Covid Support Thread
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Yikes… It’s crazy lately. Newswise. I honestly don’t know what to think. But increasingly… I am inclined to feel a rising panic like Wendy. I often fear everybody is delusionally optimisitic about just how bad things truly soon get.
If you get them tested see if you can get an anti-spike antibody test (sometimes called an semi quantitative test). Some of the tests measure the antibodies against the nucleocapsid, which kids often dont develop. The Spawn of Fyodor initially tested negative on a nucleocapsid test but ended up having high levels of anti spike antibodies when we got her tested on a newer test.
I think that the antibodies from infection taper off after the first five or six months but then kind of steady off so I wouldn’t necessarily assume that it’s too late.
This is one of studies I was thinking of, showing most people still having their antibodies at thirteen months.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-021-07057-0
I wouldn’t bother with an antibody test at this point. We don’t have a clear picture of the relationship between antibodies and viral exposure so we don’t know how strong of an antibody presence is necessary to avoid alpha strain, let alone Delta which is significantly stronger.
There’s pretty good granular data from the UK and Israel on reinfection rates with Delta. In Israel they did not vaccinate most of the previously infected so we know that previous infection is providing a pretty decent level of protection. I agree that knowing particular numbers isn’t going to give you fine tuned information but knowing whether they have been previously infected is a pretty good data point.
Yeah, it’s not been 16 months since our suspected bout of Covid. The kids never had any symptoms at all and while Drew and I had symptoms (some of which lingered for many months) we did not have the telltale ones like loss of taste and smell. I had marks on my lungs consisted with a recent infection when I was finally able to get to see in doctor in May (about 6 weeks after symptoms began) but even that doesn’t tell me much. We just don’t – and probably never will – know for sure whether what we had was covid or not. And we definitely don’t know whether the kids did. And even if they did, any protection they might have wouldn’t be enough for me to feel they were “safe,” necessarily. I know of kids in our peer circle here who have been infected twice.
Anyway, all this to say that I am getting increasingly more anxious about the kids starting school in just over four weeks. It was to be such a joyous occasion – their first day back after a year and a half, the day after my birthday. But now, ugh, I’m just so worried.
So like a year and a half ago, I thought to myself that if COVID primarily affected the young like it did the old, the response would’ve been very different. But now young people, including children and babies, are getting sick in much higher numbers and the response still stinks. So I guess I was wrong on that note.
I finally got a desk to WFH. And a chair, which will probably not come for a few more weeks. My company has halted its return to work planning, so I now don’t see us going back until 2022 and when we do, it’ll be hybrid. So it’s finally time to get a WFH set-up that doesn’t give me back pain or make me want to scream into the void about how frustrated I am. It’s a floating desk that folds into a hutch in the wall because the only real space we have for me to put a desk is in the bedroom. Which is not ideal. I wish I had my own home office, too. But the space saving option seems kinda cool and I’m happy I’ll finally have a dedicated space to store my work items.
@Wendy – while there will be some risk, it should be relatively low where you are in NYC. The vaccination numbers are good, mask wearing is up (at least in my neighborhood) and with the exception of potentially the Orthodox community, most of the city is pro-vaccine. The pathway is pretty clear to having vaccine mandates and after the horrors that you and others have described, I don’t see anyone wanting to slide backwards (except for Staten Island).
If DeBlasio was smart, he’d get his team thinking through every detail from getting every teacher and school worker vaccinated to putting them into the white room if they choose not to. Make the drop off and pick up a masked activity and take the next month to figure out how to manage schools safely.
But I’m not optimistic on his ability to do that.
Honestly? At this point there isn’t a single politician around that has truly played this fiasco very smart.
Right AND Left… stupidity has reigned supreme. It’s fucking depressing. It’s fucking enraging.
The real tragedy of Covid is that it failed to wipe more politicians out. We could use a clean slate all around.
CDC fucked up too as far as I’m concerned. I went for my annual check up last week since I missed it last year. My doctor and I were talking about masks and I mentioned I mostly wear mine still, especially in stores and traveling. She wasn’t happy when CDC said vaccinated people didn’t have to wear theirs because frankly, the US has shown us people shouldn’t be trusted to follow appropriate guidelines. My sister also works in the medical community and the doctors at her practice basically said the same thing.
Anyway. I’ll probably wear mine for a long time to come, and maybe forever on public transportation.
To be fair to the CDC, Delta changed things abruptly and significantly. While I have never stopped masking in indoor public places, it was I think reasonable to give it up based on where we were going in June with cases (and chance of getting infected from someone) extremely low and extremely effective vaccines available for whomever wanted them. The facts on the ground changed pretty quickly and for the drastically worse.
