Christmas 2021

Our Christmas this year was surprisingly nice. We ended up having four different small gift exchanges - one with part of my family, then part of my in-laws, then another part of my family, and finally another part of my in-laws - all indoors but masked, windows open, and relatively brief. I also saw a friend outdoors at their fire pit yesterday, and we're seeing another set of friends tomorrow for an outdoor activity.

We finally obtained some KN95 masks last week, and they're now our choice for most indoor activities. Leading up to Christmas it seemed like there was a lot more public mask use, but I was out on the morning after Christmas and hardly anyone was wearing one! Were people just trying to stay healthy so they could visit family for the holidays, and once it was over they went back to going out bare-faced?

There's also been a run on COVID tests (both home tests and the PCR type), with lots of people trying to get tested ahead of holiday visits, as well as more people contracting the Omicron variant and needing to get tested. I've heard many stories of close calls from friends who were almost exposed; one friend said they were looking forward to inviting one of their kid's friends over to play during the break, but every family they reached out to was quarantining. 

I just read this article this morning, after seeing a quote from it last night that really spoke to me. The whole thing sums up how frustrating the past 21 months have been. "This insistence on returning to life as normal came at an unfathomable cost — the loss of hundreds of thousands of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Aunts and great-aunts, uncles, and great uncles. Cousins. Friends. Coworkers and supervisors. And still, big chunks of the population refused to get vaccinated, refused to wear masks, insisted SARS-2 was a hoax, or was no more threatening than the flu."

Finally, the CDC has revised their recommendations about quarantining again, and it's causing a lot of confusion and upsetting people. I think just because it's surprising that quarantine time has been cut from 10 days to 5 for vaccinated asymptomatic people. Per the article above, it might be due to just a better understanding of the science of this disease, but my personal belief is that it's also an effort to get people back to work more quickly, because we're still so impacted by labor shortages. It's also led to some great memes...

Mixed Messaging

Despite increasing evidence that the omicron variant is hopefully less severe than previous ones (also due to more people either vaccinated or having been previously infected) and South Africa's wave receding already (they're saying the US is a couple weeks behind them), the messaging this week is so mixed.

On one hand: this is still a severe and deadly disease, and we also shouldn't overlook the effects of "long COVID."

On the other hand: we're not telling you not to see your families over the holidays, or reimposing any of the other measures we took last year, in fact more places are going ahead with reopening plans or reducing the amount of quarantine time they're requiring; everyone is probably going to catch this one, even the most careful people, don't beat yourself up over it. 

🤷🏼‍♀️

A week ago they were saying only 3% of new cases were omicron and delta was still the dominant strain in the US. Now this week I heard 73% of new cases here are omicron 😕

"There it is again, that funny feeling"

A very smart friend shared a Facebook post from a friend of hers, a healthcare journalist she trusts, on what he told his own friends and family after reporting on Omicron all month. His post included a link to this Washington Post article. Here's some choice selections from what he wrote:

First: Omicron is real, and the reports of it being “milder” appear mostly based on the generally mild breakthrough cases in vaccinated and previously infected people. 

If you've been vaccinated and boosted, there's reason to expect your omicron infection will lead to minimal symptoms.

If you haven't previously been infected, and you haven't been vaccinated, there's no reason to expect a "mild" case. 

Second: Many, many people who are vaccinated or previously infected are going to test positive in the next few weeks, given omicron’s sheer transmissibility and ability to evade antibodies. 

Every expert I've interviewed, including some of the nation's top health officials, has adjusted his or her mindset and now is mentally bracing to test positive after spending two years dodging the virus. "Breakthrough" cases are going to be normalized in a hurry, if they aren't already.

...

Federal officials are bracing for U.S. infections to skyrocket into January 2022, with numbers that could top 500,000 new cases per day. (The previous peak was 250,000 cases per day in January 2021.) Some experts predict daily case rates that could be much higher, because so many vaccinated Americans are going to test positive, although we may not capture all the data from people taking at-home tests.

Even if only a small percentage of those people need hospital care, it will tax a health system that is already straining under pandemic fatigue and treating cases linked to the older delta variant. It's also going to be a psychological blow after the past two years of fighting the pandemic, and businesses, families and others will surely be racing to adjust plans.

