Sixty days is the number I've heard.

Long COVID Experts: ‘So Incredibly Clear What’s at Stake’

Money quote:

For researchers, advocates, and observers who keep up with studies on COVID’s neurological pathways and symptoms, remaining cautious is simply a no-brainer. “If everyone were really fully informed – I mean really fully informed – and they understood the way I did, we wouldn't need mask rules,” says Furness. “We wouldn’t need them because it would be just so incredibly clear what's at stake.”

…and I say this having just traveled to my first event in three years…nearly everyone around me mask less , I’m not holding up my end of the deal for my family

Had my 2nd booster yesterday. Very, very happy that I have no side effects for the first time.

Fun fact: 35% of all and 55% of all european reports on "Post-Vacc-Syndrom" (think Long Covids much, much rarer cousin) come from Germany. Am just glad german 'vaccine-sceptics', which are historically numerous and well connected, seemed to have had a late start this time around and got drowned out early on by their even crazier brethren.

I got my flu shot & booster at 5:00 PM on Friday and was asleep by 7:00 PM. I slept until 8:00 AM. Now, aside from some injection point soreness (no worse than the flu shot normally is), I'm 100% fine. But boy howdy was I sleepy.

Caveat: I'm also a Dad with a teen and a pre-teen so I'm normally pretty tired by Friday evening anyway.

That sounds glorious.

I might need to do this once a week.

I got the flu+booster on Friday afternoon around 3:00pm. I played hockey at 9:00 and felt good, but by the time I got home I started feeling loopy. Woke up around 8:00am (because I had to, not by choice) and it took 3 cups of coffee, 2 glasses of water, a bowl of cereal and a shower before I felt like I had actually woken up. Crazy sleepy.


But then after that yeah, just the injection soreness and good to go.

I had a little lymph node swelling under the arm that I didn't have from the previous shots. Then again, I had the Pfizer booster vs all Moderna previously. It was slightly annoying and weird - like I could feel the underside of my arm rubbing against my arm - and it went away in a couple of days. It was just something I hadn't noticed before.

SI

Got my flu shot this afternoon. The pharmacist said they don't know how effective it is yet this year.

I clicked on a link to let them know I was in the store. Walked up to the counter and was told to sit down. She came out a couple min later and gave me the shot. And that was it.

Last year, it was go to counter, answer some questions, show my health insurance card etc. I'm glad they've streamlined the process.

Finally came out.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/iver...ial-finds.html

During the worst of Covid, most of the students I taught (12-16 years old) were pretty good with sneezing into their elbow and sanitizing their hands if they had to blow their nose. Many of these same kids were probably home if they had any symptoms.

I'm amazed at how many kids now are completely oblivious to any sort of good hygiene. I've watched them sneeze into their hands and wipe their runny noses with their fingers. I thought that some of the good habits taught during the epidemic would carry over but I'm seeing a lot of them regressing.

I am also giving it serious consideration.

The best part was around 6:15 PM my wife was like "you should just go to bed, I'll take care of the kids & dog tonight."

DON'T NEED TO TELL ME TWICE!!!

Assuming Shanghai Disney is like Orlando, it'll be fun for 1 or 2 days but then really suck. The article below (and a couple others I found) did not share the logistics on room & board for those stuck though.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63456107

We can probably guess what the logistics are. Few and none.

Do they aow Winnie the Pooh at Shanghai Disney

No idea what "aow" means but assuming "allow" and I'm not missing anything, yes. Why?

There's likely going to be a shortage of iPhones this holiday season. Buy now if you're planning to get one.

Hopefully Foxconn is starting to explore production capabilities at other countries (e.g. Vietnam, Malaysia).

China zero-Covid: Workers flee Zhengzhou iPhone factory | CNN Business

Just so everyone knows what is coming next: Covid didn't actually kill anyone. Doctors using Remdesivir killed them all. If they had only used the dewormer, all those people would be alive today.

