What's the coronavirus like where you are?

Seattle, WA

the good:

we've got one of the highest vaccination rates in the US (King County, where Seattle is located, currently has 78.2% of its total population fully vaccinated; 82.8% of 5 and older; and 87.4% of 16 and older)

when I go grocery shopping, I see ~95% or better mask usage.

the bad:

despite all that, our hospitals are still overwhelmed and we're burning out our healthcare workers.

Inside a Seattle-area hospital, the Covid grind wears on staff

the hospital they're writing about is Harborview, which is the level 1 trauma center for this entire region.

(if you're not familiar with the "trauma center" concept - if you get in a serious car crash, you would be taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital. if your injuries are severe enough, that local hospital might recommend transferring you, perhaps by airlift, to a bigger hospital that's better equipped and staffed to care for you. a "level 1" trauma center means the best of the best in terms of places you might get transferred to if you had really serious life-threatening injuries)

Harborview is not just the only level 1 trauma center in Washington - it also serves Alaska, Idaho, and Montana because they don't have any level 1 trauma centers of their own, only level 2 centers. this means that, conceivably, in normal non-pandemic times, if you had life-threatening traumatic injuries in Idaho or Montana or even Alaska, you might be transported to Harborview for better care.

since Harborview is the best place in the entire Pacific Northwest for trauma care, it also means that the people who work there are the best of the best, the most talented people in what is already an incredibly selective field.

and we're systematically burning out and demoralizing all of them.

even if you could wave a magic wand and end the entire pandemic, worldwide, in a single instant, right now...we will still be feeling the aftereffects of covid on our healthcare system for the next decade, in terms of how many experienced people have gotten burnt out and left, and how many relatively inexperienced people will be brought in to replace them.

on a personal level:

I've dodged covid, so far. it's possible that with the increased transmission of omicron, it may be inevitable, but I'm not going to give in to "lol everyone will get it eventually" and let my guard down. I'm vaxxed & boosted which means I'm likely to stay out of the hospital, but I want to see data about the prevalence of long covid among vaccinated people who had "mild" acute cases before I become cavalier about catching it for myself.

at work, I've had 2 people on my team of about 20 come down with symptoms in the past few weeks. we're 100% remote so at least there's no chance of spreading it that way. both of them have kids too young to be vaccinated which seems like the most likely infection route.

a third coworker is on a "take whatever time you need" semi-leave because they have a toddler, their daycare was cancelled, and his wife is a nurse. I can't possibly imagine how hard this is to juggle for them, or for the millions of other parents who are in similar situations - especially parents without the compassionate management and generous leave policies that the tech company I work at has.

my brother is still unvaccinated by choice. I think that given Omicron, him catching covid will be a matter of when, not if. hopefully he'll stay out of the hospital. I'm getting brunch this weekend (outdoors, by mutual agreement) with his eldest daughter, my niece. she's 19, fully vaccinated, and as far as I've heard very much sick of her father's bullshit. my mom, my sister, and I have all been doing our best to provide family support for her, in lieu of a father figure she trusts.

I'm in southern California and feel like the noose is tightening for me to finally get it. My mom's boyfriend, who lives next door, has it and is quarantining until this Saturday. He's unvaccinated (standard "We can't trust it" -> other justifications) but lucked out with only the horrible flu, and we lucked out with him staying away because he had also unfortunately just gotten over a cold. My friend and his wife who moved to Indiana caught it as well.

My university is doing its first two weeks of class online, which sucks because I have later classes and will have family doing stuff around me. My friend's community college just announced they're doing the same. I'm ready with my now medically rated mask with N95-comparable filters for when it opens again (just need to shave the beard).

Helloooo, Omicron!

Just when we think there's light at the end of the tunnel, the coronavirus comes up with a plot twist from Hell.

On the plus side, a lot of Aussies are vaccinated. Like I said earlier this week, 95% of Australians aged 16 and over have received their first dose of a COVID vaccine. My preferred news website has a little vaccine tracker on the home page. According to that:

• 91.7% of Australians aged 12 and over have had their second dose of a COVID vaccine;

• 25.4% of Australians aged 12 and over have had their third dose (booster) of a COVID vaccine.

(And children aged 5 to 11 have just started being vaccinated.)

We're one of the most highly vaccinated populations on the planet.

Meanwhile, Omicron is running wild. It got loose in our major cities just before Christmas and New Year, and no state government in the country saw fit to impose any restrictions over the holiday period at all. Naturally, many gatherings over the holidays turned into super-spreader events with this highly infectious variant.

