Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

Oh absolutely, don't get me wrong. I'm not worried about myself or my immediate family at this point, but I am, to put it mildly, disappointed that my father in law, who is both over 80 and had a very scary brush with pneumonia a few years ago, is still waiting to even get an appointment on the calendar.

US currently averaging administering about 1.3 mill doses per day. be nice if we can get that up to 2 mill, but that's probably a long shot for the immediate future.

A few states (like Florida) have seen their averages go down in recent weeks. not sure if whether lack of doses or something else

Apparently, the issue in Illinois is that the doses being delivered week after week are still decreasing.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/02/biden-administration-will-start-sending-covid-vaccines-directly-to-pharmacies-as-it-ups-shipments.html

I thought the Illinois deliveries were supposed to be going up? By 10K or so?

Even my mom, a retired 75-year old physician who is still licensed in two states (PA and DE) and wants to volunteer administering the vaccine, hasn't been able get the vaccine herself. Yet my 35-year old cousin in DC managed to get vaccinated, partly for bullshit reasons but partly for just being in the right place at the right time (which is kind of bullshit, too). My hope is this will be like the toilet paper shortage, a month or two of limits and frustration followed by a return to full shelves. Fingers crossed, I guess.

Sorry JiC, certainly not singling you out here, but when you look at the data, it very clearly isn't going to be "a month or two". There are still some very, very significant problems to be addressed in the supply and distribution chains.

I'm annoyed that people keep talking as if we are just around the corner from a magical land where vaccines are being jabbed left and right, on every corner, and I think it's getting people's hopes up to an unrealistic degree and taking unnecessary chances and pushing for reopenings that don't make sense at all.

I’d like to clarify — everyone should get the vaccine as soon as they can. Right place right time? Great, get stuck. It’s the public bragging I have beef with. Glad Brony B is vaccinated, don’t need to know how satisfied he is with it and himself. That’s also just a personal preference for privacy in general and an allergy to public boasting.

And I'm not saying ilxors are being unreasonable about things, but I've seen several friends and family, whom I'd assumed to know better and be doing better, saying things on social media that are effectively, "well since the vaccine is almost here we are more comfortable taking risk X, Y or Z". And again, these risks are all highly personal, calculated things for which I'm not going to fault anyone else for taking if it makes sense to them, but I do see an element of faith in an imminent vaccine that isn't yet backed up by the data.

Oh, I fully expect it to take months and months, I'm just hoping for a surprise. Biden has been president for, what, two weeks? Let's see where the power of the office plus actually taking things seriously might get us.

taking a bunch of risks because the vaccine might be coming makes zero sense even if it's only a week away, let alone months

yeah, generally vaccines don't help if you contract the virus before getting them. you don't avoid the flu if you expose yourself to someone with the flu and then get the vaccine 5 days later.

taking a bunch of risks because the vaccine might be coming makes zero sense even if it's only a week away, let alone months

100%, which is why it annoys me and makes me worry about more spikes in the near future. But I think Biden's rosy, "everyone who wants one will have it by summer" is feeding this idea that we're much closer that we actually are. Fwiw, the NYTime's tracker says that if the current rate holds, we will hit 70% on September 11, 2021.

I guess I'm confused about how people choosing to do risky stuff is the fault of Biden messaging

we can always find a way to blame centrist democrats

see ilx handbook page five

I have been assured (sans actual appointment) by my GP that I'll get my first dose within the next 12 days. My dad has an appointment next week.

Just the 3 months or so until we're kicking a pub door in together *

*obviously UK and Scot govt will have already opened everything long before then

xpost - Well, here's a specific example from a work colleague that gets to what I'm talking about. They mentioned in a meeting about how they were signing their kids up for an indoor sports league that starts in March since "the kids really miss sports and the vaccine is here". A few people expressed surprised and asked if they had gotten the jabs and they said no but "enough people will have it by March" that they will feel comfortable with indoor sports again.

And very likely they may not end up deciding to send their kids if things haven't improved enough by then, but that really felt like a decision driven more by a hopefulness about the vaccine than a more data based decision.

thing to keep in mind re: 'if current rate holds' = they're saying if the vaccination rate stays what it is now, which seems unlikely given the expansions mentioned in the article I shared above. we've definitely seen a non-negligible national increase over the last two weeks.

I agree that's an extremely stupid assumption for them to make, but again, it's not clear how that is the fault of messaging on the vaccine rollout.

xxp

is any official actually saying anything along the lines of "a whole bunch of unsafe activities will totally be safe again by March"?

No, not that I'm aware. And, again, I'm not defending that example, it just stuck with me. I would not make the same call, at all. Maybe I'm not explaining it well, but I just feel like there is (understandably, after all we've been through) this sunny outlook that things are just on the cusp of being "normal" again and it absolutely is feeding some folks' decision making. I'm not pinning it on any specific comment or statement, I'm just hearing and reading a sense of optimism and imminence that I'm not seeing reflected in the data.

If anything I have seen the worst case scenario being propagated. It's all about the underpromising.

Our high school, which just implemented very limited hybrid, announced that all faculty and staff will start getting vaccinated next week. That implies sourcing must be getting better.

if J&J gets approved for tertiary usage, that can also help as even though it comes with a lower efficacy, it is largely effective (supposedly) in reducing severity of the disease, and some protection better than none.

it's gonna be rough for a lot longer tho obv.

Yeah, it's going to be awhile. I think that's the heart of my annoyance right now because I'm seeing a lot of folks talking about a "more normal" summer or fall, but I've effectively written off 2021 completely and I'm just hoping we can have a "somewhat more normal" summer of 2022.

