Coronavirus

I’ve been using these for almost a year. Durable, comfortable.

www.hyperlitemountaingear.com/collection...ce-mask-pack-of-five

Last year, I went five months without a haircut. I trimmed my hair at home a bit with scissors, and waited almost a month after our state allowed barbers and hair stylists to reopen under strict safety requirements. Getting my hair cut is now probably the safest thing that I do outside of the safety of my own home. Before each appointment, they request an appointment confirmation and then send me a reminder of their mask requirement and other safety protocols.

When I arrive, they only let me in if I am wearing a mask. Just inside the door is a check-in station on a card table. First, I must pass my hands under a motion-activated hand sanitizer dispenser, and sanitize my hands. Then I take a pen from the "clean" container and check off responses on a two-page form asking about my health and willingness to comply with their safety procedures. After signing, I place my pen in the "used" container, and presumably those pens go in the trash. 2/3 of the chairs in the waiting area are marked off with tape, and since I always take the last appointment of the day, there is nobody else in the waiting area anyway. During the haircut, I wear a mask with loops for the ears, as required, so that I can pull off the loops on one side and hold the mask to my face while the stylist is trimming around an ear. When I pay at the front counter, the credit card device has a thin disposable plastic screen over the buttons.

Just got my second pfizer shot, which is supposed to be a real bastard. We'll see.

May have actually gotten a direct benefit from the change to a federal adminstration that wants to actually do something on coronavirus. On this second shot, our county site was staffed by a significant number of FEMA personnel in addition to the crew of national guardsmen and county health officials from my first. My first shot took almost two hours and was hopelessly disorganized, second shot was in and out in thirty minutes.

I'm not anywhere near a priority group so I just sit back and watch. My state's vaccine rollout has been a complete clusterfuck. Over a thousand doses wasted already. No centralized appointments so you just call around to the different locations I guess. Also heard a lot of people in the early groups have been turning it down.

Like I said up thread, ours is just a county by county free for all, so I feel you.

Best thing AZ has done is procured several large stadiums in the Phoenix metro area and run them all night vaccinating people as they drive through. It's still a tremendous equity problem since many of the older people who really need the vaccine do not have a car, but certainly no worse than using a fucking online eventbright scheduler like our county.

The vaccination program in the UK is running with afterburners on, so good news as I'm coming up to four months of lockdown (not visiting or having visits from people) and March is also looking like a lockdown month - and I am sick of it.

About 17% of the population of Minnesota has received at least one dose of the vaccine, and our infection levels are back down to what they were in September. Just this week, the state rolled out a new website where people can request notification of when they can get vaccinated. For now, I think that I will wait. I am eager to get vaccinated, but I want to get vaccinated properly instead of just getting a first dose without getting the follow-up shot according to the recommended schedule. I am hopeful that I can get fully vaccinated sometime this spring.

Shellhead wrote: About 17% of the population of Minnesota has received at least one dose of the vaccine,

Washington Post has you at 13.4% so I'm curious where you're getting you number. Maryland shows 11.7% on that same list, 42nd of the 50 states, leaving us firmly in whiskey-tango-foxtrot territory. This is a high tax/high service state and we're in the bottom quintile.

Add to that news from the Baltimore Sun that my county of nearly 600,000 people is allotted 485 doses per day. At current delivery rate it would be April 2024 for everyone to get one dose. Long story short, something doesn't add up.

All other counties in Maryland are in stage 1C, we are still in stage 1B. U.S. Naval Academy (in my county) changed the email address of their entire staff to a .edu extension and then used the addresses to get everyone vaccinated, including young healthy people in their IT department. Don't know if that came out of our allotment, but if it did that knocks us back several days.

I appreciate that the Naval Academy pukes all see themselves as America's aristocracy and part of the anointed few, but seriously, their IT department? They all work from home. One of their former employees passed the word to us that this had happened, and frankly I hope it gets around. Couldn't happen to a more self-entitled bunch of people.

Sagrilarus wrote:

Shellhead wrote: About 17% of the population of Minnesota has received at least one dose of the vaccine,

Washington Post has you at 13.4% so I'm curious where you're getting you number.

Good question. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune made the 17% claim in this morning's paper, so I took that at face value, even though the number sounded high.

www.startribune.com/minnesota-hits-1-mil...ine-doses/600024934/

But just now, I tried to verify that number with the state health department and Minnesota Public Radio (our state version of NPR), and both offered the same lower figure as the Washington Post.

mn.gov/covid19/vaccine/data/index.jsp

www.mprnews.org/story/2021/02/19/latest-on-covid19-in-mn

This is nothing new, broken record stuff, but I was in the store this evening---yes, 9pm grocery shopping on a friday night woo hoo---and there are still people trying to sneak in the store and not wear their mask that they have to police. A year later with half a million lives snuffed out, and some guy tries to sneak through and they have to threaten to kick him out before he puts his mask on.

My spouse got her second shot today, as well, since she is also a professor. So next week... I mean technically we can do whatever we want while still masking up and following the city's current rules. Maybe we'll... go to breakfast? I don't even know, I just feel lucky and am glad to have those days staring at the students who decided to show up to class with great fear behind me.

At least as of this morning the StarTribune is showing numbers that perfectly match the State of MN's dashboard.

My in-laws got their 2nd dose on Thursday and they are wasting no time in packing up and driving to Florida to escape the rest of winter here. They said we're welcome for spring break if we want to try (not expecting we'd want to risk it, but still offered). We aren't comfortable flying yet, so the sun and sand will have to wait another year. We booked a cabin for a couple nights up on the North Shore, so the kids will get their first experience of Lake Superior and some hiking in state parks instead.

The weather in Texas has bumped Maryland into the 4th quintile. We're now #40. Hoorah. (Note the lower case.)

My in-laws got their 2nd dose on Thursday and they are wasting no time in packing up and driving to Florida to escape the rest of winter here.

There have been great articles on the fact that those that have been vaccinated are not immune, and are almost assuredly still vectors for the disease. So the "we're welcome for Spring Break" part of your response is one of the things concerning me most.

Members of my extended family are getting vaccines and their opinions on things are changing on a knife-edge, i.e., we're vaccinated so we can go back to normal and you unvaccinated people should not kill our buzz with your "we're still at risk" bullshit. My Ma is planning an extended family get-together. All the literature is indicating that she is a risk just like everyone else to the people around her, including those who are vaccinated. They're all still infectious.

So we're moving towards a very definable Haves and Have-Nots scenario for the next six months or even a year. This virus won't be ground out of the third world for a decade. In Maryland, it's likely to last into Autumn at our current rate of delivery.

"I'm vaccinated so I can do what I want" is going to be the official get-out-of-jail-free card of 2021.

I believe we're in the "if you're vaccinated you probably shed a lot less but not 0 virus but we haven't done the studies yet so won't say for sure" phase on asymptomatic spread with vaccination.

I'm going out to breakfast next Monday with my wife and going to Costco and the meadery at the end of this week while I'm there. Weird feeling.

The vaccine is believed now to help substantially in reducing the spread.

www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/...-israeli-study%3famp

Yeah the early estimates were perhaps 40% less infectious, now combined with a 60% more infectious strain taking over the country (United States). So 0.6 * 1.6 (both completely back-of-the-envelope numbers) is . . . 0.96 as infectious.

There's still a long walk in front of us. Half of our country has shown an impressive level of don't-care in the past year, so I think it's going to be rough terrain.