Covid-19 #29: Gazing Into the Abyss, Again

[RhaenysBee]

14 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I’m so mad right now I could spit. It has just been announced that someone working at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre vaccine clinic where I got my vaccine has tested positive for Covid-19. All they’ve said is that they were wearing all the proper PPE and everyone who attended had PPE on so the risk is very low. But they haven’t even said what hours that person worked that day. They’ve just told people to ‘monitor themselves for signs of Covid-19.’

A little more detail would be helpful, guys.

I’m so sorry, this must be infuriating and stressful. The chance you contracted it is pretty low though, fingers crossed you’ll be perfectly fine! Let us know! 

11 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

That risk is so incredibly low as to be negligible. 

It’s the same risk you take going grocery shopping, except you actually got told there was a covid case instead of being blissfully oblivious.

Here’s where my trust issues start. I did get covid at the grocery store. Or in the post office line, or in the pharmacy, or from a masked repairman I kept 2 meters distance with in a ventilated area. And I still got it. And I know that statistically I’m the unlucky 0.1% but the experience just distorts my perception and magnifies the risk of so much stepping out of the door. I still feel incredibly fortunate with my covid because it was mild, it gave me some antibodies and I didn’t infect anybody. But the mental aftermath is no easier than the mental foreplay had been. 
 

anyway. News. Reopening in progress, curfew is from 10pm now, retail businesses opened, schools to reopen in late April May, J&J one dose vaccine supply received. Daily deaths at 250-300, daily new cases at 7-8000. People are just dropping like flies. Crude but true, unfortunately.

My mother was called for AZ but she didn’t take it and she can’t get Sputnik (because as it turns out, it’s not safe for the kinda chronic condition she used to have) so once again she’s on a waiting list for Pfizer. It still pisses me off because at this point I know of a LOT OF people my age who got the vaccine. 

My newest plan is to get another PCR (again the amount of money I’ve spent on these tests is ridiculous which also pisses me off) the week after next week and if that’s negative, and my mother gets the first shot by that time, I’ll go and see her for the last week of April/ first week of May. If that falls through, then... I’ll wait till the week of Pentecost. 

Sister is coming back to stay with me for a couple days though. I’m a bit worried although it makes no sense to think I might still be contagious with a positive antibody test and over 7 weeks after my first symptoms and nearly 6 weeks after full recovery. Like I said before, the thing just fucks in your perception of risk (and I’ve sucked at risk evaluation to begin with). 
 

And fuck buddy is not a generation thing, it’s a culture thing or a personality thing, because I’ve never know a single person  who used that term and if anyone described me that way I’d never speak to him again (of course one’d need covid to end for even the chance of that). But hey, if both parties are fine with with, I won’t be one to care, each to their own. 

[Filippa Eilhart]

How much are PCR tests in Hungary? I’m only asking because I was surprised that in Poland they’re twice the price of Luxembourg (120 vs 60 euro)

[RhaenysBee]

You can get one for free through the GP if you have symptoms that imply covid (not if it’s to confirm negativity or get out of mandatory quarantine). Private PCRs are priced at €50 (with the current exchange rate) plus €5-10 for “taking the sample”, plus €20-40 if you need someone to come to your house. So the total of getting one PCR for me was around €80-90.  
 

[Zorral]

Having a stronger reaction this second time around.  The arm is much more sore.  Light-headed and fuzzy.  I was asleep by 10:30 PM. Didn't get up until noon, and still didn't want to get up. Still tired.  Headache, but that's probably the usual from the vertebrae damages.  If it's no worse than this, I'm getting off very easy.  Took a couple of tylenol just now and they're already improving the aches and soreness.  So is my Oolong Tea, wonderful, wonderful pot of hot Oolong tea!  

 

[Zorral]

The caption is extremely misleading; many internal links, which don't come through due to formatting, long read, limited article access per month.

"What America’s Vaccination Campaign Proves to the World
The U.S. stumbled early in the pandemic, but the vaccine rollout could reboot the country’s image."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/mass-vaccination-show-american-might/618559/

This is the core of the article -- which could equally go into the US Politics thread.

