Covid- Thank you, Next! Get out of our lives.

[VigoTheCarpathian]

16 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Something I overlooked we also need to consider is that many people have not gotten the regular medical help they would have needed if there was no pandemic. It's possible many cancer cases have gone undiagnosed as a result of the pandemic, for example. 

Our metro area hospitals and EDs are jammed full of patients, staffing is a gigantic issue.  3% are COVID cases in my system, very small potatoes - the rest are a mix of urgent surgeries, psych and complex medical cases…basically pent up demand that was barely managed during the pandemic because you can only do so much virtually. 

We’ve had to put another hold on scheduled surgeries to have enough beds in the short term, which is has been happening during every single COVID surge, and increases the backlog of patients waiting more…it’s a pretty shit cycle. I’m interested to see how it plays out in the excess death stats, cuz it feels like it’s going to be significant.

[Kalbear]

7 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Honestly at this point, no. Citing the past in the face of overwhelming evidence that it's safe is not a good excuse, and much of it is straight anti-science. 

Oh fucking please. Both the government and official science do not have a super awesome track record with minorities in the US. Hell, the NFL just decided like this month that they would stop looking at black people as having less intellectual capacity for the purposes of checking their CTE cases, and that was a science-based system! 

Not that black people or minorities are particularly the big problem; having the ability to take time off work and get to vaccine sites and actually reserve appointments and the like were far bigger barriers for most minorities that aren't getting vaccinated. But the notion that maybe, just maybe, the minorities shouldn't trust the guy who in the 80s told them that AIDS victims shouldn't be allowed to get experimental treatment because they were drug users is not a particularly weird one. The idea that not trusting the government which told them that the water in Flint was okay to drink might not be so good. Or hell, let's talk about how the CDC and the entire medical system fucked up that Covid was airborne and said that people shouldn't use masks based on a scientific mistake that took absurd tries to get better?

My entire family got vaccinated as soon as we could legally. I absolutely trust it. But I also am a white dude, and I recognize that the scientists telling me these things are the same ones that have entirely fucked over minorities for a whole long time in the US, and it is not unreasonable for those minorities to be a smidgen suspicious.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Something I overlooked we also need to consider is that many people have not gotten the regular medical help they would have needed if there was no pandemic. It's possible many cancer cases have gone undiagnosed as a result of the pandemic, for example. 

We have several very close friends who are dying of cancer right now because of this very situation -- they weren't able to see doctors when they should have because everything was taken up by covid and then covid exhaustion and then the BACKUP, and right now are not getting the care they need -- surgeries postponed and all the rest, because the facilities and the personnel are overwhelmed with both back-up and exhaustion and very short staff. People are quitting the jobs all the time, just beat down, and given no support, just starting with financial.  And here I am talking at this moment of well-off WHITE friends with good health insurance, who have always had access to good health care.  They are dying due to this situation.

As for free transport, Fez oughta checkout the piney woods's black communities.  O yah, it's all so easy when you only know only your very special, middle-class + white communities.

Isn't it just hilarlous, Fez, that we care so goddamned much about 'the economy' while despising and victimizing and penalizing the very people who keep the economy running, won't do a gddmed thing to make it easier for them to get vaccinated, take care of their families -- or even pay them enough to have an 'economy.'  Shame.  Shame. Shame.  But hey good ol USA where I screw you and got mine and the hell with everybody else.  Until the virus breaks right through any vaccines we can make and eats you and yours too.  Seeing as it is RAGING, and ever more so, throughout the world.

 

 

 

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

3 hours ago, VigoTheCarpathian said:

Our metro area hospitals and EDs are jammed full of patients, staffing is a gigantic issue.  3% are COVID cases in my system, very small potatoes - the rest are a mix of urgent surgeries, psych and complex medical cases…basically pent up demand that was barely managed during the pandemic because you can only do so much virtually. 

We’ve had to put another hold on scheduled surgeries to have enough beds in the short term, which is has been happening during every single COVID surge, and increases the backlog of patients waiting more…it’s a pretty shit cycle. I’m interested to see how it plays out in the excess death stats, cuz it feels like it’s going to be significant.

