check against Delta...

Is it from vaccine wearing off around 3-6 month time period?

Could be, certainly, but then the question becomes hospitalizations.

We've been seeing for a couple months now that we need new ways to talk about numbers because positivity and accumulating positive infections don't present nearly enough of a picture. If we've got massive amounts of positives but low hospitalizations then we've "won".

J&J shot back in April . Needed a few rounds of tylenol to get through it but nothing serious. Scheduled for the moderna booster shot tomorrow.

Heretk wrote:

J&J shot back in April .

Well you shouldn't have fired on them if you weren't ready to take the consequences.

Little soreness in the arm around the booster shot area, for me. Moderna. My partner got hit pretty hard from her Pfizer booster shot, a day of flu like symptoms, an episode of vomiting, weakness. She recovered about 36 hours later.

Got my booster yesterday. Pfizer, same as my original course.

IMAGE(https://preview.redd.it/n2lrzk8m71z51.jpg?width=686&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ab1decbd7849855dd43c04ab548d8625da31e530)

It hit me pretty hard last night. Now I'm tired and achy.

CaptainCrowbar wrote:
Heretk wrote:

J&J shot back in April .

Well you shouldn't have fired on them if you weren't ready to take the consequences.

Lol well Moderna shot me about 5 hours ago. Lucky me.

Mild arm soreness so far. I read somewhere to relax your shoulder as much as possible so I just let my arm dangle. Worked well for the J&J shot anyway.

Stocked up with nyquil and have a weekend of no plans so I can hibernate through it if need be.

Wife and I got 3rd Moderna this evening. Feel fine at the moment. We'll see how tomorrow goes.

Well, I've felt somewhat lousy today and had a 101 fever after the Moderna booster. Pretty comparable to the second Moderna dose. If I feel better tomorrow, it'll have been a similar experience. Definitely needed the next day off.

Edit: My light fever is pretty much gone as of basically 24 hours since the shot. Feeling a lot better.

Whenever I see people describing their side effects, I feel extremely lucky. Other than that random thing where your whole arm hurts for the next day, I have never had a single side effect to any vaccine including Covid. I get the shot and never think about it again.

Unless my pharmacy is giving me a placebo...

Booster scheduled at Target tomorrow night.

Let's do this.

Top_Shelf wrote:

Booster scheduled at Target tomorrow night.

Let's do this.

*high five*

Both of us are basically normal after the second day. I went on a nice 4 mile jog this morning.

My 6 and 8 year old kids now have their first shot. The only minor downside is that appointments around Chicago are filled up for kids so I've got to wait until the 23rd for a booster appointment. There are sooner appointments further away from me but I can wait.

Boosterized (Moderna). About the same reaction as to the second dose (fatigue, dizziness about 12 hours after the shot).

Younger daughter (11) gets her first shot this week and second just before Xmas (YAY!)

Also, had to fly to New Orleans for work (reluctantly). Flew United and the attendants were very strict about masks, which was wonderful. Airports were mostly masked people, though about 10% of people still seem unaware that their nose is part of their respiratory system.

Tach wrote:

Airports were mostly masked people, though about 10% of people still seem unaware that their nose is part of their respiratory system.

We risked a vacation in Europe this fall and I'm glad we did for various reasons, and we took every reasonable precaution on our side. But yeah, shocking how many people still haven't figured out how masks work 19 months into this.

kuddles wrote:

Whenever I see people describing their side effects, I feel extremely lucky. Other than that random thing where your whole arm hurts for the next day, I have never had a single side effect to any vaccine including Covid. I get the shot and never think about it again.

Unless my pharmacy is giving me a placebo...

No side effects from my recent Moderna booster. Whereas my original j&j shot i had mild flu symptoms afterwards. The placebo thought crossed my mind as well lol. Even though i know this isnt a clinical trial scenario.

On Friday, we got news that a kid in my 5 year old's kindergarten class tested positive for COVID. This is, thankfully, the first time that's happened for her, and our first experience with our school district's new "Test to Stay" policy. It is definitely a convenient policy and I think/hope a smart policy too.

When the school learns of a positive case in a classroom, anyone not opted into the Test to Stay program goes home immediately and has to quarantine for the mandatory period (I believe 7 days followed by proof of negative test result). But for kids whose parents have opted into the program, as soon as they learn of the positive case, all the kids go to a big open room and are given rapid tests. Any positives, obviously, get sent home, but if you test negative you can go back to class. For each subsequent school day, kids in Test to Stay arrive at school and go to a separate entrance, where they get a rapid COVID test and aren't let in to the school until a negative result is received, or otherwise they go home. Through three days of testing now (Friday/Monday/Tuesday), no other kid has had a positive test result, and the large majority of kids in my daughter's class have been able to stay in school and not have their learning or their parents' work disrupted. I think this is good? Presumably any kids who might be particularly at risk of COVID who aren't comfortable going into a classroom where there is a small but non-zero risk of someone being infectious but not caught by a rapid test can just opt out of the program, and hopefully the masking and other mitigation measures normally employed will minimize risk for those who remain in class.