Quote

 

... a form of what is either admiringly or disparagingly called “vaccine nationalism” was baked into the American vaccine program, like the British and Israeli programs, from the start: Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, and screw everyone else. The Trump administration refused to join COVAX, the international consortium that seeks to distribute vaccines around the planet....

....Much has been written about how the European Union chose a different path, jointly purchasing vaccines for all its members on the grounds that a bidding war among European countries would leave the smaller ones without anything. The EU also convened the meetings that created COVAX and, expecting reciprocity, allowed European manufacturers to export to Britain and elsewhere. In Europe, pride at having done “well” in the first phases of the pandemic has now turned to anger, in some countries, at the failure to distribute vaccines faster. But vaccine nationalists are not only on a different path from the EU. They have also gone in a different direction from Russia and China, two countries that are so convinced of the global importance of this moment that they have been selling and distributing vaccines abroad even before their own populations are vaccinated. As of late March, China had produced 250 million doses of its vaccines and sent 118 million abroad, to more than four dozen different countries. Russia, whose own vaccination percentage is in the single digits, has also been boasting of its exports to 22 different countries, as well as deals to produce its Sputnik V vaccine in South Korea, India, Serbia, and possibly Italy.

And no wonder: Unlike Biden, Johnson, Netanyahu, or any of the EU prime ministers, leaders in Beijing and Moscow don’t need to worry about electorates who might judge their vaccine distribution. The Chinese may have also concluded that their contact-tracing, border-control, and quarantine systems are so successful, they don’t need to hurry with mass vaccination. More to the point, both countries have already identified the vaccines as a game-changing technology, and have already decided that the foreign-policy benefits of vaccine distribution abroad are too important to waste.

That decision is shaping other countries’ policies. Three-quarters of the vaccines supplied to Chile, the country with the highest vaccination rate in Latin America, are Chinese CoronaVac shots. Serbia, which is not part of the EU, is using Russia’s Sputnik V to power ahead of other European countries. San Marino, a microstate that is also not part of the EU, bought Russian vaccines for its 29,000 citizens and has become the envy of Italy. The United Arab Emirates, a world leader in mass vaccination—ahead of both the U.S. and the U.K.—has not only used China’s Sinopharm vaccine but is planning to co-produce a version under the name Hayat-Vax, from the Arabic word for “life,” a decision clearly made with an eye toward marketing in the Arab world.

Some of these new pacts are commercial, no different from AstraZeneca’s arrangement to produce millions of doses in partnership with the Serum Institute of India. But many are political. After Algeria accepted a gift of vaccine doses from China, Chinese state media quoted the country’s foreign minister, Sabri Boukadoum, declaring that he “opposes any interference in other countries’ internal affairs”—meaning that he will not support human-rights groups and others who criticize China—and will “strongly support China on issues involving China’s core interests,” an allusion to Hong Kong and Xinjiang province. Serbia’s pro-Russia foreign minister chose to use the moment of his inoculation with a Sputnik V vaccine to demonstrate his support for Russia more broadly: “I wanted to get the Russian vaccine, because I believe in Russian medicine.”

Neither Russia nor China is particularly shy about its political goals. In addition to pushing sales of Sputnik V, the Russians are running a full-scale disinformation campaign, wearily familiar from all the other Russian disinformation campaigns, that is designed to discredit Western vaccines. Quasi-academic publications as well as Russian state media have sought to create a miasma of distrust around the mRNA technology behind the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in particular. A recent article in one Russian state-backed publication speculated that the pandemic was created to service Western interests, including those of pharmaceutical companies. Both Russian and Chinese state-media Twitter accounts have tweeted sensationally, and misleadingly, about Pfizer too. And that’s just the visible stuff. Because trolls linked to Russian security services have been masquerading as anti-vax conspiracy theorists on American social media as far back as 2015, no one should be surprised if they are doing the same now.