I'm not on the clinician side, but the numbers are pretty staggering here. Normally we see spikes in the winter (it's Minnesota after all) and declines as the weather gets better, which usually begins in April. Our department numbers keep climbing each month to levels not seen before, and most of it is minor stuff (say a wrist injury that's been lingering for months, but was put off until the hospitals were more open and safe). I shudder to think of the more dire cases that were left untreated for an extended period of time.

3 hours ago, Kal Corp said:

Oh fucking please. Both the government and official science do not have a super awesome track record with minorities in the US. Hell, the NFL just decided like this month that they would stop looking at black people as having less intellectual capacity for the purposes of checking their CTE cases, and that was a science-based system! 

The use of race-norming as an underlying means to deny medical claims by the NFL has been known about for some time now. It was always junk science used by a private corporation to shirk their obligation to injured/retired players. I'm glad more people are becoming aware of it, but it's really not germane to this discussion because we're talking about the federal government, not a private entity, and it's in the former's interest to have the science to back their claims up. The two cases really aren't comparable.

Quote

Not that black people or minorities are particularly the big problem; having the ability to take time off work and get to vaccine sites and actually reserve appointments and the like were far bigger barriers for most minorities that aren't getting vaccinated. But the notion that maybe, just maybe, the minorities shouldn't trust the guy who in the 80s told them that AIDS victims shouldn't be allowed to get experimental treatment because they were drug users is not a particularly weird one. The idea that not trusting the government which told them that the water in Flint was okay to drink might not be so good. Or hell, let's talk about how the CDC and the entire medical system fucked up that Covid was airborne and said that people shouldn't use masks based on a scientific mistake that took absurd tries to get better?

Facts change, and when they do your opinion should too. I'm not claiming the government has a perfect record on any of the stated issues above, but in this specific situation, given the vaccination rates and the almost non-existent side effects, it's time everyone just gets their fucking jab(s). It's safe. Full stop. Or as one of my favorite commentators put it, "If the White man is in line for the shot, and I can get in the same one, I'll be lined up right behind him." Or this he had to add:

Quote

My entire family got vaccinated as soon as we could legally. I absolutely trust it. But I also am a white dude, and I recognize that the scientists telling me these things are the same ones that have entirely fucked over minorities for a whole long time in the US, and it is not unreasonable for those minorities to be a smidgen suspicious.

I was suspicious at first and made it very clear here. Then Administrations changed, the scientists were put back in charge, the data seemed optimistic, the early results were solid, and when I got an early opportunity I still turned it down. Because reasons that in hindsight were dumb. A month later I got my first jab and three weeks later I got my second. 

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

The use of race-norming as an underlying means to deny medical claims by the NFL has been known about for some time now. It was always junk science used by a private corporation to shirk their obligation to injured/retired players. I'm glad more people are becoming aware of it, but it's really not germane to this discussion because we're talking about the federal government, not a private entity, and it's in the former's interest to have the science to back their claims up. The two cases really aren't comparable.

It's all part of the same thing, and if you think that the federal government also doesn't sometimes decide to choose to go with things that aren't super sciency, well, again, that's a large chunk of minority history that you're just glossing over because it's inconvenient. 

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Facts change, and when they do your opinion should too. I'm not claiming the government has a perfect record on any of the stated issues above, but in this specific situation, given the vaccination rates and the almost non-existent side effects, it's time everyone just gets their fucking jab(s). It's safe. Full stop. Or as one of my favorite commentators put it, "If the White man is in line for the shot, and I can get in the same one, I'll be lined up right behind him." Or this he had to add:

 

Shockingly not everyone is on the same page. All I'm saying is that while I think Montez and others are wrong, I can have a great deal of sympathy for not trusting the government to have their back or actually use science in a particularly useful way to them. This ain't ancient history to anyone.

Furthermore whether or not you have sympathy for those who aren't getting the vaccine - as heartless and cruel as that might be - is really not the issue. The problem is that those people who aren't vaccinated are going to be risks to those who can't be vaccinated for a variety of reasons. If you don't have sympathy for those who choose not to, have some sympathy for the people they're fucking over and start working towards understanding why they didn't get a vaccine in the first place, instead of yelling at them for it.

