Coronavirus

Oh gawd, I had first run in with Federal District Court back in December, and being on call for 6 days (Monday to Monday) was soooo stressful and annoying. I didn't ultimately get called, but I think I would have preferred just coming in for a day rather then be strung along like that. It didn't help I was going out of town on the Wednesday after that second Monday, so if I ended up getting called that last day it could have really messed that up. So then as it was stretching on, I had to decide to roll the dice or "postpone" my service after having gotten most of the way through my window. Terrible experience.

Mask usage is definitely up at the gym, with about 20% wearing masks. More people, too, so I suspect that the increased mask use was mainly due to cautious people who weren't coming to the gym at all lately. Now they are masked and at the gym because Valentine's Day is coming up and they are frantic to get back in shape.

The guy from MPR News who's been reliably churning out testing/cases/hospitalization graphs on Twitter all these months recently asked for and was given wastewater treatment plant data from the MetCouncil, so now we can track the amount of virus in the metro area's poop--like the Boston region and others have been using successfully for awhile now. This is a great leading indicator of what the trajectory of this thing will be, because the test processing backlogs are leading to long delays in when cases formally get added to the total (sometimes up to 2 weeks after the fact), making the datasets very messy and requiring a lot of cleanup to generate trendlines that are close to accurate.

JoelCFC25 wrote: . . . because the test processing backlogs are leading to long delays in when cases formally get added to the total (sometimes up to 2 weeks after the fact), making the datasets very messy and requiring a lot of cleanup to generate trendlines that are close to accurate.

Please tell me you typed it this way on purpose.

Shellhead wrote: Now they are masked and at the gym because Valentine's Day is coming up and they are frantic to get back in shape.

"Hey, hon', you know what would be fun for Valentine's Day this year? Blindfolds."

An ongoing challenge during this pandemic is the human ability to disregard rationality in order to do whatever we want. I had hoped that gamers would be wiser on average, but that turns out not to be the case.

A few days ago, an old friend invited me on Facebook to play board games yesterday. I wasn't interested, because pandemic, but took a closer look at the details and became horrified. It was originally going to be a small gathering at someone's house, maybe a half dozen people. But my friend (who is not the host) decided to invite 25 more people, including me. Hard pass.

Since mid-December, an old friend has been back in town. One of his parents died and left a big mess, so he came back home to clean it up before selling the family house. So I have been playing board games with him every Saturday. Yesterday, I gradually noticed that he was pretty sick. Persistent cough, runny noise, sore throat, etc. I'm irritated that he came to my house sick during a pandemic, and he also didn't get tested because he thinks that it's just a cold.

Got my free tax-paid Covid test kits in the mail.

Mine are supposed to show up today too.

ChristopherMD wrote: Got my free tax-paid Covid test kits in the mail.

To be fair, for people like Jeff Bezos they are free.

My county dropped our mask mandate again. This time my job also made masks optional for vaccinated employees. First time since we reopened that that has been the case.

I work for a large national chain so presumably similar things are happening across the US.

Hospitalization is way down in my county. Supposedly we are in a period of respite. I think I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

Ah_Pook wrote: My county dropped our mask mandate again. This time my job also made masks optional for vaccinated employees. First time since we reopened that that has been the case.

Same here. My grocery store changed its sign from “masks required” to “masks encouraged for unvaccinated individuals.” I went shopping without a mask for the first time in over two years. Felt weird.

Despite mask mandates being dropped here, I’m still wearing one and it looks like a good number of people are, too.

It’s partially to help protect myself and family, it’s partially a sense of social responsibility.

But this pandemic taught me a terrible lesson: the government, including health agencies, is very vulnerable to political, monetary and social pressure that puts at risk the public health.
It’s something I feel incredibly let down by.

I'm still masking for sure. It's about half and half where I work atm. Our customer base is more like 80-20 non masks.