This time, the goal may be to create doubt not just in the U.S., but around the world. One recent study showed that nearly a quarter of Jordanians and Kuwaitis believe that Western vaccines cause infertility; nearly a third fear that they contain microchips that will control recipients’ brains. Iran’s supreme leader has also called Western vaccines “untrustworthy.” Iran is betting instead on the Cuban researchers who, in pursuit of this globally prestigious technology, are in the final stages of testing several vaccines. They too see a chance to broadcast the advantages of their political system. One of their most advanced vaccines is called Soberana 2—the name invokes the Spanish word for “sovereign”—while another, Abdala, has been named after a poem by José Martí, a Cuban independence hero.

But an opportunity for the U.S. might lie precisely here, in the authoritarian drive to politicize the vaccines. The best answer to Russian and Chinese strongmen who offer thousands of vaccines to countries that say nice things about them is to flood the market with millions of American doses, helping everyone regardless of what they say about the U.S. or anyone else....

 

 

[Clueless Northman]

I'm quite tired of this shit, of these shitty media who try their worst to portray the US as a kind and benevolent vaccine powerhouse and to portray vaccine-exporting countries as either suckers who can't help themselves (EU) or evil schemers (Russia, China).

US and UK should be considered selfish asshole countries that decided that the rest of the world could just die and barely mattered. Why every other vaccine-producing country decided to export half the production is of no interest. What is of interest is that every other vaccine-producing country did the right thing (and in this case, everyone should note that even bad guys Russia and China are doing that right thing), and that US and UK leadership showed their true colors and basically said to the entire rest of the world: "fuck you, eat shit and die".

I fully expect to see more and more calls from US and UK media to "share vaccines with all 3rd world countries who don't have any", the more their very own vaccination campaigns come to a close, and these calls will of course aim to gaslight and guilt-trip Europe, Canada and other Western suckers who still consider that couple of countries as friends and as morally respectable. I don't expect either UK or US to ever ship any vaccine to mainland Europe (except Gibraltar, mind you), under the fake "let's help the poor" argument, while calling for the EU to ship more and more of the vaccines it produce abroad. After all, that's exactly what they've done so far, and the result is obvious: to economically hurt the Union as much and as long as possible by making sure, by any means, that the vaccine rollout goe as slowly as possible.

To be blunt: either American and British media call for their own countries to export, beginning next week, half their vaccine production, no matter the consequences and the slowing down of their vaccination efforts, or they should shut the fuck up forever about "vaccine nationalism", "vaccine diplomacy", and how other countries mishandled the rollout, or are just exporting vaccines for public relations reasons.

[Zorral]

 

This is what the article is talking about so why are you yelling at it?   Would you have even been aware of the article if it hadn't been brought to your attention by somebody else?   Ya gotta admit this is confusing!  

 

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

9 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

20 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

 

Here’s where my trust issues start. I did get covid at the grocery store. Or in the post office line, or in the pharmacy, or from a masked repairman I kept 2 meters distance with in a ventilated area. And I still got it.

Were you doing any indoor dining or have any relatives that got Covid , or are you certain your case stemmed from the grocers, pharmacy, post office or repairman? It must be mind boggling and frightening to not be certain how you contracted your case?

[Luzifer's right hand]

Most people don't seem to know who they got it from around here. Unless most of them are just lying to make contact tracing impossible. I know quite a few people who had covid-19 and none actually reported the people they had >2m <15 min of contact with officially. You are the bad guy if someone is officially quarantined because of you.

[DireWolfSpirit]

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

Having a stronger reaction this second time around.  The arm is much more sore.  Light-headed and fuzzy.  I was asleep by 10:30 PM. Didn't get up until noon, and still didn't want to get up. Still tired.  Headache, but that's probably the usual from the vertebrae damages.  If it's no worse than this, I'm getting off very easy.  Took a couple of tylenol just now and they're already improving the aches and soreness.  So is my Oolong Tea, wonderful, wonderful pot of hot Oolong tea!  

 

I'm also prescribing you a big delicious hot, spicy noodle bowl of Pho. Best hangover/ache-n-pain panacea evah!

[RhaenysBee]

23 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Were you doing any indoor dining or have any relatives that got Covid , or are you certain your case stemmed from the grocers, pharmacy, post office or repairman? It must be mind boggling and frightening to not be certain how you contracted your case?