My parents, both just over 65, won’t get theirs before fuck knows when because lol Quebec, whereas all of their friends back in Romania are already vaccinated.

The US is going to be supply constrained to something like 1.3-1.5m/day for a couple of months. It supposedly goes up to 2m/day after that (factories come on line in spring). But the big thing that will get us up to double that rate and herd immunity much faster is approval for the single dose J&J (this year some time) or the easy/cheap AZ (lol maybe never).

x-posts

I might have said before, I quite like the idea of "writing off 2021" but not in an absolutely negative way.

More, I find the idea of "It'll be over in 12 weeks", "We'll be fine by Summer", "Christmas? Everything will be smashing!" a bit draining.

I sort of need to find a way of being "This is what we've got - Find a way of staying okay."

That said, I don't mean that to sound passive or as if I don't want Boris Johnson and pals to be held to fucking account.

Which vaccine are they using in Romania?

So far, Pfizer-BioNTech. Moderna doses will also be administered very soon.

I think a lot of my despair atm is coming from the cognitive dissonance of seeing how far out we are with the vaccine hitting any meaningful landmarks at the same time as restrictions are being lifted left and right. Schools are opening back up! Indoor dining is a-ok again!

Could we just order the mRNA from our local oligonucleotide suppliers and then eat it?

I think opening schools more may be somewhat defensible, but there have been multiple data points just in the last week showing that indoor dining even with distancing restrictions is just a bad idea

Yeah, I know schools are a much thornier proposition right now, so maybe that wasn't the best example. The indoor dining thing absolutely kills me though.

whenever i see re-opening announcements i get so angry

it just makes me despair, like it’s been this long & we are nowhere bc nothing stays closed for more than a few weeks

I'm sympathetic to these concerns, obviously but....one thing I want to reiterate is that until there's a stimulus better than a one time $1400 payment, it's the only way some people can survive.

if we issue the 2k a month like Bernie suggests, doors can be closed and employees can not feel utterly pressured to go in.

my brother right now has to work at Universal because under the current enhanced unemployment rules, he would be deemed 'ineligible' for unemployment in FL if he was able to go to work but refused to due to COVID fears, and even if he did qualify for it, the $300 a week on top of the paltry amount FL caps their unemp at ($275/month, which he would only qualify for a small fraction of due to the ridiculous way it's calculated) would be a big paycut.

but he'd stop working if he just...got 2k a month and they closed his park so he wouldn't have to worry about losing the career he's fought for , for over a decade. so I hope Bernie keeps hammering this idea of his.

so do i, but it isn't going to do anything.

remember, politicians don't consider their constituents at all.

So far, Pfizer-BioNTech. Moderna doses will also be administered very soon.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, February 3, 2021 3:06 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

thx. guess that makes sense inside the EU. i was interested to see serbia is getting sinopharm. i wonder if sputnikv is in use outside the former USSR.

some extremely 2021 pics here https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2021/02/photos-vaccine-centers-cathedrals-stadiums-and-parking-lots/617915/

p.s. i read every single one of these stories about people using up vaccine after refrigeration systems break or whatever. i find them weirdly uplifting.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/NYTCUzk_VJMm8-E-QSOYo8Ga62E=/900x600/media/img/photo/2021/02/vaccination/a21_AP21030002938283/original.jpg

The Josephine County Sheriff's deputy, Nicole Letona, receives a COVID-19 vaccine administered by Dr. David Candelaria and Leah Swanson, a Josephine County emergency-preparedness coordinator, on Highway 199 near Hayes Hill, Oregon on January 28, 2021. Oregon health workers who got stuck in a snowstorm on their way back from a COVID-19 vaccination event went car to car injecting stranded drivers before several of the doses expired. #

thx. guess that makes sense inside the EU. i was interested to see serbia is getting sinopharm. i wonder if sputnikv is in use outside the former USSR.

The contrast with the Republic of Moldova, most of which used to be part of Romania pre-WW2, is quite striking:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2021/jan/28/here-in-europes-poorest-country-we-have-no-vaccine-to-argue-over

Sputnik V was approved in Hungary btw.

i've been to moldova. took the night train from bucharest to chisinau. the bit where they lift the train cars of the axles (trucks??) and put them on new axles because the railway gague changes to stop stalin (or hitler?) invading was a very clear reminder we weren't in the EU any more.

as long as they keep upping the number of people being vaccinated daily, I'm happy... I might get one next week or three months from now, but life will resume when hospitalizations drop and almost everyone is vaccinated, which will take a few months no matter what my place in line ends up being

Just to lighten up the thread for a moment, I was watching the local news and heard a restaurant owner say (re: reopening of restaurants in NJ), "Just after the Great Depression, you got the Roaring Twenties"... so yeah, that's the level of people we're dealing with hereabouts.

one of my favorite shutdowns of platitudes like that was in Bad News Bears

"Come on guys, Rome wasn't built in a day!"
"Yeah, it took several hundred years"

lol for real though i did kind of think about how the levels of sheer unbridled hedonism that are going to erupt in 2022 might have had an antecedent in the roaring (19)20s which followed directly on from the spanish flu (tho i'm sure i'm quite late to the party in drawing this connection)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVjlEA2VBes

burning of Vader's corpse = COVID

https://i.imgur.com/sdWm4py.png

me and the boys after covid

sorry that's kind of dark

i've been to moldova. took the night train from bucharest to chisinau. the bit where they lift the train cars of the axles (trucks??) and put them on new axles because the railway gague changes to stop stalin (or hitler?) invading was a very clear reminder we weren't in the EU any more.

Y’all are mighty sure the vaccine is gonna make Covid go away, and that life will return to old normal.