I finished a 6 day trip that saw me cross the Atlantic four times, and spend time in Belgium and NYC. When I cleared customs in Chicago they had people handing out free Covid take home covid tests and encouraging people to use them 3-5 days after they got home. I thought that distribution plan was brilliant and targeted.

So I can buy a plane ticket to Chicago and back to get an at home test? Decisions, decisions.

Only at the international terminal. So just fly to Europe and back.

What would be the cheapest and quickest? Would Canada work?

Probably would, yeah. Seemed like NYC had testing sites set up on every corner, and almost all of them had lines. When I was in Munich in November, that's the way it was there. The longest lines were for Covid testing. I did NOT see that in Brussles. In fact, Brussles, was very different from Amsterdam. One is in heavy lockdown, the other only has mask mandates and required vax cards to eat inside, but nothing is really closed.

My very antivax in laws both have covid. Mild symptoms so far, we will see how this goes.

Can you buy the self tests in pharmacies in usa? We have some issues this week as everybody wanted tests before the Christmas Eve but in general you can buy a test for 8€ in any pharmacy and test yourself in 20 mins.

I can say that Omicron was very soft on me, 1.5 bad days and fine after that, either because it’s less dangerous or also because I had the vaccine and booster before it.

The bad news is that despite me being self isolated in a room, my wife tested positive 3 days after me also with self tests, our kids negative so far. But for my wife its even softer than for me, just headache and throat pain, not even fever. Of course the problem is that when you test positive and isolate, you have probably been infecting others for a couple of day already, that is why this is impossible to stop.

My guess and hope is that this is the future of covid post vaccine, a mild infection like the flu that we all will get from time to time without too much troubles except for the people with already bad conditions or too old, exactly like the flu that also kills thousands every year.

Covid won’t disappear and we need to get used to it once it’s not that mortal anymore.

Regarding the antivax… I wouldn’t force them but I would ask them to be tested negative every day to be able to go to work, to bars or any public place and in countries like Spain where the great health system is free or better said, paid by all us with our tax, I would force them to sign an statement renouncing to any free treatment of covid if they get it so it won’t be us vaccinated to pay their free decisions. Freedom yes always but with the responsibility attached to your own decisions.

You can buy the self-tests if they're available, last few days near me they have been out.

Yay Icy and family!

I bought a bunch of home tests on Amazon a few weeks ago. You can get them at lot of different stores - it doesn't have to be a pharmacy, but supply is limited right now. They're usually around $15.

Well crap. Son called and said he tested positive for Covid. He's got a fever etc. and somehow was able to get tested today. Wife and I don't have the major symptoms of lack of smell/taste, fever etc.

I was going to visit optometrist to use up my vision insurance for the year but called and cancelled. That's a bummer.

According to CDC website, suppose to self isolate for 14 days (have to read more about this, is it 5 days now if no symptoms after X days?). It'll be a long 14 days. Will have to start using Kroger order online and pickup again.

My wife is sched to start school on Jan 6'ish. Not sure what they'll tell her to do.

I never got tested when I got sick last week. The drive up sites were packed and I didn’t want to venture into any stores. The confirmation for me was learning the guy next to me in our office was had tested positive.

I had joked with my boss that I was going to milk it for all it’s worth if I ended getting Covid but I was back in the office five days after symptoms ended. And the same day I came back CDC came out with their five day recommendation.

20,000 tested positive in Georgia yesterday, beating the previous record by 6,000 people.

Looks like my daughter finally tested negative after about a week or so...we are all still negative, I think since my son is only 8, she was the one farthest out from her shot (and it was Pfizer). We never bothered with a PCR test because she had symptoms and tested positive at home. I think we'll skip the PCR based on guidance from the CDC in that the rapid tests are probably more indicative of disease and being contagious.

Florida say hoooold your horses:



-----------------

There's been at least 2 promising lab studies published yesterday re: T-Cell response to Omicron, which reinforces the hope that things hold up well on serious disease (which will 'trickle down' to a good degree to moderate cases at home). The consensus in terms of data is the same, the few exceptions (an older swedish study and a newer from South Africa) both have some confounding factors that might skew the results. In addition to the statistical analysis this makes me cautiously optimistic, at least for regions with a high/thick 'immunity wall' and a decently low starting level in hospital ... (On an individual level for me and Family/friends the optimism has been high for almost a year anyway. There's always a risk and as always it's good to be prudent, but that's the thing one can controll and has heen by getting vaccinated.)

whomario,

you seem to be very knowledgeable on this subject. I'm wondering if there have been tests on asymptomatic close contacts of people with flu Do they sometimes test positive? Are we just seeing it with Covid because we are looking?