Coming to a republican investigative committee near you.... Covid came from Dr Fauci's personal stash of virus parts and he spread them in China before coming home so he could take credit for saving the world, but instead killed everyone, and tried to blame it all on trump.

By: Rand Paul

China bans Winnie the Pooh film after comparisons to President Xi | Xi Jinping | The Guardian

From what I've googled, that's an urban legend.

The comparison may be banned but not Winnie the Pooh. See below.

The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh | Attractions | Shanghai Disney Resort

Can I get a ticket to another timeline, please?

SI

I'm looking forward to the GOP House's investigative committees, whose subpeonas will be enforced by miltias while the response by House Democrats to ignored subpeonas has been: :confused: .

Militias? I think you mean secret gay lovers.

Functionally the same thing at this point.

This thread falls off the front page. It's fine. It's over.

Only 262 Americans died of COVID yesterday. We have slowed the spread to a 9/11 (remember, the worst thing that ever happened to our country?) body count every 10 days, rather than every week, though too soon to know whether it's just a blip. And cold weather approaches, which typically means a caseload and death toll spike.

But we as a society are done with the inconvenience.

Weirdly, I still see a decent chunk of masks in grocery stores here. Nowhere else. And definitely not a majority or anything. But a decent chunk - like 1 in 3~5.

Me looking at my boring graphs tells me that any time now we're going to start going up before going through the roof in December.

Houston wastewater indicators have started to tick back up a little as have case positivity rating (it's hard to see on the chart but we were scraping along low-mid 2% for a handful of weeks but bounced back to 2.9 last week)
Wastewater Viral Load Across City of Houston - Texas Medical Center
Covid-19 Positivity Rate Across TMC Hospital Systems - Texas Medical Center

Our family has been trying to do a handful of things that we haven't done in a while over the past month or so while numbers have been down and we likely have sterilizing immunity. We ate in a restaurant (as opposed to eating outside or takeout), my wife and I went to a movie (only 4 people in it, tho, since it was midday and Top Gun had been out like 3 months when we did it), we've been going to church instead of watching online - that sort of thing. And we'll probably start to pull back some before December. We're going to try and fly up and see some relatives at Christmas this year and just generally holding our breath about that. We've already flown a couple of times this year.

Also, getting my son's COVID booster was a frustrating exercise. I got a reservation at Walgreen's the day before. Went there after school and early. Checked in, waited until almost a half hour after our time for them to tell us we needed to fill out another piece of paperwork. Checked that 15 minutes later and then were told "oh, it's the pediatric one and we don't have it here". Never mind that the online form asked me that, the person who checked us in asked us that, and the form I had to fill out told me that. The next day, we went to the local grocery store (HEB for the Texans familiar with it) - we had to drive about 20 minutes to get to one with the pediatric one. Then it took them like 30 minutes to prepare it. To their credit - they did tell us that when we got there, though - it takes a bit longer to prep the pediatric one. I have no idea if it's true, but they did tell us that to help set expectations. We wanted to get it now so that he should have his best protection in December and January when it's running rampant.

SI

From a quick googling there are 99 deaths per day in the US from automobile accidents and we've never had a thread on that. I can agree we could and should be doing more to prevent Covid spread and deaths societally, but at a certain point we all need to choose our risk threshold and do what we choose individually, and I think we've all reached our own conclusion on that by now.

I'd love new information or studies on effects, but barring that what are we supposed to post?

My "we" here is society, not really "FOFC forum members." I don't have much to say, either, other than the same old stupid scolds, so I'm part of the same thing. Sorry if I suggested that this thread was a meaningful bellwether for the true importance of the issue.

