Covid 48： The Long March

[Heartofice]

41 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

It seems like everyone I know who’s gone traveling comes back with Covid. The most recent are friends who returned on Saturday after being in Italy for a month (she’s a professor who teaches a course). Her husband and adult daughter have both tested positive, but she hasn’t…yet.

That just makes me feel gloomy. I want to go to Glasgow for Worldcon next year.

Yes the virus isn't going away. 

[Fragile Bird]

3 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

You could cosplay as something that has an air bottle and functioning respirator as part of the outfit. 

Your friends are obviously spies. "Professor who teaches a course has to go to Italy because 'reasons'." Uh, huh. Daughter's probably a assassin. Bet they're not even related. 

Were you sober when you wrote this?

[Iskaral Pust]

5 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

It seems like everyone I know who’s gone traveling comes back with Covid. The most recent are friends who returned on Saturday after being in Italy for a month (she’s a professor who teaches a course). Her husband and adult daughter have both tested positive, but she hasn’t…yet.

That just makes me feel gloomy. I want to go to Glasgow for Worldcon next year.

My anecdata agrees.  We’ve avoided COVID at home but this trip to Vegas tripped us up.  And if my previous virus in May was also COVID that just didn’t register on the home test kit, then I got that in London.  And that’s despite wearing masks in airports, on flights, in hotel lobbies, in theaters; plus using Enovid consistently and lots of Purell/hand wipes.

While at home, 99% of our restaurant dining has been outdoor or take-out/delivery.  On a trip, you have multiple restaurant exposures in a few days, and you generally don’t know in advance who offers outdoor seating options (almost no-one in London or Vegas, as it happens).

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Were you sober when you wrote this?

Insomnia.

[williamjm]

10 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

That just makes me feel gloomy. I want to go to Glasgow for Worldcon next year.

Unfortunately, large international conventions do seem like the perfect environment for Covid or other bugs. I saw a lot of posts this year from people who went to Eastercon (UK national SF convention) and caught Covid there.

[Kalbear]

I mean, con crud was always a thing. And I'm not even talking about the STDs! It's just now much worse.

[Zorral]

How Covid Affects the Heart
Three years into the pandemic, the short- and long-term risks are becoming more clear.

"... heart-related deaths also increased dramatically in younger adults. In fact, a study found that the sharpest rise in deaths from heart attack during that period occurred in 25- to 44-year-olds."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/well/live/covids-heart-health.html

Quote

 

.... Some of these cardiovascular-related fatalities may have happened because it was harder to access medical care during the height of the pandemic. But physicians and researchers now have little doubt that Covid-19 itself was a factor. In addition to the complications that can occur during the acute phase of a Covid infection, there appears to be an increased risk of heart attacks, strokes and other problems up to a year after an infection. Experts are now trying to understand why.

“There’s a very unique connection between this virus and the cardiovascular system,” said Dr. Susan Cheng, the chair of cardiovascular health and population science at Cedars-Sinai, who led the study on heart attack deaths. “What is that connection? That’s the million dollar question.” ....

 

 

[Zorral]

Woo -- three texts this morning from friends in three different parts of the US telling us they got covid -- one of them just home from visiting here last week, and with whom Partner hung out a lot in music venues.

Haven't heard from so many people contracting covid as we are now since the first year of the pandemic.

 

 

 

[Zorral]

Book Review:

The Fatal Breath: Covid-19 and Society in Britain by David Vincent review – a moving account of the plague of our times
This bold and forensic history of the pandemic, drawing on previously unpublished diaries, underlines the sheer scale of suffering, with the poor and isolated particularly badly hit

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/10/the-fatal-breath-covid-19-and-society-in-britain-by-david-vincent-review-a-moving-account-of-the-plague-of-our-times

Quote

 

Covid-19 is the best documented pandemic in history. From the moment it became clear that the coronavirus would trigger a series of global lockdowns, every twist and turn in the pandemic has been chronicled in blogs, diaries and by print and digital media.

The desire to historicise the event has been just as urgent. As early as March 2020, the Pulitzer prize-winning writer Thomas Friedman declared that Covid-19 was “our new historical divide” and predicted that henceforth there would be “BC”, the time Before Corona, and “AC”, the time After Corona.

