Dear Wendy
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“there aren’t that many active commenters” … all the more reason not to continually attack the ones who actively participate, and for me to make those who do, feel safe here to share.
Ranger chic, we’re going through the same thing with my mother, in the hospital since Monday (foot infection, not covid), and they’re so short-staffed that her care is really compromised. It’s so nerve wracking! I hope your MIL gets better quickly!
Just want you all to know that I’ve blocked BGM’s IP addresses so that he has a forced break since he didn’t take the long break I asked him to. If he continues accessing the site from different IP addresses, I will continue adding them to the block list. Mark, if you’re able to log in from a different IP address and see this, know that yes, the ban is deliberate. You’ve been warned and you ignored the warning. While men are welcome here, this site is primarily for women and it needs to feel like a safe place for them to express themselves and to share with each other. You have compromised that safety too many times for me to continue giving you access here.
Ok, carry on.
The at-home tests are not thought to be very reliable unless you’re using them every day (or like 4-5 days in a row while symptomatic). I’m heading out now to stand in a testing line and then will test the kids at home probably every other day for the next week (we traveled yesterday, so lots of potential exposure). If I test positive with a pcr test today, I’d assume my kids are positive too and keep them home from school (they’re supposed to go back tomorrow). I’m really trying to do the right thing and this feels like the best I can manage. I’m not going to make my kids stand in a really long line in the cold today… 🤷♀️
Hi, I’m still having some tech issues (and have been on vacation and not able to give them the attention they need), and some replies were deleted from this thread when I had to restore the site to a backup from early this morning. Sorry for the inconvenience! I do have screen grabs of the comments that I can post later (I’m currently sitting at ohare, where my flight home was cancelled and WiFi is spotty…)
Yes, get your boosters as soon as you can. NYC is getting his HARD right and it happened in a matter of days. It’ll spread across the country like wild fire over the next couple weeks, especially with holiday parties and gatherings and travel. What we’re seeing in NYC is super triggering (for me, anyway) – so reminiscent of march 2020 but I have to keep reminding myself we have vaccines now and hopefully they’ll keep us safe. But I heard more sirens yesterday than I had in a long time…
NYC is not looking good. Tons of broadway shows canceling bc so much covid in the casts. six cases at my kids’ school, including my friends’ kid who was exposed in class 13 days after his second vaccine shot (and now has symptomatic covid). My friend’s employer tests the employees every week and this week 20 out of 25 tested positive. All fully vaccinated (don’t know about boosters). Lines at testing sites are suddenly several blocks long, which happened literally overnight. The DOE (department of ed) is reporting over 700 cases a day and that’s with hardly any in-school testing. UGHHHHH
I was just reading an article on CNN about how the death rate in Michigan is at its highest of the whole pandemic, but so far, none of the deaths have been in anyone who has had booster shots. 75% of the deaths gave been in unvaccinated folks and 25% in folks whose last shot was more than six months ago (And of those, I’m not sure how many actually had two shots or just one). Id say – and actual experts are saying – that current data suggest that the risk of death or even just serious illness for people with boosters, and especially people with boosters and no underlying conditions, is really really low/ close to zero. Maybe that will change but right now, I don’t have any anxiety at all about getting serious ill myself. For people whose last shot was more than six months ago, the risk is higher (maybe much higher). And for those without any vaccination, the risk of infection over the winter is sky high and the risk of serious illness and death is probably relative to overall health and age, but I think it’s going to be a really, really bad time for anti-vaxxers.
My own personal concern now is around whatever longterm effects might result in covid transmission – even mild or asymptomatic cases – that we don’t know much if anything about. I still think Drew and I had covid in late march/early April 2020 (before tests were widely available), and while the kids had zero symptoms at the time, I do worry that if we had covid they likely did too and I hope that doesn’t effect longterm health for any of us, and I hope that any infection we might have in the future, even if it’s likely mild or asymptomatic bc we’re all vaccinated, doesn’t result in any longterm health issues. But, yeah, I no longer have any anxiety about serious illness or death for myself or anyone I love and care about is are well-vaccinated.
Mark, I agree with others that you’ve crossed a line lately that isn’t tolerable, and respecting the long history you have here on DW, I’m not going to block you, but I am asking you to please take a long break from the site. If you choose not to and the harassment and abuse continues – and I apologize that I was mostly absent from the other thread that crossed the line; I missed some of what people are referencing – then I’ll take more aggressive measures to protect the rest of the community here. Thank you.
You might not be aware of this BGM, but in my personal life – and on social media – I was a very vocal proponent of keeping school buildings closed all last year/ until vaccines were widely available and we brought covid numbers down. I was so vocal about it that I lost some friends and alienated myself from neighbors and members of my community. I have earned the right to whine about the pain of ongoing quarantines, about the frustration of watching, in real time, the loss for my kids every time their lives, which are already still very much limited and and restricted and mitigated from what would be considered a ‘normal’/ pre-pandemic childhood existence, are disrupted again with another classroom closure and the progress they’d made – socially and academically – is set back again. Maybe it’s just for a week or ten days at a time, but every set-back adds up, and for these kids whose last 21 months has been one long setback from where they might otherwise be in terms of development, they deserve and really need the chance to, frankly, start healing. And that’s hard to have happen in this constant state of disruptions and mass illness around them.
Yes, Vathena – thank you! We know we can handle two weeks at home with our kids; we did it for months and months and months. My daughter was 4 when she left school and she didn’t go back until she was 6! She spent her entire kindergarten year – kindergarten! arguably the most important and formative year of one’s life! – *at home* and didn’t complain once, so excuse me if I get frustrated when she – my now vaccinated daughter who wears a KN95-equivalent mask for eight goddamn hours a day without complaining and isn’t even allowed to talk to her classmates during lunch when masks are off – misses another three weeks of school in the span of a month and a half because her classmates and her teachers keep bringing covid into the school and she’s forced to quarantine (and then miss whatever outdoor social activity we had scheduled to give her some sense of normalcy because we can’t risk potentially spreading covid to someone else).
Parents of young kids are over this whole thing as much as anyone possibly could be besides ICU healthcare workers who are goddamn heroes and should be treated as such and teachers and school admins who have moved mountains to provide some kind of education and some kind of routine and support to kids whose lives have been utterly disrupted – some to the point of losing parents and loved ones and teachers – through absolutely no fault of their own and have carried on with the kind of grace and flexibility at least half of the adults in this country couldn’t begin to muster even if they were paid to. even if their lives depended on it.
I mean, my kids didn’t have indoor playdates for like 21 months (literally we can count on one hand – on two fingers – the number of indoor playdates over the course of 21 months). Drew and I didn’t leave them with a babysitter after we realized we could still get covid even after full vaccination. We used a baby-sitter twice between march and July after we were vaccinated and then stopped. We didn’t dine indoors, we didn’t go to movies, we cancelled vacations, we even cancelled our thanksgiving plans bc the other guests refused to take rapid tests before gathering, we didn’t go out or really do much of anything in an effort to keep our kids covid free so they could not only be safe from the virus but they wouldn’t risk spreading it to classmates and teachers. We lived like fucking hermits for almost two years while we watched on social media and just in real life so many others acting like the pandemic was over and were carrying on life as normal, letting their children live as totally normal children (which we were so desperate to do ourselves) and then complain when classrooms and schools had to close bc of positive cases. So if it’s those parents you are fed up with, I GET IT, and believe me, you are not more fed up than I am. But if your comment is directed at me – my family who sacrificed so much more than it seems the average family did – I say again: go eat a big steaming bowl of dicks.