I flew cross country recently, estimated 15% mask usage while on the plane, maybe 5-10% in the airport, and virtually none in my various stops across Northern Cali. Through some combination of misinformation/disinformation about the effectiveness of masks in routine contact situations, political tribalism connecting the behavior to weakness/wokeness, and whatever other complicated factors are at work... we have just decided that the act of masking up when at the grocery store doesn't pass our test as worthwhile. It's... I don't know the right term... it's heartbreaking, if you can work your way to consider all the victims at the end of the line who are suffering as a result of these decisions we are actively making.

And I'm aware there are numbers like deaths in car accidents. If there were measures each of us could take that are as easy as masking and vaxxing, that would have the same kind of effect on that death toll, we would be taking them. Like, for the glaringly obvious example, wearing safety belts, which we've instituted as law and has surely saved thousands and thousands of lives over the fairly recent spell it has enjoyed as a political consensus. No, it's not reasonable to expect every vehicle to travel at 15mph forever (that would likely reduce vehicle deaths to very near zero) - so no, I'm not a naive absolutist that every precaution is worthy any gain in better outcomes. But where we choose to draw the line on what is and is not "worth it" says something about us as a society, and I am having a hard time coming to terms with where this particular spinning wheel seems to have landed.

My frustration is somewhat political, somewhat societal, and I confess I don't know what to do about it. Griping here is useless but cathartic, taking some flak for doing so is part of the price of admission, I get it.

Part of my blind spot on this issue, I will admit, is that I just don't feel that wearing a mask in public situation amounts to a meaningful imposition on my freedom, independence, or even comfort. I wore a mask for hours and hours during travel and it became uncomfortable, but in the more routine stuff where I still do (shopping, an hour-long physical therapy appt, etc) I find it to be a negligible matter.

I guess there are some people for whom it's a bigger deal for specific reasons. But I more or less suspect that most of the outrage is manufactured for effect.

Counterpoint: I have the glasses-fog-up thing with my preferred pair of glasses (not my older ones, though, with a different shape). I also had a couple of 30-hour travel days to and from Europe where it got really unpleasant on my ears (I prefer the over-ear vs back-of-head masks) so I started hooking them on my glasses instead of my ears for part of the time. I've been ok the few times I've had to do 8-10 hour days with them but if I had to do them more regularly, maybe I'd switch types.

But, yeah, I think I'm in the same boat. Which I think is outside a standard deviation or two at this point.

Also, with the grocery store thing - it feels like a very demographic split on who is wearing them and who isn't. It's almost as if people who aren't white don't trust the white Texans. Hmm. Also, contractors generally will ask if we come to the door in our mask. We tend to request they do so inside the house but we also don't care if they're in the attic or outside or whatever.

You can also add schools to the list - my kid says about half his class still wears masks and when we've done Open House events, that seems accurate-ish. Though his class is the GT class and a bit of an outlier. He wears his all day except at lunch, recess, and maybe gym. He even has a set of Pokemon ones he puts over his KN95 to give him something unique.

I'm sure that's always played into my thought process here, too. I mean, it's hard to not be a little glib and be like "hey, the seven year olds can do it" and "my asthmatic mom has no problems" and "Lorenzo Cain could play in the MLB doing it". I know that's a gross oversimplification, but that's always seemed like such a way to get a ton of mileage out of not much. Man, anyone who had a school age kid the last couple of years knows how much child school illness has been down the last year or so. But here we still are, talking about masking almost 3 years into a pandemic and I'm going to be the one coming off as the crazy, irrational outlier.

SI

I do wonder why Xi is so reluctant to open up China gradually (now that he's got his 3rd term). China is about 90% vaccinated. I'd think he could create a 6-12 month roadmap. The pros outweigh the cons (well, obviously not to him).

Is it just conceding that western vaccines are better than homegrown ones? Seems like a small concessions & embarrassment to concede that point, he can point to how well China has done overall in the pandemic re: deaths etc. Make Moderna/Pfizer happy and just buy their stuff. Then tell the populace the trade off is an increase in hospitalizations and some deaths. Willing to bet the populace will be agreeable to that trade-off.