[Fury Resurrected]

To chime in as a member of the minority groups being argued about here- 

I disagree with those who don’t trust the government enough to get vaccinated because of past medical experimentation and misconduct on their community. Vehemently. I am so convinced vaccines are the biggest miracle of our time and ones duty to the greater good to get I am currently breaking up with the person I am in love with and had planned to spend the rest of my life with because he refuses to be vaccinated. It’s a huge fucking deal to me- a moral imperative. 
 

BUT- I absolutely do have sympathy for communities that were victims of medical atrocities at the hands of the US government. There are indigenous women still alive today who were forcibly sterilized as young girls by the US government and I don’t blame them one bit for not trusting them. Would I personally beseech them to get vaccinated anyway? Yes. But I don’t think their mistrust is something to not have sympathy for, and treating it as such is going to be the opposite of helpful.

I have no sympathy for middle and upper class white people who won’t get it- but I also think the media and public discourse doesn’t do anything helpful by treating them that way either. And when other people’s lives are at stake I will forgo the enjoyment of giving people I think are dumb what they deserve by calling them dumb.

[Luzifer's right hand]

13 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

To chime in as a member of the minority groups being argued about here- 

I disagree with those who don’t trust the government enough to get vaccinated because of past medical experimentation and misconduct on their community. Vehemently. I am so convinced vaccines are the biggest miracle of our time and ones duty to the greater good to get I am currently breaking up with the person I am in love with and had planned to spend the rest of my life with because he refuses to be vaccinated. It’s a huge fucking deal to me- a moral imperative. 
 

BUT- I absolutely do have sympathy for communities that were victims of medical atrocities at the hands of the US government. There are indigenous women still alive today who were forcibly sterilized as young girls by the US government and I don’t blame them one bit for not trusting them. Would I personally beseech them to get vaccinated anyway? Yes. But I don’t think their mistrust is something to not have sympathy for, and treating it as such is going to be the opposite of helpful.

I have no sympathy for middle and upper class white people who won’t get it- but I also think the media and public discourse doesn’t do anything helpful by treating them that way either. And when other people’s lives are at stake I will forgo the enjoyment of giving people I think are dumb what they deserve by calling them dumb.

Sorry to hear that KF.

Any news on booster shots yet btw? You were part of the AZ test program right?

AstraZeneca has no approval yet in the USA and even over here the plan seem to be to switch to an mRNA vaccine for the booster shots(in the Germany they even switched between the first and 2nd doses in some cases).

 

[Filippa Eilhart]

8 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Something I overlooked we also need to consider is that many people have not gotten the regular medical help they would have needed if there was no pandemic. It's possible many cancer cases have gone undiagnosed as a result of the pandemic, for example. 

There is hard data in Poland showing exactly that. 25% less new cancer cases were detected last year.

[Derfel Cadarn]

29 minutes ago, Fillyjonk Eilhart said:

There is hard data in Poland showing exactly that. 25% less new cancer cases were detected last year.

Certainly a problem. However if hospitals were overwhelmed with Covid patients, then there wouldn’t be any capacity to provide regular medical help anyway

[rotting sea cow]

There is a good article in The Atlantic about some of the things discussed in the last pages. Read carefully. It's strongly focused in the US but applies elsewhere I think.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/06/individualism-still-spoiling-pandemic-response/619133/

Some quotes

Quote

The U.S. also largely ignored other measures that could have protected entire communities, such as better ventilation, high-filtration masks for essential workers, free accommodation for people who needed to isolate themselves, and sick-pay policies. As the country focused single-mindedly on a vaccine endgame, and Operation Warp Speed sped ahead, collective protections were left in the dust. And as vaccines were developed, the primary measure of their success was whether they prevented symptomatic disease in individuals.

 

Quote

Unvaccinated people are not randomly distributed. They tend to cluster together, socially and geographically, enabling the emergence of localized COVID-19 outbreaks. Partly, these clusters exist because vaccine skepticism grows within cultural and political divides, and spreads through social networks. But they also exist because decades of systemic racism have pushed communities of color into poor neighborhoods and low-paying jobs, making it harder for them to access health care in general, and now vaccines in particular.

 

Quote

In the early 19th century, European researchers such as Louis-René Villermé and Rudolf Virchow correctly recognized that disease epidemics were tied to societal conditions like poverty, poor sanitation, squalid housing, and dangerous jobs. They understood that these factors explain why some people become sick and others don’t. But this perspective slowly receded as the 19th century gave way to the 20th.