I saw a post in my town Facebook group last week that troubled me, a parent ranting about the damage that the school district's COVID policies had done to him. There was definitely language in there that made me wary of him and his politics, but there was a core of truth in there too--basically, he is not a salaried worker, so every day his kid is out of school he is losing money, and according to him, his kid was forced to miss something like 3 weeks of school because of a close contact in the classroom, almost immediately followed by a close contact on the bus, followed by another close contact in the classroom, and yet in none of those cases did any students other than the original positive kid ever test positive for COVID. I'm a lot more understanding than this parent was of the difficulties of crafting the right policies and protecting kids, but also, I'm a salaried employee with an understanding employer who has had to deal with very little childcare difficulties basically from Summer 2020 onward, so really, I can afford to be understanding. I will resist the temptation to spend time looking at Facebook to see whether this particular parent is happy with the Test to Stay program--it does feel like there's a non-zero chance he'd say "oh, you think I'm gonna let the government stick a swab in my kid's nose?" and make me want to tear my hair out--but I do hope the new policy helps parents who have less flexibility, and of course also helps kids keep their education on track too, all while keeping kids safe.

Your Test to Stay is a lot more thorough than they’re doing here. They only test to stay after passing a % threshold of active positive cases schoolwide (or 30 cases total for larger schools, with cases dropping off the count after 10 days). And then test to stay is a 1 time event. After that, they wipe the case count and start again at 1 for the next new case that crops up. Also, exposure does not require staying home. And no mask mandate.

And all that is the reason why when my daughter caught it and 2 days later they hit 30 cases and tested to stay, they found another 30 new cases. But of course, still with no mandated testing to follow up on those who were still incubating during the first test.

Yours seems to be a good way to handle it—so much better than here.

Our district and state now as the policy that on close contact, if the student was properly masking and is not showing symptoms they do not have to quarantine. I really don't have a problem with this at the moment. I think adding some mandatory testing isn't a bad idea. But I think it's a fair argument that we can't just keep sending kids home without a more direct reason. Like logical, I have a ton of flexibility. So when my kids did just go through a 2 week quarantine, it wasn't that big of a deal. But for a lot of families that isn't the case.
I'm hoping vaccines cut down the spread rate at schools quickly.

As for my own post-Covid, I think I finally figured out a way to explain it. I got better from it, as in my body was able to fight off the virus and my symptoms subsided, but I was never able to actually recover from it.

I was back at work immediately after my mandated quarantine because I'd already spent a month of sick days to take care of kids with Covid and to ensure I wasn't spreading it while incubating or potentially asymptomatic and then my own illness, and a month of work had piled up unfinished for me. And every day since has been either a work day with a MASSIVE backlog of tasks, a take-care of sick kids day (my son has had 2 colds in 3 weeks post-covid), or just trying to keep up with life with a diminished post-covid capacity.

Physically, I'm exhausted (but also unable to sleep) basically all the time. My brain is not running as well. My mental and emotional health are completely shot, and my self-care is entirely out the window. I finally feel like I can start to rebuild some semblance of my life again, but I have no time available to do it. I feel like I need another week off to do the actual -recovery- in terms of my mental health, my personal routines, my emotional well-being, and just the physical care of my house. I may just skip Thanksgiving entirely this year, and try to let that recovery happen then instead.

Father in Law isn't doing too well. My wife got this text from her mom...

MiL wrote:

Dad isn’t feeling good. Had a bad night. Very dizzy kidney area hurts body ache. And he has lost some of his taste. Stay away. I will keep an eye on him. I am staying upstairs with him. Gave him Tylenol. Encouraging fluids. He saw the doctor yesterday. I will need to call there. Do not come here. I feel fine. Don’t know about fever and I am searching for the pulse ox thing.

This is problematic because he is already in poor health and immunocompromised. He is fully vaxed and boosted, but he is not the person who should get the Rona.

My wife got some rapid tests for him and the MiL, though he may just end up going to the ER regardless.

And for the people who like football...

He did go to see his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers at a bar a few days ago because they weren't on local TV. He was masked when he wasn't eating, but still.

It would be ironic if seeing the Steelers and Detroit Lions playing to a 16-16 draw is what does him in.

Regarding schools, the ones near me are really regretting not having a distance learning option available at all this year. Having to come up with lesson plans for the kids who have to quarantine due to close contacts on top of handling their normal in-person class has been a major drain on the teachers. Predictably, the schools having the worst problems are those that bent to public pressure and didn't implement mask requirements or sign up for pool testing. I'm just glad I've been able to do the stay at home dad thing so my kids don't have enough go to any area daycare, which seems to be where many of the new cases and close contacts are coming from.