It's reported that there are about 500,000 active coronavirus cases right now (about 2% of the Australian population) - and that number is known to be understated because our testing system has collapsed under the load, and many people just can't get tested.

All PCR tests have to be processed individually now, rather than in batches, because the positivity rate on tests right now is about 10x what it was at the height of previous outbreaks - so that's slowing things up. Last week, about 90,000 people in my state got notified that they had no test results, because their test samples had reached 7 days old without being processed, and could no longer be used. And rapid antigen tests are impossible to get. Noone planned ahead for the possibility that we might need a supply of rapid tests, so the limited supply sold out weeks ago, and new orders are taking a while to arrive in the country.

I read an article yesterday which said that about 1,000,000 workers are currently isolating, either because they have the coronavirus, or because they've been deemed a close contact of someone with the coronavirus. That's about 7.5% of our national workforce. Supermarket shelves are empty because there aren't enough truck drivers to deliver stock or enough staff to stack shelves. Farmers are throwing out fresh produce because there aren't enough truck drivers to pick it up. Restaurants, cafes, and pubs are closing because they don't have enough staff to open. And so on.

Also, thousands of healthcare workers are in isolation, just when the case load for hospitals is about to approach its highest level during the pandemic. There are over 1,100 people in hospital with COVID in this state alone, and that number will continue to increase over the next few weeks. My state government has just declared a "code brown" for all hospitals, meaning that staff can be recalled from leave, and non-essential surgery won't take place, and so on. The federal government is supplying defence personnel to drive ambulances because we've had two days in the past few weeks where the ambulance service simply couldn't meet demand, and people were waiting over an hour for an ambulance to arrive.

On the news last night, they showed a graph of mobility data which demonstrated that movement in Australia has dropped to levels similar to what was seen during our lockdowns. People are staying home in droves.

Life is fun!

Denver area-- Omicron is tearing through town like it is everywhere else. I (fully vaxxed and boosted with Moderns) finally caught it last week. Said vaccines did their job-- aside from a mild runny nose for a couple days, I was asymptomatic. The only reason I even found out I had it is, because my mother is immunocompromised and works in a long term care facility, whereas I work in a grocery store and take public transit, I take tests before going to see them as a precaution. I was legitimately surprised to see the positive line show up on the test.

It's torn through my store the past two weeks-- I was one of nine people out with it last week, and I'm sure this shortened 5-day quarantine period is doing zero favors on that front. I'm still horrified at just how many of my coworkers are still unvaxxed entirely though, even after losing two people to Delta in November and watching my own boss, an otherwise healthy dude in his early 30s, end up nearly dying, spending two weeks hospitalized, and only got off oxygen to the point of being able to come back to work two and a half months after he first got sick. It's disappointing, but it's really lowered my regard and respect for a lot of the people I work with, sadly.

I've been juxtaposing mine and my boss's very disparate results despite otherwise being in the same categories as a hopeful tool to encourage some of them to get vaxxed (as has my boss, who, while not an active antivaxxer before this, didn't get the shot out of that lingering 20s sense of medical invincibility), but I doubt it'll change things.

Add that the biggest local grocery chain is on strike right now, driving our business to 150-200% increases in sales, and it's getting ugly.

Only silver lining is that it's a somewhat less deadly variant that maxed on its infectivity stat vs Delta, but the collective fatigue and perpetual inaction on the part of the state (Polis seems like the Democratic Desantis some days as far as his covid policies go--he's just lucky that the Colorado Republicans are absolutely off the deep end and act like they're in Florida or Alabama) is just overwhelming sometimes.

I mean, how is it that it's January 2022 and only now is the state offering free KN95's to residents? They're a year and a half, if not two years, late to that game. At least we were the first state to start sending free at home test kits to residents, but our covid response only looks decent because other states are doing even worse than us.

These past two years have done more than almost anything else to amp up my misanthropic side, honestly. If it wasn't nearly impossible for someone without a degree to emigrate and utterly unaffordable for me to complete the degree I had started right now, I'd be seriously looking at it.

Our county has done fairly well through all of this with 76% of the eligible population having at least one dose of the vaccine and 66% being fully vaccinated. Our particular town is at 96% having at least one dose. I am unable to find data on completed or boosters for our town. We are seeing spikes in cases and have had more hospitalizations than we have seen previously (61 people hospitalized out of a total population of just under 300,000).