During those decades, researchers confirmed that microscopic germs cause infectious diseases, that occupational exposures to certain chemicals can cause cancers, that vitamin deficiencies can lead to nutritional disorders like scurvy, and that genetic differences can lead to physical variations among people. “Here … was a world in which disease was caused by germs, carcinogens, vitamin deficiencies, and genes,” wrote the epidemiologist Anthony J. McMichael in his classic 1999 paper, “Prisoners of the Proximate.” Public health itself became more individualistic. Epidemiologists began to see health largely in terms of personal traits and exposures. They became focused on finding “risk factors” that make individuals more vulnerable to disease, as if the causes of sickness play out purely across the boundaries of a person’s skin.

“The fault is not in doing such studies, but in only doing such studies,” McMichael wrote. Liver cirrhosis, for example, is caused by alcohol, but a person’s drinking behavior is influenced by their culture, occupation, and exposure to advertising or peer pressure. The distribution of individual risk factors—the spread of germs, the availability of nutritious food, one’s exposure to carcinogens—is always profoundly shaped by cultural and historical forces, and by inequities of race and class. “Yet modern epidemiology has largely ignored these issues of wider context,” McMichael wrote.

 

[Maithanet]

We are having real frustrations with vaccine hesitancy in my wife's family.  She has a big family and almost all live in Delaware.  Of her 7 siblings only two are vaccinated.  Of the other five, they are varying degrees of anti-vax, but the overarching argument they all bring up is:

 - They already had COVID, so they don't need a shot. 

 - Because they already had COVID, they'll probably get sick from side effects from the shot and for what? 

We explain that with the variants it's just a matter of time before they get COVID again, but they just ignore this.  This is doubly frustrating because my father-in-law is immunocompromised and in poor health.  He doesn't go out much and has been lucky enough not to get COVID thus far, but if he does, he will be in very real danger.  But even that argument doesn't move people ("I don't see dad much!")  It is extremely frustrating.  And it makes us take way more precautions when we visit than we would have to otherwise and people are getting tired of dealing with that.  We're tired of dealing with it too!  If only there were some widely available free miracle drug that made it so we didn't need to take these kinds of precautions anymore

Overall it sucks, and it has damaged my wife's relationship with her siblings.

[Fragile Bird]

@Fury Resurrected I’m so sorry the bf has turned out to be an anti-vaxxer. As I have said numerous times my SiL is one and it’s very distressing. 

[Fez]

17 hours ago, Kal Corp said:

Yep! No sympathy for anyone who doesn't have things like internet or easy communication. Hell, no sympathy for minority populations who have been abused by the government before and aren't super trusting of programs to give them medicine! Fuck all those people!

Over 90% of the US population has regularly access to internet. That doesn't necessarily mean home internet access, but it does mean some sort of access exists, be it through public libraries or something else. Of the remaining 10%, the vast majority have programs they are eligible to call, be it the state Medicaid program or some other service provider, who would be happy to assist them. 97% of the US population has a cell phone. Lack of information is not a valid excuse.

It's also worth noting that you're defending a group of people that basically doesn't exist. The overwhelming polling shows that there's very few people left who want the vaccine but haven't been able to get it. The vast majority of people left have specifically stated they DON'T want the vaccine for one reason or another.

And as for people who have suffered in the past, the present is not the past (and I fully acknowledge we're still fucking over many communities on other health issues). There has has been a huge public effort to show these vaccines are safe and effective. Anyone denying that, regardless of other legitimate health grievances, is deliberately sticking their head in the sand.

 

14 hours ago, Zorral said:

As for free transport, Fez oughta checkout the piney woods's black communities.  O yah, it's all so easy when you only know only your very special, middle-class + white communities.

Isn't it just hilarlous, Fez, that we care so goddamned much about 'the economy' while despising and victimizing and penalizing the very people who keep the economy running, won't do a gddmed thing to make it easier for them to get vaccinated, take care of their families -- or even pay them enough to have an 'economy.'  Shame.  Shame. Shame.  But hey good ol USA where I screw you and got mine and the hell with everybody else.  Until the virus breaks right through any vaccines we can make and eats you and yours too.  Seeing as it is RAGING, and ever more so, throughout the world.

