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Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of January 16
This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
I expected a big January spike, just like the past two years, so I’m glad that didn’t seem to happen. It’s hard to follow the numbers now because rapid testing is so much more widespread and not reported, but even from an on-the-ground perspective, things look a lot better.
This time last year we were being slammed by omicron and my school almost closed due to a lack of staff. This year we had only a few post-Christmas-break cases. We’re not seeing anywhere near the absences that we were last year.
That said, I will say that this has been a bit of a disgusting year for regular illness. I don’t know if it’s because I’m more attuned to notice it because of COVID, but on any given day it feels like ~20% of each class has cold symptoms. Lots of sniffling, coughing, blowing noses, etc. It’s been like that all year and hasn’t shown any signs of stopping. We’ve also had a good number of flu cases too, but thankfully those have been mostly mild.
Mom got her covid shot on Friday, and is still dealing with some of the symptoms. Her run with the disease in April '20 was nasty, and even now she probably isn't fully recovered, (merely human instead of superhuman levels of daily stamina, much to her annoyance). Her doctor twisted her arm to get this latest vaccination, and she's swearing off further vaccinations at this point, since she's still on considerable amounts of ibuprofen to function, going on five days later. Can't say I would make the same decision, but I can't say that I wouldn't either if I were in her shoes.
Edit: Additionally, our work is hiring a new employee with a vaccine exemption. There may be enough hoops that it's just not going to work out, but we already work on a campus without a vaccine mandate, so I guess it's not really that big a deal anyway.