Covid 19 - Thoughts and feelings

[moredhel]

Best wishes for all of you Annuil.

[Jitter]

Annuil, do you have your results yet?

[Annuil]

Since I did not receive a call from our local healthcare, I am negative. Also, thanks for your support, guys! Really appreciate it 

[midwestmutt]

Take care Annuil. Double up on the sanitary protocols.

[Annuil]

Take care Annuil. Double up on the sanitary protocols.

Yup, it’s kind of crazy now, as far as using the bathroom on the opposite side of the house and thinking  every time before touching anything :'D

Thanks!

[wavewright62]

Whew, good for you Annuil!
The extra-infectious strain from the UK is here in NZ, as well as another from South Africa, but thus far neither has penetrated managed isolation into the community. Thus far.  A lot of folk have gotten complacent, which worries me greatly, but Christmas and New Year's are now at least two weeks gone.  That gives me some ease.

[Jitter]

Our situation is very much like yours, wave! We have about 50 cases of the UK variant, all related to the same chain of infections and presumably contained, and two cases of the SA one. And it seems the holidays have not resulted in a peak in infections. Vaccinations are going slowly, but are ongoing.

Right at this moment I feel like a bit of a cold coming on, we'll see what's what. I get this way a lot and usually it doesn't bother me. Now it does.

Annuil, good to hear you are negative! But like you mentioned, it's an inevitable "at least for now" situation. We are rooting for you!

[JoB]

Heh. I have to admit that I had not yet noticed the new upside of my habit to make a grocery list beforehand.

[Grade E cat]

I needed to check a fanfic I had written in early 2018 for the name of a minor OC for whom I found a spot in my current story. The opening lines of one the two possible stories in which he could have appeared wound up accidentally prophetic, it looks like:

"Helena couldn’t believe this had happened. She never thought that she would be hunting for beasts in Mora. What made her the sickest was how so many had gotten inside the Outer Mora walls in the first place: a handful of sheltered adult non-immunes convinced that the Rash was a fabrication and an excuse to restrict their liberty of movement. "

[Annuil]

Grade E Cat, that sounds like an awfully familiar talk... all this sounds too familiar... Like, start rereading SSSS and you'll understand those people way better than a few years ago, before it all took place in our world. Sometimes we discuss with my family the possibility that COVID was a human-created virus, because of how it finds weak spots in people's bodies and attacks them and how wonderfully it managed to get rid of everyone pass the retiring age. 

[Yastreb]

I'm an aviation enthusiant from way back, and I was watching a video of an old and respected workhorse that I remember flying on back in my younger days, a Fokker F-27 Friendship, landing at Blenheim Airport in New Zealand. It moved me to comment on the Friendship and the Electra, another turboprop from that time, and then I added this rumination (emphasis added).

"[The] only planes in the sky where I live (apart from helicopters and Cessna-types) are short-haul turboprops like the Saab 340 and the Fairchild Metroliner, and it's going to stay like that during the pandemic. It's almost like the jet engine hasn't been invented."

[JoB]

"It's almost like the jet engine hasn't been invented."

[lives (and thus home-offices) near a military airbase and cannot quite confirm the impression]

[PaperArtillery]

Weird observation, but after I've been stuck at home after I finally got around to catching it (it kicked my butt for a week or so, but the aftereffects are also quite suck even weeks later), it's kind of refreshing to see the whole area also stuck at home by ice and snow (Virginia, USA).

I'm pretty incensed about the callous manner in which people have been insisting on schools and businesses reopening before teachers and medical personnel have had a chance to be even 90% vaccinated, so I'm kind of a "this is a sign from the gods that you're being idiots" with all the winter weather forcing schools to close again. Or maybe I'm just petty. Heh.

The United States has been mishandling this mess from the start, and the new SA variant just reared its head in Connecticut. Oh boy.

Side note: it's kind of mirthlessly funny to read the prologue to SSSS right now, given...well, Covid. Rant over.

[Annuil]

I cannot say I blame US, at least it’s doing better than Russia, who at first made weird laws about literally the amount of steps you can make outside of your house (I am exaggerating, but just a tiny bit) and then they just said that we defeated covid (just because), so we can reopen now... For some reason people still are getting sick and dying, the hospitals are filled to the top, but no! Covid is gone, right!.. At least the US laws about covid are 80% reasonable (the rest 20% of them could have been made better). Sorry, I am just scared for my family and friends back in Russia (I am currently living in Michigan, USA). Laws in Virginia may be different from the laws of Michigan, but altogether it doesn’t seem to be that bad, it could have been worse.
Butter good!

[PaperArtillery]

I cannot say I blame US, at least it%u2019s doing better than Russia, who at first made weird laws about literally the amount of steps you can make outside of your house (I am exaggerating, but just a tiny bit) and then they just said that we defeated covid (just because), so we can reopen now... For some reason people still are getting sick and dying, the hospitals are filled to the top, but no! Covid is gone, right!.. At least the US laws about covid are 80% reasonable (the rest 20% of them could have been made better). Sorry, I am just scared for my family and friends back in Russia (I am currently living in Michigan, USA). Laws in Virginia may be different from the laws of Michigan, but altogether it doesn%u2019t seem to be that bad, it could have been worse.
Butter good!

I must kindly beg to disagree. The US has badly mismanaged the whole situation because "MUH FREEDOMS" not to wear a mask/social distance/stop partying. Without getting too political, all I can say is that there's been entirely too much ignorance on the part of policymakers who are just all about the economy and not, y'know, human lives, despite repeated insistence by scientists and medical professionals conflicting with "let's reopen and save our corporate profits". It's especially painful for me because, as a FEMA disaster liaison for the Virginia Army National Guard almost 10 years ago, this is stuff we came up with contingency plans for and they were never implemented.

EDIT: That's not to say that Russia is doing any semblance of a good job. I trust their reporting of cases about as far as I could throw a bottle of vodka, which is to say, not at all, because I wouldn't throw a bottle of vodka.

It's just so many levels of sad, and people are dying. The county I currently live in in Virginia (not my birth/hometown, I moved to Richmond area) has a ton of cases but few deaths and so people are shrugging it off, but also this county has a fairly wealthy white population that can afford care. Other parts of the state, and the US in general, are not doing so great.