When I am in town I generally feel safer than when I go into the outskirts of our county. In town people are mostly masked up and socially distancing. When I get outside of our town it's hit or miss what I am going to find, but even then, I've found it much better than when I visited Florida and then rural Oregon last year where I had to listen to comments about my mask wearing.

My friend, who lives in same area as me, was telling me a few days ago that our state was planning quarantine camps for the unvaccinated, and nothing I said could convince her otherwise. They are putting their house on the market and looking to move Montana or Texas. So we still have that sort of crap here.

Edit: we're in western Washington state

Germany: all restaurants now require you to be boosted or have a test to be seated.

My sister and husband, 5-year-old nephew, 18-year-old nephew-in-law (is that a word?) that came from abroad are quarantined with my mother because nephew-in-law tested positive for covid. He's sad, but asymptomatic. They're scheduled to go back in a few days but they must all test negative for that to happen. I don't see that happening.

Our ICUs are 70% occupied.

I'm getting my third shot next week. A lot of people took one shot and never got the second. Presumably, these are the ones in ICUs.

My mother-in-law's home care nurse is presenting the symptoms, but she's still going to elderly MIL's house everyday. I strongly oppose that, but I have no say in the matter.

Northern CA, I know two people being treated for COVID, one on full vent, who I don't expect to come home, and one on home oxygen after being discharged due to the hospital being over-capacity. This is the first time I've personally known anybody with severe disease in the last two years.

I stopped going into the office when half the team I'm on came back with COVID from various hospital work sites around the US, most notably Florida. All but one of us wears masks in public religiously, but we're traveling for "essential" work. Current policy is again "if you can work remotely, do so".

We're all vaccinated and boosted, in a tiny region of Northwestern Michigan that's near the highest vaccination percentage in the U.S.

It's been clear for a while that a) Omicron is hella contagious, b) no vaccine will completely prevent a large enough exposure from causing some degree of illness, and c) cloth/surgical masks aren't going to cut it. [I AM NOT SAYING "DON'T GET VACCINATED"! Defense-in-depth, FFFS, get vaccinated, avoid obvious indoor exposures, and wear N95.]

The tourists and families were traveling again for the holidays, and it's just an endless cycle of opportunities for viruses to migrate.

Latest stats I've seen on ICU bed occupancy in the US are at 80+% in most states, anywhere from 30 - 50% attributable directly to COVID-19. Locally, it's at about 83%, 35% COVID-19 cases. That doesn't say much about people who've had, say, heart attacks and "incidental" COVID-19 positivity.

It's the worst it's ever been where I am. Staffing is very bad: the government is asking for VOLUNTEERS (clinic and non-clinic) for test centres and vaccine clinics and hospitals. This is especially ridiculous given recent drama with negotiation of nurse contracts and the Conservative premier trying to brag about a budget surplus (that he got BASICALLY entirely from Federal COVID funds that hadn't been deployed yet).

Additionally, my mother recently sustained a bad injury to her leg in a fall and had to go to the ER. She was left on a bed in a hallway for nine hours and she was completely unable to walk. I could not go see her and it was incredibly stressful. I know healthcare workers are doing what they can, it's just... frustrating.

Honestly not super sure. I just know it's really bad. I was paying attention to the numbers, but I stopped because it was bad for my mental health. Living in Florida kind of sucks right now.

Since getting back after the holidays, I rarely leave the house other than bike rides. So I don't really know what it's like, other than how it looks on the Internet.

I think the local school went remote last week, but they're open now.

Yeah, things are just going awesome here in the west Atlanta exurbs. Total population vaccinated in my county? 25.4%. Percent of population >65 years old and fully vaccinated? 47.4%. Great job, guys. Way to look out for your neighbors!

Update: there's a chance that I got covid, I'm presenting all the symptoms to a high degree and this definitely doesn’t feel like the flu. There's not much I can do but to treat the symptoms, drink lots of water and wait for the shit storm to pass. If I go to the hospital they'll just send me home, and I'll be taking resources away from people that are much worse. Thank God I have my girlfriend, she's really taking care of me. Even getting out of bed requires great effort, and eating with an extremely sore throat is no fun.

I’m in South Carolina. I think y’all can draw your own conclusions from that statement.

Edit to add: I picked up a P100 half-face respirator a few weeks ago from Grainger.

Based in the UK - Vaccination rates are great, but the death toll is not. Awful to learn that while everyone obeyed the rules, those that set them partied away (that list may now be out of date) - even on the night of the Queen's husband's funeral. We're moving away from 'Plan B' measures, but it seems unlikely that this is the end of the virus. Very grateful for the NHS.