Covid Support Thread
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Kate and KTFran, on the collapsed lung, yes, that can resolve. How depends on the cause. Is the person whose lung collapsed tall and thin? That happens fairly commonly to people (especially males) with that body time and it’s called a pneumothorax. What can happen is there are blisters, called blebs, that can develop on the lungs. These can heal on there own but if it’s large enough, if it pops, it’s like sticking a pin in a balloon and the lung collapses. It’s a partial collapse because our lungs are divided into sections called lobes and only the affected lobe collapses. What happens is when the person breathes in, the air that would inflate the lung leaks into the chest cavity until there is enough air pressure pushing back on the lung to collapse it. Lung fluid can also escape and build up further complicating things. So, they’ll put a hole in their chest through their back and put on a suction machine to draw out the fluid along with air. In most cases the lung heals in days with the suction and then they are fine. In some cases, they don’t heal and surgery is required. There are a lot more variations on that, but that’s your reader’s digest version. If the lobe is damaged enough, it might need to be removed. Lungs are like balloons though and the remaining lobe(s) will expand to fill the space so there person will have almost normal lung capacity.
@ktfran I’m sorry to hear about your BIL, but glad to hear he seems to be ok given the circumstances. I hope he makes a full recovery. The guy who got your BIL sick is a jerk… and I’d think that even if your BIL wasn’t going through this. While I have felt for a bit that it’s time to learn to live with COVID, I don’t understand why people can’t just stay home when they’re sick. We’ve canceled plans over sore throats/cold symptoms that turned out to be not COVID and have had the same happen to us.
I thought I was ok being in the office without a mask. I guess my anxiety is getting to me especially with talks on BA.2.
Kate, that guy sounds like an enormous asshole! SOOOO tacky. His poor kids.
Ktfran, hope your BIL makes a full recovery!
As for BA.2, it’s here and spreading quickly in NYC, and nothing will be done. We are supposed to be in a “learn to live with covid” phase, meaning, I guess, being ok with getting covid 2-4 times a year, which seems really wild to me. My kids’ school dropped mandates a week ago and I told the kids they could decide for themselves how they wanted to proceed but that once I saw evidence of a new wave, I would ask them to please wear their masks. As of today, the 7-day case avg had increased 50% since a week ago, signaling the beginning of a wave, so I asked them to please keep their masks on at school. I am not ok with this level of infection and transmission. I’m surprised so many people are. The longterm effects of such frequent mass viral infection is going to be bad.
@KTfran and Kate maybe all those kinds of people should all live together on a tiny island so as to not infect the rest of us with their narcissistic assholeness.
It’s spring break week here at the college where I work. Since most of the kids are gone, I’m taking this week to work without a mask on. It’s really nice to be able to breath regularly all day. I’ll be wearing it full time again next week when all kids arrive back from all over the place – plus the new variant. I think here in Colorado we usually lag about 1-2 weeks behind what happens in NYC. But I’m wondering how many of the students are traveling there and will bring it back.
Have to be in the office this week for a major interview. NOBODY is wearing masks ANYWHERE. They weren’t on Sunday at the grocery store either, nor in the Lyft I took on Friday. It’s maddening.
Although at the same time, I don’t know why I’m annoyed because I do wear a mask and am relatively safe (maybe not as safe as Wendy/Fyodor/a couple others, but safer than most) and I still got Omicron.
Is testing open to all in NYC? Ontario has restricted testing to I think frontline workers since January so we can only gauge COVID on waste water and hospitalization.
I don’t know about NYC but there are still testing sites all over the place in PA. Maybe not as many as before, but there are still pop-ups in mall parking lots and various places. The only restrictions in the US for PCR testing is on what you can personally afford to spend on it.
Yes you can pay for PCR test for travel. The free tests are restricted. I understand with omicron that it got to the point where we knew there was a lot of it going around. But I don’t understand why they didn’t open it up again.