No doubt cases are exploding, but some of the crazy numbers we're seeing are due to counties holding case counts until after the holiday weekend and dumping multiple day reports over one or two days. We've been doing this long enough that this has repeated itself multiple times.

Interesting article below. Something I tossed out there in an earlier post and now a preliminary study has been done.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/h...ies-delta.html

For those recovered from Omicron ...

Looking at this CDC site with new rules, it says vaccinated+boosted do not need to quarantine if exposed (e.g. from my son).

CDC Updates and Shortens Recommended Isolation and Quarantine Period for General Population | CDC Online Newsroom | CDC

But this other CDC link says

Public Health Guidance for Community-Related Exposure | CDC

Basically, think the CDC site has not yet been reviewed and realigned with new guidance making it contradict itself.

But we are comparing to other days they have done that. So 6,000 more than any day before is 6,000 more than a day they have dome that in the past. We are comparing crazy numbers to crazy numbers.

General tldr: Of course it's a thing with flu as with most (all ?) viruses, doubly so if you mean asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic (post-symptomatic much rarer). Of course with most viruses it is most infectious with symptoms and that phase is longer than the pre-symptomatic phase while asymptomatic folks are on average less infectious. But that is offset to some degree by behavioural changes due to symptoms (by us and those around us).
An extreme example is measles, which is spread 3-4 days before developing the telltale rash and feeling noticeably sick.
As for Flu: It's actually considered a "major source of transmission" as well by the WHO. Early on the hopium/silver lining take for SarsCov2 was that it wasn't happening as often as with flu ...

But best i know later data indicated that it is more of a factor with SarsCov2. Most i remember argued for 30-50% more frequent + most likely for the Rest of cases (the majority do get symptoms, even if they are mild) some 12-24 hours extra time where people are infectious but not yet show symptoms which then also don't really start out very serious for even many folks that later get very sick. (I can't readily compare it with Influenza in that regard, but i think it's more of a 'thing' here. Plus coughing is a late symptom here, which is harder to ignore than most anything else).

But yeah, the smart move in future would be to treat Flu and other Illnesses much the same on a Basic (!) level of caution (for example not visiting an older relative for a couple days while your spouse/partner has symptoms and you don't.).

Here's some basics:

Similarities and Differences between Flu and COVID-19​ | CDC

Obviously it hasn't been documented on this scale with the flu via public testing (people are people. Heck, personally i think now having tests that simultaneously recognise both is going to lower Influenza illness and deaths immensely in the future, especially in hospitals or care home settings) but there have of course been scientific studies specifically looking at this sort of thing for every virus you can think of via so-called "cohort studies", same design as those where the Covid knowledge comes from, that include contact tracing and surveillance of when people develop symptoms. With flu it does happen but simply less frequently. (And if anything i guess that the somewhat smaller scientific studies for Influenza might overestimate the ratio since they are bound to be more complete focussing on smaller groups. But that's me guessing without a clue.)


Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection: A systematic review and meta-analysis | PNAS

Though with SarsCov2, as the paper above explains, spread by truly asymptomatic individuals is also a bit less frequent than sometimes thought (The "oh, a sore throat counts as a symptom ? What, a runny nose too ? Yeah, i guess i had that !" syndrome), especially since it is hard work to differentiate between asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic. If you read "asymptomatic transmission" it often means "no symptoms at that time", not "transmission by people never experiencing symptoms".

As a net result of all things mentioned you have people spreading it more often without having any clue (or being more likely to ignore it) which offesets the heightened awareness and any preventive measures taken which were easily supressing Influenza and other viruses globally.

As another aside, i guess that flu being contagious earlier (but for less time and less time unnoticed) is likely part of the reason why truly bad flu waves are pretty steep as well despite not having the same ability to infect big groups in one go. Heck, one leading theory for Omicron is that it kinda is spreading so fast due to being infectious earlier after infection but still being symptomless or mild early on. This pretty much determines the so called 'serial intervall', meaning average time between one person catching it and then passing it on to the next one. This is, best i know, 2-3 days for flu and was 5 for SarsCov2 until Omicron.

Take this all with a salt shaker as i am not an expert and haven't kept up with things as much as i might have earlier.