Officials hope that the peak of the omicron wave will be over by early February. 

...

If you are passing through an airport or train station, you are undoubtedly being exposed to someone with omicron at this point.

As someone who's been boosted and wears an N95 mask in public, I feel like I'm taking the best precautions I can. I'm also exhausted with the pandemic and had started to get back to hobbies like swimming, going to movies, having dinner with friends. 

But for me, omicron means I'm going to pause some of those activities, and I'm going to resume double-masking when I'm in public. Even if infections are inevitable, I don't want to help omicron along, especially until we get more data in the coming weeks. And I don't want to unwittingly get sick and carry an infection to family members this holiday season.

Relatives of ours had invited us to a Christmas Eve open house (we declined), but today they announced the event was cancelled because 3 attendees had already let them know they'd tested positive for COVID, and the way things are going they wanted to be cautious. Other family members of ours who'd been planning to get together on Christmas now won't be. We currently have 4 different Christmas gift exchanges planned on 12/23, 24, 25, and TBD, with different small groups of family members (each masked and/or outdoors), plus another outdoor activity and gift exchange next week with friends. Considering the small groups and precautions planned, I am still feeling OK about all this. 

ETA: that Facebook post is now itself a Washington Post article!

Feeling Familiar

With the rise of the omicron variant, it's feeling like early March 2020 again - lots of things temporarily shutting down or closing to the public "out of an abundance of caution."

Saturday Night Live, which has been filming in front of masked, vaccinated, live audiences for months, is not having an audience tonight and will use a limited cast and crew while filming their last show of the year. A Broadway show I follow on social media cancelled their Friday and Saturday performances because a member of the company tested positive for COVID and so they were testing everyone else, but expect to open next week. (I also saw a meme that said, "I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you live in New York, you have COVID.") Our local metro city's public health commissioner is urging residents to avoid in-person gatherings over the holidays. 

My employer, which hasn't really reopened our offices because moving to the next phase of the process involved meeting metrics that we were getting further away from, recently announced a change to these requirements. Now there won't be any metrics based on hospitalization rates, because this was too difficult to track (but our site leadership will be monitoring this locally), and the local infection rate for reopening is going from 5/100,000 to 15/100,000 (we're still at over 60/100,000, so not reopening anytime soon...)

This article shows how dramatic the spread of the omicron variant has been. "Cornell’s positivity rate soared from less than half of 1 percent to almost 5 percent in the span of a single week. When charted on a graph, a curve that steep doesn’t look like a curve at all. It looks like a vertical line." Cornell has a 97% vaccination rate. "Along with the Cornell outbreak, each of these data points suggests that the U.S. is about to experience what other countries are already starting to grapple with: exponential Omicron spread of the sort that will put America — which is currently enduring yet another big Delta wave — on track to reach previously unthinkable levels of COVID infection and transmission, shattering the country’s previous record."

ETA: The SNL musical guest tonight has apparently also been cancelled due to the limited amount of crew to support the show. (Very curious to see how this episode turns out!) And I forgot to mention that a number of NFL (and maybe also NBA?) games have been postponed due to too many players from some teams being on the "COVID protocol list."

Mask Update

mentatdgt for Pexels

I've noticed recently (maybe especially since the Omicron variant came about?) that more people are wearing masks out in public - in stores definitely, but even at outdoor events where there could be crowds. However, there's still a large number of people blissfully walking around with all their face holes out and open 🤷‍♀️

From the beginning of this pandemic, cloth and homemade masks were just supposed to be a stopgap until higher quality masks were more readily available. We now have some surgical masks, and though I hate the waste of disposable products, these are now my preferred choice. (I do use them probably longer than I should, in an effort to get as much life as possible from them.) I usually have a cloth mask with me as back-up, in case the disposable one should break or something. My husband usually grabs for the cloth ones first, though.

According to this article, we should be wearing higher quality masks by now if possible. "Your cloth mask is still OK but not necessarily the best protection you can have. ...There is some evidence that surgical face masks are potentially a bit better than cloth masks." But it sounds like ultimately the best mask is the one you'll wear (i.e. one that's comfortable for you). I've had a hard time with fitting masks to my face, but I don't find the paper ones uncomfortable at all now.