 

 

 

I literally said I'm not talking about the economy. Pay attention next time. The issue is how badly other health, physical and mental, has suffered. And how badly education has fallen down.

Also, I grew up in the poor backwoods. I had friends from high school that literally went to go work in coal mines after graduation. The plurality of my high school graduating class joined the military, even though it was 2005 and things were going to hell in Iraq. Most of the rest developed drug addictions. I didn't grow up in a bubble, I know how much this country can suck. Don't you DARE try to pigeonhole me.

8 hours ago, Fury Resurrected said:

To chime in as a member of the minority groups being argued about here- 

I disagree with those who don’t trust the government enough to get vaccinated because of past medical experimentation and misconduct on their community. Vehemently. I am so convinced vaccines are the biggest miracle of our time and ones duty to the greater good to get I am currently breaking up with the person I am in love with and had planned to spend the rest of my life with because he refuses to be vaccinated. It’s a huge fucking deal to me- a moral imperative. 
 

BUT- I absolutely do have sympathy for communities that were victims of medical atrocities at the hands of the US government. There are indigenous women still alive today who were forcibly sterilized as young girls by the US government and I don’t blame them one bit for not trusting them. Would I personally beseech them to get vaccinated anyway? Yes. But I don’t think their mistrust is something to not have sympathy for, and treating it as such is going to be the opposite of helpful.

I have no sympathy for middle and upper class white people who won’t get it- but I also think the media and public discourse doesn’t do anything helpful by treating them that way either. And when other people’s lives are at stake I will forgo the enjoyment of giving people I think are dumb what they deserve by calling them dumb.

I'm sorry for what you're dealing with. And I too have sympathy for people who have been fucked over in the many myriad ways by the US government. However, by not getting vaccinated now they are making a choice, and that choice has consequences; namely, getting left behind as society re-opens. There absolutely should be continued education efforts by people they trust to get them vaccinated, but that doesn't mean everyone else should remain in stasis. That's my point.

[Zorral]

16 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Something I overlooked we also need to consider is that many people have not gotten the regular medical help they would have needed if there was no pandemic. It's possible many cancer cases have gone undiagnosed as a result of the pandemic, for example. 

We have several very close friends who are dying of cancer right now because of this very situation -- they weren't able to see doctors when they should have because everything was taken up by covid and then covid exhaustion and then the BACKUP, and right now are not getting the care they need -- surgeries postponed and all the rest, because the facilities and the personnel are overwhelmed with both back-up and exhaustion and very short staff. People are quitting the jobs all the time, just beat down, and given no support, just starting with financial.  And here I am talking at this moment of well-off WHITE friends with good health insurance, who have always had access to good health care.  They are dying due to this situation. Right this minute.

It is far worse across the board for people who don't live where they live and don't have resources they / we have. It's exactly the same situation for women living in rural areas who can't get decent reproductive, pre-natal, post-natal and reproductive medical care. There are no facilities anywhere near them within hundreds of miles. 

In the meantime with covid and the mass infusions of federal cash to corporations, the for-profit hospital chains/congloms have accelerated their buy-up of smaller, more local, POORER PUBLIC hospitals, stripping them, shutting them down, making health care even less accessible. Why jerkwaddies who whine about no sympathy for people who aren't vaccinated refuse to look at the whole picture and pretend it's so obvious and easy, is beyond comprehension unless they are "don't really care do you / let them eat cake / borrow the money from your dad" sorts, and we know what sorts those are.

The responsibility and obligation of Public Health is for USA / us, meaning you and me, to go to them, not berate them for not being able to go to a facility.  This is how it worked with the massive years' long polio vaccine in the 50's and 60's.  It worked.  They came to us way out there in nowherelandia -- which was more populated then than it is now, and had far more medical facilities and resources then than it does now.

 

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

26 minutes ago, Zorral said:

We have several very close friends who are dying of cancer right now because of this very situation -- they weren't able to see doctors when they should have because everything was taken up by covid and then covid exhaustion and then the BACKUP, and right now are not getting the care they need -- surgeries postponed and all the rest, because the facilities and the personnel are overwhelmed with both back-up and exhaustion and very short staff. People are quitting the jobs all the time, just beat down, and given no support, just starting with financial.  And here I am talking at this moment of well-off WHITE friends with good health insurance, who have always had access to good health care.  They are dying due to this situation. Right this minute.