This is probably neither here nor there, but within the past week there have been local articles on the COVID deaths of both a police officer and a firefighter.

(Also an aside on firefighters. I thought these guys were supposed to be STUDS, like the ones in those calendars middle-aged ladies are all hot for. But every time I see an obit for one, they are...not exactly in great shape?)

I've been feeling pretty sick the last day and a half (chills, cough, runny nose) and I probably should get a covid test. However there are no immediate appointments that I can find.

And yes I've been vaccinated but I've been procrastinating on the boosters.

Hope you feel better.

But we really want to know ...

I felt like this too right after Christmas. Went to the drive-thru testing place and the line had to snake around for a mile. Gave up and went home. Feeling fine now so either it was a mild case of Covid or some other bug.

Getting tested right now is really difficult in some areas. UW Medicine is only offering pre-surgery testing right now and all Washington State public schools are closed Monday to encourage students and faculty to get tested before returning to school.

I finally got tested. negative.

yay!

So I went into the office last Wednesday for the first time in 3 weeks since surgery. My boss came in, after a week out of town, feeling sick. He was in the office for 3 hours, fully masked. He and his wife tested negative 2 days earlier, but she's got pneumonia. He went to the doctor on Thursday morning, tested positive (of course).

I have zero symptoms and likely wasn't in close contact by the strict definition, but I went to the Little Clinic for a test this morning to confirm I'm negative before going back into the office to be safe (and because my office would ask me to do so). They told me if you're asymptomatic, a rapid test is useless as you'll test negative whether or not you're positive, so they did a PCR test that gets sent to a lab and I likely won't have results back until Wednesday or Thursday at latest. And, insurance might not cover it since I have no symptoms, and in that case, the visit and lab tests will cost me about $195. So, I'll be working from home this week.

I should have just stayed home, not gotten tested, and gone back to work on the 10th.

“When a mayor has swagger, the city has swagger. We’ve allowed people to beat us down so much, that all we did was wallow in COVID.”

— NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) pic.twitter.com/rgKN13Ssnm

— The Recount (@therecount) January 3, 2022

So no actual plan, then. Just SWAGGER the virus into submission.

Yeah, that's gross... his benevolent swagger shines down on us all.

Ha ha, you puny virus! You can’t harm me!

Well that is still better than the Florida Surgeon General who said the problem is we test too much.

Testing situation here sucks. Wait time is over 3 hours to even get a test and who knows on results. My brother was exposed at work and we hung out over the weekend.

Texas Medical Center released their weekly numbers this morning, as scheduled. Refresher: this is a pooled dataset from largest collection of hospitals in a single medical center the world so it's a good aggregator of what is going on with Houston with a lot of noise removed.

I like to think of the pandemic dashboards in three numbers: leading (positivity rate), current (case numbers), and trailing (hospitalizations). The TMC dashboard graphs are weekly averages, to reduce noise, and cover all 4 peaks (original 2020 summer, alpha 2020 winter, delta 2021 summer, and omicron current) so you can compare to see which were better or worse.

Weekly Average Of Daily New Covid-19 Positive Cases - Texas Medical Center
Cases: 232 -> 721 -> 2094 (!) -> 5390 (!!!) -> 5695
Case numbers are the least helpful as they're limited by how many we can count and I'm sure have been undercounted all along. People rarely test if they're asymptomatic and often don't test even if they are, for a number of reasons ranging from no testing availability to unsure if sick to wanting to go to work and testing would make them ineligible. It was pretty clear we hit testing capacity during the 2020 summer wave and those were badly undercounted. Also, it looks clear that we've hit it again now. During Delta, we hit a weekly high of 4892 so last week's 5390 eclipsed that. However, what was more scary was that it took 7 weeks to get from early summer valley to the high. This time it took only 3 weeks.

Weekly Average Of Covid-19 Testing Metrics Across TMC Hospital Systems - Texas Medical Center
Positivity Rate: 2.7 -> 6.2 -> 15.4 (!!) -> 28.0 (!!!!!)
This one's staggering. The highest we had previously was in summer 2020 with 22.0% but, again, you practically had to be coughing up a lung for them to test you as there just weren't tests available. I'm sure we're resource constrained again as the number of tests is the highest it's even been but not by much (4595 vs previous high of 4116 during alpha). However, if 28% of 4595 tested positive, that means 1286 people are confirmed just from hospital tests alone. The worst during Delta, for instance, was 15% of 3876, or 581. In other words - less than half.