Today that periodisation looks increasingly questionable. This is especially the case given the other crises that have coincided with or superseded the pandemic, from Brexit to the energy crisis to the war in Ukraine. Indeed, as in 1918, when a war in Europe overshadowed the Spanish flu pandemic, Covid-19 may well turn out to be a footnote in a much bigger and more far-reaching polycrisis.

It takes a brave writer, then, to attempt what his publisher calls “the first full-scale history” of the pandemic, just two years on from Boris Johnson’s declaration of “freedom” from the coronavirus restrictions. But that is exactly what David Vincent, a former pro-vice-chancellor at the Open University, has done. Drawing on research reports, official data and personal testimonies, including previously unpublished diaries from the Mass Observation study, Vincent has written a granular social history of the pandemic that isn’t afraid to engage with the present.

Vincent’s journey began in March 2020 when he was invited to record his thoughts and impressions for a blog. As for many of us during those now half-remembered lockdown days, the daily discipline of setting down his thoughts became a way of making sense of an experience unprecedented in modern times – what Vincent calls “the sheer otherness of an essentially medieval event of plague”. In search of meaning, Vincent returned to A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe’s post hoc account of the bubonic plague that visited London in 1665 (he was just five at the time) and where a stray breath could prove similarly fatal. Vincent also draws parallels with earlier Tudor plagues where, as Shakespeare put it, people were also “cabined, cribb’d, confined”. ....

 

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

Theres a new round of monovalent vax coming online this month, get your updated shots. I will be getting the new vax a pneumonia and flu shot as soon as its released.

I definately need as much protection as i can give myself from these antivax conspiracy theory nutjobs i have to work alongside.

[Zorral]

Will wait on my flu/pneumonia shot until next month. But the covid shot, you bet as soon as I can schedule after it is released.

First They Said it would 'probably' be the middle of this month.  Now They Say, 'end of month.'

[LongRider]

Interesting article on how much virus is exhaled by patients with the disease.

"COVID patients exhale high numbers of virus during the first eight days after symptoms start, as high as 1,000 copies per minute, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

It is the first longitudinal, direct measure of the number of SARS-CoV-2 viral copies exhaled per minute over the course of the infection — from the first sign of symptoms until 20 days after."

COVID patients exhale up to 1,000 copies of virus per minute during first eight days of symptoms - Northwestern Now

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

I’m seeing more people wearing masks at the supermarket.

[LongRider]

51 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

I’m seeing more people wearing masks at the supermarket.

I've been doing that as cases of covid have been reported locally.  

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

17 minutes ago, LongRider said:

I've been doing that as cases of covid have been reported locally.  

I’m going to start. What the hell, I’ve still got packages of them in my car. 

Solidarity!

[LongRider]

7 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

I’m going to start. What the hell, I’ve still got packages of them in my car. 

Solidarity!

Woo hoo!  Yes, I feel self-conscious but do it anyway.  It's still hot here too so masks are very hot, a minor thing compared to covid.  When the new vaccines come in, I'll get my booster as well. 

[Fragile Bird]

I think I’m seeing a few more people wearing masks, but very few still. I am also considering wearing masks in the grocery store and in Costco again. 

On Saturday members of the church choir got emails asking them to come in early because someone different would be the choir conductor, because the usual lady had Covid with complications and was unwell. That was rather alarming, so after hearing about it I asked around to find out how sick she was. Turns out she wasn’t freshly infected, she has long Covid and there are days that become too exhausting for her.

“Shudders”. That’s all I’d need right now. Ugh.

[Zorral]

They are supposed to announce the roll out of vaccination availability today.  I'm waiting . . . so I can call the pharmacy that does Moderna and get an appt. asap. It's nice that this variant's vaccine is a single-shot, not the two we've done for the earlier mutations.

 

Edited September 12 by Zorral

[Zorral]

I nearly booked an appt. for the 18th, but wasn't sure it was really possible!  This was the earliest I could get. Of course I have a BD party thingie on the 20th, so with reaction, hmmmm.

[Zorral]

I'm booked for this Saturday to get the new Covid vaccine.  I'll be so glad when that's over.

Will do flu late next month, I think.