This board seems to have a lot of people who believe their vaccination and vaccination passes will keep them safe. You are not safe. Please, for your own safety, don’t behave as if you are. Don’t let your vaccination status lull you into a false sense of security.

Below is from an MD in Seattle:

1. I tested positive for COVID this week, along with 9 of 12 fully vaxxed friends (among others), days after we attended an outdoor wedding (that required proof of vaccination) in one of the lowest-risk states in the country.

2. Thankful for protection against bad outcomes but YALL- uncontrolled spread of the more transmissible #DeltaVariant means that even relatively uncommon events are going to happen in significant numbers.

3. I’m worried about its potential to wipe out ranks of HCWs, many of us vaxxed > 7 months ago = waned immunity relative to much of the public. It’s depressing, but we need to change behaviors in response to the mounting data showing that delta presents a new level of risk.

4. I understand why the focus is on vaccination (as it should be to prevent hospitalizations & deaths & eventually reach herd immunity) but when it comes to getting and spreading COVID, that is unfortunately now only part of the equation.

5. P.S. Very symptomatic. You don’t want it.

https://twitter.com/drmeowza/status/1429221776270135296?s=20

Yes, an anecdote, but one I’ve seen numerous times.



If I had school age children, I certainly wouldn’t be sending them to school this Fall. Whether your government locks down or not, the best practice is still to self-isolate as much as possible and to always wear a mask if you go out.

Human

(My worse fear is being realized in Alberta: doctors and nurses are exhausted and are simply walking away from their positions. They are not replaceable.)

I’ve been self-isolated since 1981.

Plus you save on after shave!

Wilson, my volleyball, has been giving me attitude lately.

Well, I certainly got the message. I don't think that it helped that things relaxed for a while. People are having a hard time tightening up again.

As a teacher, I'm very worried. My school district is mandating masks for all, but even with masks we had classes constantly going on quarantine last spring. With Delta, that will be happening even more frequently. I will get the booster shot as soon as I'm given the go-ahead.

Much less so since COVID. I work at home. Lucky me. I do feel lucky. Always have except when my kids were toddlers. I've been very worried. Like summer said, I'm getting a booster as soon as they tell me I can.

My doctor said Utah's hospitals are full. I went somewhere the other day. I had to pick up my prescription at Walgreens. The hospital where my "husband" works closed their pharmacy (IHC closed all their public pharmacies). There were quite a few people standing in line there. I didn't feel well the next day and I was CONCERNED, but I think it is just my new medication I'm taking as I'm okay now.

But I live in fear of it.

So we only need another year or two of living like hermits, right? Most of us have had plenty of practice and are getting good at it.

Maybe it's a good time to re-paint the house, inside and out. Or turn what used to be the back yard into a giant veggie garden.

That's in-between sessions with my physical therapist, an adorable thirty-something hottie who is helping me get rid of back pain from an old injury. Heck, he's younger than most of my own kids. . .

Human wrote: "This board seems to have a lot of people who believe their vaccination and vaccination passes will keep them safe."

Then why get a shot? And you got your medical degree where? And simply because you've seen this anecdote many times makes it true? There are a lot of #$!% talkers out there these days, honest. Just look at all the LDS missionaries, for example.

I'm fully vaccinated, and yes, people like me do get Covid, but it's generally far less severe, and your information about the delta variant isn't supported by the actual experts.

You put your hysteria on display when you referred to a "government lockdown," and your claim "that is unfortunately now only part of the equation," is an example.

I actually find I'm safest when I use critical thinking skills on specious claims like yours.

I'm fully vaccinated but I prefer my own company most of the time. Always have actually...Covid just reinforced that.

Isolation leads to desolation

And we all know what that leads to

Just had my first shot today.

Gotta wait almost a month for part 2.
Sheesh

At age 59, I just don't see the need for nearly as much in-person socialization as I used to when I was younger. With working 4 out of 5 days from home and most people at work doing the same, where I work is pretty much a ghost town. On the off chance that you do see anyone there, they're all wearing masks. For the three weeks before I caught Covid-19, I didn't even go in to work at all. I didn't see any friends in-person. As I said in a previous post, I must have caught Covid-19 from a cashier in a store or at McDonald's. Because those are the only places that I had been in the three weeks prior to catching Covid-19. I recovered a few weeks ago.

