Weighing in here with some thoughts and tools to help all.
1. Mayo Clinic Online Assessment Tool for COVID - anyone can use this to determine if they should be seeking testing or medical care. Also, if you think you might have had COVID, if you answer the questions as if you are sick right now with your symptoms from back then, it will give you a good indicator.
2. IHME Data - this shows you not only every country, but also every US state. Not a pretty picture for the US... even so, it's a good way to track how quickly resources are being exhausted in your state.
3. Find Your Place in the Vaccine Line - this handy tool from the NY Times has only 3 questions and will tell you how many people are ahead of you to get the vaccine. I found out that even with my high risk status and age there are 23 million Americans ahead of me, and about 300,000 ahead of me in my home county.
4. CDC Flu View - the feared "Twindemic" appears to NOT be happening - a small silver lining. I've long suspected that international travel was the primary driver of flu every winter, and also the factor that here in the US everyone has to work when they're sick (and travel for work when sick too). Looks to me like I was onto something with my theory, as flu levels are below the lowest comparative data for this time of year. This is worth keeping an eye on anyway, as the flu may just be delayed in its arrival.
5. Harm Reduction vs. Total Lockdown - this is more of an opinion piece from the LA Times, but there is some social science to back it up. Here in SoCal we are supposed to be back to shelter in place. Only essential workers and those on essential out of home trips are supposed to be out and about, and maintain social distance and masking. I can tell you that it's BS - malls are open and no one is complying. My county has issued some cease and desist orders to businesses, but it looks to me like they get circular filed. This article is interesting because it describes how this type of backlash works. The more you try to suppress personal decisions the more backlash you will encounter. There is an interesting argument to be made for harm reduction - basically education on HOW to do what you want to do more safely. Unfortunately our state government is not willing to consider this idea. All it means is more of the populace disobeying more of the rules. There should be a higher level of public education instead of all this wrist-slapping nonsense.
On a personal note, we cannot see our daughter and her BF on Christmas (or eve) because his family is being rigid and inflexible and are anti-maskers. I offered several solutions, all were rebuked. My daughter is sad about this, but I reminded her that by this time next year things should be returning to normal. Instead we are focusing on Chanukkah this year (we celebrate everything anyway). Tomorrow we'll have a socially distant meal in our garage studio space with the barn doors open and the space heater blasting. Brisket and latkes for all, and we'll do our family gift exchange. Then the kids are free to go with his family for Christmas, and we won't reconvene til January some time.
Note that our gathering in a semi-outdoor space is technically illegal under the current mandate because they don't live in our house anymore, but again, the two ways of working on problems that never have good results are: patchwork and inflexibility.
Chag Sameach, y'all! And Feliz Chrismakwanzakkah!
Thanks for those helpful links. I'm 250,000th in line at my County vaccination center ;) And I liked your attitude about your family's holidays. We do what makes sense for our own situations.
I saw an interesting article about COVID reducing blood flow for long enough to induce tooth loss https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/health/covid-teeth-falling-out.html and https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/covid-19-and-tooth-loss/
Even more concerning were reports that COVID blood flow reduction was increasing erectile dysfunction. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/yes-covid-19-can-cause-erectile-dysfunction-in-men/ and https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/covid-erectile-dysfunction
Maybe that will be enough to convince some to wear a mask.
@jeanne-mayell This is absolutely true and played out for an acquaintance of mine who's ONLY exposure was from a health aid that lowered his mask for 5 minutes to eat at a 10 foot distance. And my friend has a super expensive fancy medical grade Hepa filter in her home AND was wearing a mask when the aid was eating. She also has the humidity in her home set to 40%. She & her hubby care for his 94 yo Mom, his 53 yr old Downs syndrome sister and their adult Autistic son who has a very serious seizure disorder. Very scary!
This is seriously the weirdest infection I've ever experienced.
I was infected sometime between Tuesday and Friday of last week.
Saturday I woke up and my eyes were so watery I actually thought I cried in my sleep. Then they never watered again
Sunday I felt perfectly fine but sneezed a couple times, which is strange for me but paid no attention to it
Monday I woke up fine then in the afternoon I had horrible aches and pains in my back and legs. That evening I ran a fever of about 101 and had chills
Tuesday I woke up feeling exhausted with no fever and it never came back. By noon I felt perfectly fine. Headache started off and on that evening
Wednesday I felt perfectly fine but would get bad sinus congestion for a half hour then it would go away out of nowhere and come back a few hours later just to repeat that.
Thursday my far peripheral vision was a little foggy off and on but felt fine unless I talked loud-that would make me slightly out of breath. Also my 2 year old lightly bumped me in the shin with a toy and it felt like he hit me with a hammer.