I'm happy that China has self-constrained her growth and her policies are making corporations look elsewhere. But it does seem to be a senseless policy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63633109

A tech writer comes back to twitter to discuss his Long COVID and... wow

https://twitter.com/rowlsmanthorpe

I mean, was this ever posted? My wife had long Covid and killed herself. We must help others who are suffering | Nick Güthe | The Guardian

My wife, who was an army medic and has been in medicine most of her life in medicine, got into an argument with her step-dad while visiting him this week. He insisted that the cdc has changed its definition of a vaccine because of the covid vaccine. He said the flu shot and covid shots are now classified as therapeutics.

Obviously not true. He stopped talking to her the last day she was there over it. I told her it's almost certainly from Facebook morons not understanding shit and twisting it. We therapeutics for the flu and covid that are short and I'm sure these Facebook wannabe doctors confused them with vaccines and think the cdc quietly reclassified them.

I'm planning to get the latest booster in early December. I've been getting Moderna just because that's what I was given initially. Wonder if Moderna results are similar to below. May have to ask specifically for Pfizer for the next one.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/18/covi...nt1point1.html

Still seeing chinstrappers out there. To paraphrase Yoda, Mask up or no mask, chinstrap there is no.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/h...smid=share-url

Unfortunately, the new boosters don't seem to offer a ton of help in preventing infection from the BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 variants, which are very good at evading immunity. But the boosters do lower the severity if you catch Covid.

CDC charts show covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths are "steady" or near steady.

CDC COVID Data Tracker

Interestingly, below chart shows other countries 7-day average of cases. The "surge" is in Japan and China. Not sure how it really knows about China though. Japan has recently opened up so maybe not as surprising.

Global COVID-19 Tracker – Updated as of November 18 | KFF

The chart for 7-day average of deaths is a mess, I can't tell much from it.

I finally contracted covid for the first time in Vegas this past week. Not sure what variant, but I can say Thursday I have never felt so ill in my life. It was brutal before I finally had a mobile IV company come to our room and hook me up with some vitamins and supplements.

I have had both shots and one booster, so not sure how much worse it would have been, but I was wishing for death a couple of times that day, shit was no joke! Right now it just feels like a really bad cold, and I have lost much of my sense of taste today.

Only if you care to share ... what were your symptoms? I assume dehydrated but also difficulty breathing, nauseated etc.?

Breathing was fine and my O2 sat was 95, for me it was the most excruciating headache I have ever had, then nausea that stayed right at that level of when you are on the verge of throwing up, but it just stayed there, for hours straight, even after puking. Very unpleasant. I obviously couldn't hold even water down, so got dehydrated, plus the usual other symptoms, cough, chills, body aches, etc, Still have those, but nausea is gone and headache is only a 2, so much better.

Thanks.

Sounds like you're over the hump. Hope your taste comes back soon.

Another lockdown for 3.7M in China.

https://apnews.com/article/taiwan-he...source=Twitter

Just thinking and wondering ahead. For business & tourism travel whenever China opens up again, what happens if I'm caught in a lockdown at the local Marriott? Do I have to pay the extra, unexpected X days? Will there even be enough employees to run the hotel for visitors e.g. for food, not the other fluff?

I think the answers are yes. More reason to stay at a western hotel and not a local hotel/hostel I think (e.g. smaller towns/cities in China don't have Marriotts and like). Been itching to visit Xian.

COVID booster and flu shot at may time may have been a mistake.

I did the same and I agree. But I always react very badly to the flu shot so I was completely screwed regardless.

Got them at the same time and started to feel off after 4 hours, had a mild fever after 8 hours, then was just achy and not feeling great for the next 16 or so hours. Once it was done I was fine.

I'm sure I'll feel fine tomorrow and be glad I did it this way.

I felt crummy the next day but was back to normal after that. Still think it was worth it since the odds of me forgetting to go back for one would have been high.