It is far worse across the board for people who don't live where they live and don't have resources they / we have. It's exactly the same situation for women living in rural areas who can't get decent reproductive, pre-natal, post-natal and reproductive medical care. There are no facilities anywhere near them within hundreds of miles. 

In the meantime with covid and the mass infusions of federal cash to corporations, the for-profit hospital chains/congloms have accelerated their buy-up of smaller, more local, POORER PUBLIC hospitals, stripping them, shutting them down, making health care even less accessible. Why jerkwaddies who whine about no sympathy for people who aren't vaccinated refuse to look at the whole picture and pretend it's so obvious and easy, is beyond comprehension unless they are "don't really care do you / let them eat cake / borrow the money from your dad" sorts, and we know what sorts those are.

The responsibility and obligation of Public Health is for USA / us, meaning you and me, to go to them, not berate them for not being able to go to a facility.  This is how it worked with the massive years' long polio vaccine in the 50's and 60's.  It worked.  They came to us way out there in nowherelandia -- which was more populated then than it is now, and had far more medical facilities and resources then than it does now.

 

 

People I know did go the the doctor but treatments got delayed because of the lack of ICU beds. A co-worker got his brain tumor surgery cancelled 3 times and delayed by half a year. 

People are abandoning health care jobs around here because the lack support by a lot of society. People want to go to the pub and go on holidays while people taking care of the most vulnerable and sick had the most stressful year since WW2. 

Edit: My GP who is pro-vaccine and has a no tolerance policy when it comes to anti-maskers has been called a Nazi to his face and his staff has heard way worse. GPs are in short supply arround here especially young ones. The people who are against covid-19 measures are harming our health care system a lot even when they are not infecting other people. 

[HoodedCrow]

@Luzifer's right handSo horrible. So sorry for other people. “My” young doctor was bananas a week ago. 
I had/ have a terrible time getting follow up care for something most likely to recurr, right now, and then less so. I got to que sera, sera, then panicking.  Being double vaxxed will help stress levels all around. We announce it to people. 
Distractions here are so welcome.
 

[DireWolfSpirit]

While we have this horrible history of the govt. ruining the lives of some minority communities with false, unsafe practices (from the smallpox tainted blankets to the syphilis experimenting to poison water supplies) and we should sympathize with those that have been subject to such atrocities.

That sympathy in no way extends to millions of (usually right wing Christian) Americans who are simply too selfish to take the vaccine and do not give a rats ass about lifting a finger to make the overall community safer. It's straight up flat earth science denial and arrogance for a sizeable proportion of the majority unvaxxed  idiots I've ran into.

And even though I may feel they should reap what they sow, unfortunately they are also  endangering many of the innocent and immuno compromised through their selfishness.

[Fragile Bird]

20 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

 

That sympathy in no way extends to millions of (usually right wing Christian) Americans who are simply too selfish to take the vaccine and do not give a rats ass about lifting a finger to make the overall community safer. It's straight up flat earth science denial and arrogance for a sizeable proportion of the majority unvaxxed  idiots I've ran into.

Any evidence it’s “usually right wing Christian” people who are not taking vaccines? They’ve gotten a lot of publicity for their stupidity, but I’d like to see a survey on that point. 
 

Everyone I know at my church, including the priest, has received at least their first dose. But I guess we’re all commie-socialists here?

[Fury Resurrected]

10 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Sorry to hear that KF.

Any news on booster shots yet btw? You were part of the AZ test program right?

AstraZeneca has no approval yet in the USA and even over here the plan seem to be to switch to an mRNA vaccine for the booster shots(in the Germany they even switched between the first and 2nd doses in some cases).

 

I was! They haven’t mentioned it to me and I was there on Monday. They just take some of my blood to track immunity and send me on my way. I assume boosters would be a second study to opt in or out of.

[Luzifer's right hand]

3 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

I was! They haven’t mentioned it to me and I was there on Monday. They just take some of my blood to track immunity and send me on my way. I assume boosters would be a second study to opt in or out of.

That makes sense. Good to hear that they are keeping track of things. 

The evidence that a combo of both vaccine types is beneficial seems to be growing.