If I didnt know I was exposed to it, I never would've attributed this to covid. It feels like a completely random set of very short lived symptoms that have no pattern to them and nothing lasts more than a few hours. Also, whenever I get any kind of viral infection(cold, flu, etc) I start getting tiny pimples on face for a day or two before I get symptoms. Ive gotten nothing with this one.
I hear you Mas ... it is a seriously weird virus and like nothing else.
It seems to be an 'engineered' entity, though just my humble opinion ... I've read so many reports and 'reputable' scientific articles that want us to believe otherwise however.
Maybe an alien ship crashed in Wuhan and accidentally unloaded a s**tload of infected bats, or was it even earlier in the sewers of Spain? So much focus diversion. Lols.
Anyway ... we the ordinary unsuspecting global public will probably never know just how the demonseed was unleashed in reality ?
I hope you are taking good care, and your family recovers quickly! Sending you all light & love ?
I'm positive its not at all engineered. The bits of info I have gotten on the gene sequencing of it leads me to strongly believe that it is a mutated version of SARS that hid out in animals for a few years and jumped back to people in a weakened state.
Dont think that was manually engineered from SARS either. It is significantly weaker and less fatal than SARS so there would be no sense at all in making a weaker version, even in a lab for research purposes. The changes are simple and common mutations that would naturally occur over the almost 2 decades since SARS was found.
As to whether the original SARS was engineered, that is a different story and I dont have enough info to make any assumption either way because of how different it is from other known human coronaviruses at the time and the fact that I have little knowledge of the genetics of coronaviruses in non human mammals.
@stargazer Not really engineered it's an animal virus that jumped into humans, when it jumped into mink it mutated then jumped back into humans a different virus then it was originally. Coronaviruses when they are in animals try to find a way to live in it optimally and it evolves. The problem happens when it jumps back into humans armed with new tricks. There are so many viruses out there we don't know about because we are normally not in contact with the animal that harbors them. Bats have coronaviruses, many different kinds they don't harm the bats because they have evolved together. In the bats they have different coronaviruses that mix together and make whole new viruses like virus babies. The probabilities that this virus was created in a bat in such a way that it's super infectious and virulent (deadly) for humans and jumps species, spreads to the entire world, is beyond human ability with all our technology. Even though our scientists know the entire genome of the virus and they know what some of the proteins do, ex: spike, envelope. They don't know to this day what all the proteins do and are still trying to figure it out. So not engineering, just extremely bad luck, and it seemed we were do, since it happens every 100 years.
@jsr78 & Mas
Yes, it's all been discussed ad nauseum, and though I do appreciate your erudite replies, forgive me my cynicism (sinacism)?
The virus is so strange and multi-layered, and in theory may be a mutant Sars, but then again it is not (a Sars)....
I don't know about you guys, but speaking personally the pandemic has altered my life so drastically that I barely recognise myself after months & months of isolation. My state is just coming out a bit from this last lockdown and it's still just pathetic actually. Just so weary of the battle and it's endless complications, and however 'honed' we may be it's still no way for sentient beings to live is it?
I got a new t shirt with the slogan " I hate Covid! " in Chinese lettering the other day... it has a bat on the back?
I remain the eternal optimystic.
Oh I'm right there with you being sick of this. It cost me my business and my wife her job, and with it our insurance. It pushed the twins trial out 8 months and caused them more anguish and now their covid infections, as well as mine. Ive spent the last 9 months killing myself to keep my wife and kids sane and safe only to get the damn virus and have it ruin Xmas for everyone. I probably should rant more but because of covid I dont have the damn energy anymore. To put it bluntly, covid and 2020, as a whole, can take a long walk off a short pier.
Now, with all that said, looking forward, this will end as everything does. I dont know your living situation but it has brought my immediate family a lot closer and helped find new ways to interact with extended family when we cant be face to face. When this ends, it will make everyone cherish personal contact more than they ever have or ever would without having lived thru this. This made us, and our relationships, all stronger. It helped weed out the toxic relationships we wouldnt otherwise have broken off. It showed us what is really important that, in the fast paced rat race we call life, we have overlooked. When we look back on this, we will all see the torture we went thru but we will also see the new outlook and prioritization we have and be grateful that we made those personal changes when we did. And, if absolutely nothing else, it will show all of us that we can conquer anything because we are conquering the overwhelming right now.
If a year ago, I told you that you would've lived thru what you have the past 9 months and are still laughing at a stupid t-shirt with a bat on it(no offense at all, just putting it into perspective), you would've said you went crazy long ago. But you didn't. You're still strong as ever, weary as you may be.