Absolutely not. None of my relatives had covid, thank goodness (and we meet under very strict terms). As for indoor dining, the last time I did that was... I think in early September, restaurants haven’t been open since November. I can literally count on one hand how many times I left the house in those ten days before I experienced symptoms. It was grocery store twice, taxi to other flat (this ride is 12-3 minutes, window down, masks) +repairman at the other flat (every window open, masks, 2m distance)+taxi back, post office once, pharmacy once.  And weekend walk without destination, basically just roaming streets and a park.

Mind boggling, yes. Frightening not so much, at least not for myself anymore, I am terrified of my relatives’ going to the grocery store or the post office now. Mostly I feel disbelief, a bit of resentment and gratitude over it. (The latter because it was me and not a family member, because I had it mild and because I didn’t pass it on to a family member, or anybody else) 

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

I'm also prescribing you a big delicious hot, spicy noodle bowl of Pho. Best hangover/ache-n-pain panacea evah!

Thank you!  Good advice. I should just give up and get back into comfy bed. I can't even put three words together coherently. But I also regressed to 3 - 4 years old: "I won't go to bed!  I don't wanna! You can't make me!"  Can we say overprivileged and lucky person, boyz and girlz, who can afford to be like this?

This stuff is so depressing, depressing all across the board -- just damn those corporate slimeballs for not doing their job.

This is short, no paywall:

https://gothamist.com/news/states-johnson-johnson-vaccine-supply-will-drop-nearly-90-next-week-cuomo-says.

@RhaenysBee -- There is a piece about what they are calling 'break-through infection' in The New Yorker Magazine, by a woman who had gotten both a mild form of covid, and then was fully vaccinated, and then got infected again, though she wasn't sick herself, particularly.  Unfortunately it is pay-walled, but the thing is, nobody knows how or why this happens, other than it is fairly rare.  But it is understandable these things make one feel anxious, not only for oneself, but for others in our world.

 

 

[Arakan]

Regarding vaccine nationalism...well the people around the world are not stupid or disinformed. Thats condescending. Maybe 20 years ago the US state department could have send Beyoncé to Congo to give a live aid concert sponsored by the American vaccines for freedom program and everything else be forgotten. That shit doesn’t work anymore. Be it as it is, the facts are the facts. 

Anyway, mighty Premier Johnson and his cabinet of Rule Britannia mental midgets got very quiet recently. They know that they depend on the EU to reach their future vaccination targets. They got the message. Little Englander Brexiteers might not like it, but the EU is the big dog in the area. 

Meanwhile, the US, China and Russia can play their little PR games, people don’t care. People care about getting vaccinated. Even Bavaria, conservative bastion of Germany, bastion of pro-American spirit, ordered Sputnik-5 (2.5 million doses, from June onward). 

I told my opinion already a week ago. This shortsighted selfish and nationalistic approach of the US might be a short-term tactical win but it’s a longterm strategic defeat. No amount of Marketing PR, Think Tank and Consulting wizards can spin this any other way. Regarding the UK, in the end who cares. They are all in all irrelevant in the broader vaccination picture. Yes, the Johnson administration is annoying but sooner than later they’ll be gone. A more reasonable future Premier will understand that it might be wiser as a 65 million country (maybe less in a few years) to work together with its neighbor (in a fair and accountable manner) of 450 million with the second largest economic might in the world, instead of constantly pissing them off. 

[Padraig]

13 minutes ago, Arakan said:

Anyway, mighty Premier Johnson and his cabinet of Rule Britannia mental midgets got very quiet recently. They know that they depend on the EU to reach their future vaccination targets. They got the message. Little Englander Brexiteers might not like it, but the EU is the big dog in the area. 

You are not doing your point of view any favours with this kind of stuff

[Padraig]

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

The caption is extremely misleading; many internal links, which don't come through due to formatting, long read, limited article access per month.

"What America’s Vaccination Campaign Proves to the World
The U.S. stumbled early in the pandemic, but the vaccine rollout could reboot the country’s image."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/mass-vaccination-show-american-might/618559/

I think this is a decent article.  It doesn't try to suggest that the US is wonderful (just see the first line quoted below) but it takes the view that the US brings some advantages and if it really focuses on those, it can do a lot of good stopping COVID going forwward.  Fair enough.