Average Daily New Covid-19 Hospitalizations By Week (Monday-Sunday) - Texas Medical Center
Hospitalizations: 56 -> 68 -> 110 -> 210 -> 401 (!!)
Finally, hospitalizations hit an all time high this week so that's really not promising as we're at the start of this wave. This is twice as steep as the previous fastest (pre-Alpha) wave. Hopefully it's quicker than previous ones - currently, we have a good number of beds as we're still just in Phase 1 (see other slides). The first wave also resolved fastest but we were in real dire shape for hospital beds then. Some capacity and planning has gone into adding Phase 2, 3, and temporary beds so there's more than there was back then. But if this stretches out for months like Alpha or even lasts as long as Delta, at a staggering 400 patients a day, those fill up fast. And this is assuming this is the peak value and not just another stairstep on the way up. If next week, we jump again to 600 or continue geometric progression to 800 - things get grim quickly. With better treatments, better therapeutics (except monoclonal antibodies off the table), and a seemingly milder Omicron due to a combination of better community protection and a differently constituted virus, outcomes should be better than in past waves. But when hospitals fill to capacity, mortality jumps an order of magnitude as there just aren't enough caretakers.

So, yes, even with the "good" news from omicron, today's numbers are a bit sobering for Houston.

SI

We're now at 62% fully vaccinated (2 shots).

> 12 is at 71.1%.

At least one dose is 72.3%.

> 12 is at 83.5%.

So there is approx 10% that took one dose but have not finished the second for whatever reason. I don't get why health/government can't reach out to them specifically and ask/incent them. We know who they are.

I've watched a lot of football lately. Admittedly I've flipped channels quite a bit (and fell asleep on the couch more than once) but I remember only seeing 2 ads for vaccination. One was a generic let's get vaccinated (Covid not mention).

Still a frakking lackluster "change" program IMO.

CDC COVID Data Tracker

I think we're well past the point where it's like the warning label on cigarettes. Anyone who cares whether or not smoking is bad for your health, knows that it is.

For the missing 10%, we need to know why. I don't think we have that info (or my google-fu isn't good enough).

We know who they are. Do a survey and understand why. Then create a plan(s) to address their concerns, their apathy etc.

The problem is we don't know why and it doesn't seem the government wants to spend the money (and we have plenty of that right now) to figure it out.

Yeah, people either want it or they don't at this point. And if you breakdown the numbers by region, it tells how political the vaccine is. Chicago for instance is at 72% fully vaccinated.

I do think they can and should do a better job of making the vaccine more accessible to people in certain communities. Setting up mobile vaccine units that can reach areas with low rates and low accessibility would probably have helped a lot in Chicago.

I don't know how accurate the one-dose numbers are either. The CDC has some major issues with their data. It seems if you get your 1st and 2nd dose at different places, it may not be accurately reported. Same if you forget your vaccine card.

It probably varies by region, but getting shots is not as easy as it should be. We have a bout a 3-week wait to schedule a booster shot around here. And when you do get your initial shot, you have to schedule a second dose at the same time. So people would be scheduling an appointment for that 2nd shot 6-7 weeks out. Not easy for people who have hectic schedules that could change.

But that's the choice we made when we chose to put our eggs in the private sector basket for vaccine distribution.

Orange County's Kelly Ernby Dead of COVID at 46 | PEOPLE.com

"Politician Was Outspoken Vaccine Mandate Opponent"

She died as she lived- owning libs by denying science.

Florida has reached over 4 million covid cases. Not sure if that is in total or active, but still a massive number and DeSantis continues to dodge the media.

Yes, but he gave a 'press' conference today saying essentially people need to stop getting tested, basically blaming "hysterical" people for taking tests away from the (in his mind very few,l i wager) who need them by getting tested "all the time".

I'm pretty sure his plan is working.

As someone pointed out, he's big on the monoclonal antibody treatment, but if you can't get tested, how do you know if you need it?

Lets also not forget he had someone arrested for exercising their first amendment rights.

That can't be true, he never shuts up about censorship!

And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that monoclonal antibodies are reimbursed by the feds so none of that money comes out of his pockets. Also, his top donor makes money off it (tho there's some context there).
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/cor...255556531.html
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden...424e19b3ed994f
Ron DeSantis and Regeneron connection on monoclonal antibody treatments, explained


SI