If I were age 19 again, this level of socialization or lack of socialization would be unsustainable. So how much isolation is required of a person? How much social isolation is or should be required of others? Does each of us have a socialization quota or limit? If a teenager in their dating years catches and spreads Covid-19 while having very little social life compared to us when we were teenagers, have they done anything wrong? In the meantime, if I can catch Covid-19 now, anyone can. It doesn't matter how careful you are. Is it fair to ask young people to have no social life what-so-ever?

I just don't think it's right to tell other people to isolate themselves for more than just a few weeks. Remember the initial justification "just a few months to level the curve"? That was over a year and a half ago. So we should just ask people to use common sense precautions as much as possible. Be responsible for ourselves. If you're really afraid, feel free to self-isolate. But I won't try to tell others how to manage their own health or protections.

No one in authority ever said the masks and isolation would last "just a few months." You made that up.

The strategy was to level the curve so that hospitals would still have ICU beds to deal with those with cancer, heart attacks, etc. If you had looked at the graphs, you would know that the curves went down and then back up again, then down, then up. From the very beginning it was well known that the problem would last a long time. The goal was to keep the hospitals functioning.

As for your notion that since you don't know who infected you, "it doesn't matter how careful you are," that's pretty silly, isn't it? Avoiding infection is a matter of probability--even you can't see the virus particles--and the precautions are to improve your probabilities.

To say that you always drive 55 mph but still had a crash does not mean you can safely drive at 120.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The goal was to keep the hospitals
> functioning.

I am amazed how often people lose sight of this simple fact. It never comes up in conversation so I'm constantly mentioning it.

It does change the conversation quickly though.

People like to see the world in the simplest possible terms. That goes a long way towards explaining politics and religion.

The problem with all these "special exceptions" people keep trying to throw out there as to why they don't need to pitch in and help with this massive problem that impacts everyone in society is that we can't get through it and back to what we all want to get back to when these "special" people keep seeing reasons why rules and responsibilities should not apply to them; "let others inconvenience themselves and do double duty on the required sacrifices, but not me....rules and societal responsibility don't apply to me because I'm (insert whatever excuse is chosen here)."

I know we're a huge country and there's tons of interstate and global travel and we're a big dysfunctional patchwork of different public health policy/enforcement in the U.S., but if we could *all* be mature and disciplined enough to get on the same page and work together at the same time with *every* tool we currently have being simultaneously and consistently used to slow the spread (no special people constantly mucking it up), we could get at least turned around and going the right direction again in terms of getting back to "normal."

As it is, living in the U.S. (a country lucky enough to have enough $0.00 cost vaccine for anyone who shows up) is like being crammed together in a big pool to become certified competent swimmers, and just as we all get anywhere close to finishing the course so that we are certifiably competent to save ourselves from drowning, some special person poops in the pool, we all have to jump out, take care of trying to remove the turd, drain and disinfect everything, refill the pool with clean water, and then by the time that's done, we're too rusty on the foundational skills we worked on to pass them off, so we have to start the process all over from square one. It's on a constant repeat where we make progress and then another group of people decides the rule to not go to the bathroom in the public pool doesn't apply to them and we're *all* right back with new floaters to deal with. Of course, there will be the occasional miscalculation that an expected "fart" will turn out to be an accidental poop. Not ideal, but not completely avoidable perhaps. But if we also have to deal with the "tired of it and can't be bothered to get myself to the bathroom" crowd on top of this, we just won't be able to make any headway back to anything like the pre-Covid lifestyle we all desperately want to go back to.

No one - young person, old person, highly social person, not-so-social person - is having an easy time of this. All these people who feel like they're somehow special cause they don't like the restrictions and inconvenience and delayed gratification are the reason we are all going to be stuck in this hell for months, maybe years, longer than we would otherwise have to. I ***sympathize*** with everyone struggling with this; I sincerely do cause I'm struggling horribly like everyone is. It suuuuuuucks!!! But the only way out of this is working on it together for as long as it takes. It will take less time if we can collectively grit our teeth and temporarily sacrifice things we all hate to sacrifice so we can hope to *ever* get out of this mess. I don't get the allure of prolonging the misery for myself or society as a whole; I just don't get why anyone thinks that's a good plan if we want this over. But if we all think we're specially exempt from doing our part, unnecessarily prolonged misery for everyone is exactly what we're going to get.

(I really don't mean this rude - harder to tell sometimes with written communication. Just my explanation of why I, with all due respect, have to disagree.)

It's nicely written and coherent.

Some may take offense that you don't recognize their refusals to get vaccinated or wear masks as the heroic gestures in favor of freedom they believe those actions to be, but that is precisely the "special people" problem you identify.