For example, an increasingly spoken about issue is ingredients (or the lack thereof).  The US modifying its approach there would help a lot.

Quote

Vaccine nationalism is small-minded, self-centered, and ultimately self-defeating, because COVID-19 will not cease to be a problem until no one has it. This is the moment to think big, the moment for generosity and big ideas. As our massive logistical investment in refrigerated transport begins to pay off, the question for Americans is not just how we can enter the game, but how we can change it.

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

So am using a new Kindle and haven't gotten the hang of sharing articles from it just yet.

But very good article at NYT on vaccination stats around the World for each country their, sorry if link doesn't work though.

Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World

 

Doses administeredPct. of populationPer 100 peopleTotalVaccinatedFully vaccinated

World	9.8	754,085,882	–	–
Israel	115	10,224,921	60%	55%
Seychelles	107	103,968	67%	41%
U.A.E.	93	8,923,543	–	–
Chile	63	11,778,275	39%	24%
Bhutan	63	473,393	63%	–
Bahrain	59	919,222	36%	23%
U.K.	58	38,444,540	48%	9.8%
Maldives	54	280,186	51%	2.9%
United States	54	178,837,781	34%	21%
Monaco	53	20,510	30%	23%
Malta	48	232,335	35%	13%
San Marino	46	15,673	27%	20%
Serbia	41	2,836,012	24%	17%
Hungary	40	3,932,413	28%	12%
Show all

[Fragile Bird]

Here is a link to the NYT vaccine tracker. Their Covid-19 articles are not behind a paywall.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html

[Fragile Bird]

The thing about the UK variant is that it infects more people and makes them sicker, and it's deadlier. Many doctors have come on air and have explained that with the original wild virus, a person in a household could get sick and not spread it to everyone in their house. With B.1.1.7, entire households are showing up in the emergency room.

I just watched an interview with a woman living in a community north of Toronto. They live in a multi-generational house, her husband and kids and her parents. They all came down with Covid-19 the same day, and have no idea how they caught it. For the first week it was like they all had mild colds. They joked about the fact that "if this is all it is, it's okay". Then her father woke up on day 7 or 8  and had difficulty breathing. The same thing happened to her mother. Both got admitted to hospital, both ended up in ICU. They were expected to recover. The father died, the mother has been released from hospital but needs oxygen and has difficulty walking.

Six weeks later, the daughter still has symptoms. She has "Covid toes", which you may have originally read about months ago as a sign in children that they had Covid-19. In adults it's actually symptoms in the feet. Her feet hurt, are swollen, and the skin is peeling off the soles of her feet. It makes looking after three small children difficult when you can't put your shoes on.

Earlier this week I heard that Canada had 16,000 confirmed cases of B.1.1.7 so far, while the US has 17,000. Apparently we test far more than the US does. I have heard doctors in the US say there simply isn't enough testing being done for variants, there are likely thousands and thousands of more cases. The majority of cases in provinces across the country are the UK variant. In Alberta, almost all the new cases are the UK variant.

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Padraig said:

I think this is a decent article.  It doesn't try to suggest that the US is wonderful (just see the first line quoted below) but it takes the view that the US brings some advantages and if it really focuses on those, it can do a lot of good stopping COVID going forwward.  Fair enough.

For example, an increasingly spoken about issue is ingredients (or the lack thereof).  The US modifying its approach there would help a lot.

 

