Miss MJ

Yeah, COVID is just everywhere here right now. It recently ran through my condo building, but it started with multiple people getting it from different places, not one big superspreader. As for masks and restrictions, with vaccines and more effective treatments, I think that ship has sailed, even though Long COVID is still a thing and the elderly and medically vulnerable are still susceptible to bad outcomes. It’s a struggle to get people to even quarantine the requisite number of days, at least around here. I know there were positive people with active symptoms in the elevator and by the pool – no masks.

@Oracle: Both my mom and I are fully vaccinated. However, apparently some of the staff at the facility are not!!! Hence, the repeated need to be on “breakout” mode. If you work in a health care setting, it should be a condition of employment that you get vaccinated if you are able.

My mom is there for PT after a car accident and is leaving next month, but there are other very fragile folks who live there who really don’t have that option. My mom does have a couple of underlying conditions, though, and now she’s terrified she’s going to get it, which isn’t helpful for her recovery.

Definitely talk to an employment lawyer. If you’re in the US, then depending on the size of your employer and the particulars of your situation, both the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and/or the Family Medical Leave Act may offer you protection from being fired due to Covid-related absences.

So I live in an area of FL where people are rushing to reopen, masks have become passé and Spring Breakers and other assholes abound who don’t believe in the vaccine or COVID or whatever. The end result is that people are being idiots, and I won’t qualify for the vaccine in FL for the foreseeable future because it’s a corrupt shit show. So my husband and I went to a neighboring state where we do qualify and got vaccinated.

And, gotta be honest, I don’t feel bad about it. I made the appointments at a pharmacy a week out and we were the only two scheduled appointments out of 20 that day, there were multiple other days that week with empty appointments and on the day of, I checked and there were only six booked appointments, including ours. It was the J&J shot and apparently, no one wanted it. If people don’t want whatever vaccine they can get, then I’ll happily take it and tell my loved ones to do so as well. (I will also happily donate to any programs out there there that are organizing rideshares to vaccination centers and mobile vaccination sites so that who want the vaccine but can’t get to it can be helped.)

Flash forward to today and I just found out one of our condo neighbors just got diagnosed, likely due to the absolute lack of care people in this area are taking. My husband and I were almost certainly exposed to him through a series of unfortunate events last weekend. But you know what? Even if we get sick, odds are we won’t die. And if I’d waited until FL got its shit together, we might have. So, yeah. Take whatever vaccination you can get, y’all.

“Seeing everyone around me living like nothing’s going on makes me doubt if I’m being stupid by social distancing still.” @Helen, I swear my husband and I have the “Are we crazy for staying away or are they assholes for not caring?” conversation at least once a week. It’s like living in two realities, except that covid doesn’t care if you believe in it or not and it’s only gotten worse since March, so…no, we’re not crazy. Right?

As for Republicans, it’s already come out that they didn’t do anything at first because they thought it’d just kill people in blue Dem-leaning cities. And now that it’s obviously taking a harder toll on Black and brown people and the elderly and poor, it’s like Christmas for the GOP! Something to do their longed for mass execution of “those people” for them! All they have to do is do nothing. Which is exactly what they will do.

Yeah, my antibody rest came back negative, too, even though I had all the symptoms back in March (when I couldn’t get a test). So did my dad’s, even though – same thing. But neither one of us got the antibody test until May, so we think that we may just not have made enough antibodies for them to last? I dunno. They’re saying now that even though the antibodies don’t appear to stick around, other aspects of the immune response may. Who knows, at this point.