(04-23-2023, 11:46 PM)mordant Wrote: I heard about the FDA decision last week (Wed PM I think; I heard about it Thursday) that people over 65 can get a bivalent Covid booster every 4 months if desired. I got mine Friday morning. No appreciable side effects either.So a few Covid-related impressions about my trip and an earlier foray into NY City.
Aside from the fact the efficacy of vaccinations gets dicey after 2 or 3 months, my big reason for doing this is that I'm flying to Minneapolis on the 29th to visit my brothers up there; one of them isn't doing well and wants to see me, he says, "one last time".
My other precaution is a P-100 mask (unlike an N95 which filters 95% of particulates, this filters 99.97%, including oily aerosols, meaning I don't have to endure the over-perfumed lady behind me on the plane, lol)
I figure this is the closest thing we'll get to a lull, and so I'm taking the risk of being cooped up in a tin can with 100 other mostly unmasked people ... twice. Wish me luck.
I make the percentage of people still effectively and correctly masking at about 3%. A guy in business class, a couple of Asians in coach (many Asians were masking pre-Covid anyway, it's a cultural thing), one stewardess out of four crews, a teenage girl and little bro traveling together -- all in high quality N-95 wraparound masks, although my P-100 was superior and more comfortable at least based on my personal experience.
People who still mask properly have a way of nodding in acknowledgement of each other, lol.
On the NY City trip we made the mistake of visiting the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on a rainy Saturday morning, where we found ourselves cheek-to-jowl with thousands of New Yorkers and tourists who decided it was the perfect rainy-day indoor activity. It's literally impossible that someone in that throng wasn't shedding viruses. The saving grace was high ceilings and greater air volume to dilute the soup.
I decided not to mask around the younger of my brothers and his wife while at home with them, since, like us, they don't get out much anyway. I tried to mask with the other brother and his wife and extended family but it's surprisingly hard to maintain discipline when no one else is and they keep plying you with food.
Things are finally thawing out / normalizing between my stepdaughter and wife so the stepdaughter returned our visit to her in NYC and will be coming back for a few days in early June. We will likely not mask at all for that, despite that she's an exposure vector and my wife will be convalescing from knee replacement surgery by then. There is only so much you can do when the rest of society can't be arsed to do their part.
I think what it boils down to is that catching Covid is a numbers game. I am still not out of the woods from my Minneapolis trip (I'll consider that to be roughly Tuesday) but probably got away with it. Partial masking plus a fresh Covid booster and lots of extra care with hand washing and hand-to-nose-and-eye touching probably got me through. But if I were doing this all the time, I would definitely succumb at some point and then there'd be the distinctly nonzero chance of Long Covid or the worsening of my diabetes, the acquisition of fresh brain-fog that could effectively end my software development career, etc.
One pattern we've seen over and over is friends letting down their guard and traveling abroad and ending up sick, so we will not be doing that sort of thing. Our neighbor here just got declared cancer-free after months of chemo and then he and his wife were both laid low with Covid in Costa Rica on a celebratory vacation. Another friend was forced by his wife to attend a concert she was in while he was very sick, on the theory that he was still testing negative for Covid. He tested positive the next day. My wife attended the same concert and found an excuse to sit as far from him as possible. He, too, had just returned from abroad. He passed Covid on to his wife, who had a hard enough time of it that she is now determined never to catch it again. Better late than never to be enlightened, I guess!
It seems like people tend towards one extreme or the other -- either panicking or willing Covid away because they're tired of dealing with it. We've tried to steer a rational middle ground. So far none of us has caught it even once, and we hope to keep it that way ... but even we are taking more chances than we used to.
My brother the fundie thinks we are "just living in fear" but he's the one who should be afraid, not me. He's also the one who refused to take any kind of extra precautions to protect his wife while she's on chemo. Thankfully her last treatment was yesterday and maybe she'll get by. Doubtless, God will get the glory for that one, lol.