That's what I thought too.  I even wrote the the language of the caption was extremely misleading as to the content of material and argument.

~~~~~~~

Conclusion, I think to my reaction to 2nd Moderna injection -- it might be of interest to others as to what they might expect -- I expected this, more or less because our Pod Partner had exactly the same reactions for about the same amount of time that I had / have.

Later this afternoon, I felt progressively chilled.  Got back into bed clothes, but much warmer than normal for this time of year, pulled blanket and duvet over me.  Started to have shivers, even with cashmere opera length mitts under the sleeves of thermal sleep shirt and wool sox.  Shoulders, arms, hands, feet and digits felt ice cold.  The shivers came increasingly frequently, and were quite intense.  El V came in and read out loud to me from the Sybill Bedford book of her journey to Mexico, which frequently made me laugh out loud in delight, so often was she comical.  Intentionally comic, or at least dryly witty.  It's not situational comedy, but compositional comedy, from how she structures paragraphs and sentences and the word choices.

At least, unlike with cold and flu when I had the chills and shakes and shivers, there was no accompanying respiratory miseries such as the throat scorched by a blow torch, with nostrils feeling the same way. 

After enough time when by that I could take Tylenol again, I had lashings of strong, ground black pepper in chicken broth that had been in the freezer, with mushrooms left over from last night, with dumplings from the Gourmet Garage, gotten and frozen earlier this week.  It was perfect.  Took two more Tylenol, got back into bed. Within a half hour the shivers stopped. Slowly the chill left my body.  

Now I'm sitting up in bed and typing on the little laptop.

B says this is exactly how went with him after his second Moderna injection. By tomorrow it will all be over. But maybe sooner for me as B doesn't have el V to read Sybill Bedford to him, while plaintively asking, "What?" about every 11th British usage.  Also, you know, from 1953.  A world that has long been gone.  I'm enjoying this book immensely!

Still kind of tired, and the arm - shoulder still hurts quite a bit -- all that dense, hard muscle the vaccinator had to push that needle into.  All these years of working out, even with light weight weights, push-ups, etc.

But if I could laugh out loud while being read to during the worst of it -- man that's nothing!  Like all of us fortunate enough to be getting the injections -- a privileged and lucky person.

Everybody deserves and should be having this experience.  It bothers me that some people I know -- not really friends, though, now they and their loved ones are fully vaccinated, they're no longer in the least interested in what's going on with the vaccines, the vaccination effort, how many are vaccinated and how many aren't, and who the people are and where.  

 

 

[RhaenysBee]

10 hours ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Yeah, true community spread is.....awful. Glad that at least you know you didn’t pass it on. 

The initial virus passed in a dispersion of 20% of people passing it on to 80%, who then typically infected either a family member living with them or no one, unless they were past of the ongoing 20% who spread it widely (think: choir practice as the example in the medical journals). The variants are apparently spreading more in a lattice pattern, like the flu. 

You likely caught it in the grocery store or pharmacy, just bad luck running into aeresolized viral particles. Which sucks. 

So, yes, I can see why Bird is worried, with the variants going around. On the other hand, the risk should be lower in a vaccination center, where everyone is wearing masks properly; perhaps even double masking or wearing an N95, than in a grocery store, where we all know we see people with their damn dicks hanging out....er, masks below their noses. 

I actually don’t know if I had the regular one or the British variant. Not sure how I could find out. Likely I’ll never know. But yes, the variant is definitely responsible in part for the horrid stats we have now. And of course all the irresponsible people who refuse to follow regulations and go everywhere with their mask hanging on their chin. :/ 

 

9 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

So am using a new Kindle and haven't gotten the hang of sharing articles from it just yet.

But very good article at NYT on vaccination stats around the World for each country their, sorry if link doesn't work though.

Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World

 

Doses administeredPct. of populationPer 100 peopleTotalVaccinatedFully vaccinated

World	9.8	754,085,882	–	–
Israel	115	10,224,921	60%	55%
Seychelles	107	103,968	67%	41%
U.A.E.	93	8,923,543	–	–
Chile	63	11,778,275	39%	24%
Bhutan	63	473,393	63%	–
Bahrain	59	919,222	36%	23%
U.K.	58	38,444,540	48%	9.8%
Maldives	54	280,186	51%	2.9%
United States	54	178,837,781	34%	21%
Monaco	53	20,510	30%	23%
Malta	48	232,335	35%	13%
San Marino	46	15,673	27%	20%
Serbia	41	2,836,012	24%	17%
Hungary	40	3,932,413	28%	12%
Show all

This is very interesting but kinda misleading, because it added up first dose administrations and both dose administrations. We have in total 2.8Mish doses administered. And 1.1Mish (of that 2.8) already got both doses. I wonder if this happened in every other case.