T3h C0Vids
Jimster
Cruffiton.etsy.com 6,954 Posts
Just wondering how seriously people are taking it, in your necks of the woods?
Mum died with it, if not directly of it. Lost my aunt and uncle in August of it. Wife has lost her aunt last week to it. X-amount of strains it seems, some of which are hardier than others. I am walking for about an hour each day and keeping my distance, avoiding shopping as much as possible. Yet there still is way more traffic on the roads than the first lockdown in March when you hardly saw any vehicles.
Shit really seems to be getting out of control here the the UK. Neighbour is in ICU on a ventilator as I type.
Mum died with it, if not directly of it. Lost my aunt and uncle in August of it. Wife has lost her aunt last week to it. X-amount of strains it seems, some of which are hardier than others. I am walking for about an hour each day and keeping my distance, avoiding shopping as much as possible. Yet there still is way more traffic on the roads than the first lockdown in March when you hardly saw any vehicles.
Shit really seems to be getting out of control here the the UK. Neighbour is in ICU on a ventilator as I type.
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I don't know anyone personally who's died from it, but I don't have a massive social circle or family. Neighbors I don't know well seem to be dying more than normal, and our families are scattered among different countries with different conditions, so my biggest worry is my American family - my folks are extremely vulnerable but my dad's been able to work from home and my mom's retired, so they've been hermits all year.
But I do have a lot of friends who either got it already or are currently isolating - roomie tested positive, etc. A whole family, multiple generations, a schoolteacher (even though she's teaching remotely), lots of relatives. Nobody's croaked as my peers are pretty young, but I know my anxiety about this, and can only imagine what it's like for the many older folks around me.
A couple of weeks later, 4 of them had it. Of those 4, one died, another had a series of heart attacks with it on the ventilator, but he and the other 2 came out of it alive but still worse for wear. My friend was the only one OK.
My friend is also a doctor and was on rum and coke (coca cola) whereas they were not drinking, and he knew that the alcohol would kill the virus in his throat. That saved him!
However, the owners of the company, a 90-something married couple, tested positive the weekend before last. They also have been staying home since the beginning of the year. According to the grandson who works with me, he says that they're "doing fine", whatever that means exactly. Apparently, they most likely caught it from their physical therapist, who tested positive, yet the dumbshit wasn't in a rush to let them know. The husband supposedly overcame not only pneumonia but prostate cancer as well a few years ago. I'm amazed that he's still alive.
No one in my remaining family has had it. However, a few of my mother's coworkers (slightly larger company which employs HVAC repairmen and contractors who go to and from job sites) had/have it with moderate symptoms, so it worries her. She's a strict vegan and very healthy, but she rightly fears giving it to her husband, who has emphysema. Their neighbor, who previously was a denier, has a son in his early 30s who caught it in early summer. He used to install alarms and audio/visual equipment in other people's homes.
Hoping the best for everyone!
My immediate family hadCovid in March 2020. My wife is a paediatric intensive care consultant (attending for you US folks) and she probably brought it home from work. She was unwell for about two weeks with temperature and muscle aches but has been fine since; our then 11 year old daughter had a temperature for literally a day but lost her sense of taste and smell for more than three months; our then 15 year old daughter had no symptoms, which might be because she is a super fit athlete. I went down with incredible pain in my body and a temperature of between 39.5-41C (103-106F) for a full three weeks. I slept between 15-20 hours per day during those weeks. My condition deteriorated until my wife called the ambulance when I had some serious breathing problems. After some oxygen in the hospital I felt better and my blood oxygen levels were OK. They diagnosed pneumonia on top of the infection and gave me antibiotics which over the following five days made a significant difference. On my birthday in April I felt OK again for the first time in a month but it still took time to regain my strength. I had lost six kilos (one good thing...) and have been more active over the summer / fall using the time I have due to WFH and not commuting. Winter weather is a bummer though as I hate skating on wet roads and I’ve put the weight back on again. A lot of people ask me about Long Covid symptoms but I am generally OK or possibly in denial as I hesitate to attribute slightly increased joint pains to it and blame a family history of rheumatism and arthritis. I do need more sleep though, which in my case means probably more “normal” amounts as I previously was “burning the candle on both ends” as colleagues would say. One noticeable change: I never used to remember dreams in the mornings. Now I am conscious of them almost every day. Weird stuff....
I’ve been donating plasma for Covid patients every few weeks since June as my antibody levels are good.
The kids are coping so-so with the home schooling situation. The younger one seems OK now but in the first lockdown suffered enormously from the lack of social interaction. The older one is putting on a brave face and sticks to her training regime as much as possible. She is a rower and apart from a brief period after the summer hasn’t been in a boat in ages and hasn’t had a race since the previous season. She was aiming for a scholarship to a US college but has cancelled all those plans due to a mix of concerns about sports scholarships being withdrawn and a mix of concerns about the handling of Covid at US universities and the general US political situation.
My wife’s paediatric ICU has now for the second time been cleared of all children to make space for adult patients who need intensive care. They are very busy and I dare say that having been an intensive care doctor who has had to deal with life and death on a daily basis for decades helps dealing with the situation. Other doctors and nurses who don’t normally deal with patients who might or might not make it do not cope as well.
My wife has not been given a vaccination yet, which is pretty bad in principle but tolerable in her individual case as she has antibodies from her own infection last year.
We both have parents in their late 70s / early 80s who are sheltering at home. Both in-laws need home care and I am very surprised that the visiting carers have not brought the virus into the house. However, mother-in-law had to go into hospital before Christmas for other reasons. She was tested for Covid every other day and was initially Covid free but then tested positive in the first week of January, so she caught it from staff in hospital. She’s asymptomatic so far.
Amongst our 250 staff at work we’ve had some infections but no transmissions amongst those who work on site (warehouse staff etc.) which I take as evidence that our strict social distancing, cleaning and hygiene regime is working. Not so sure about the discipline outside work amongst those who have been WFH since March as I know that people had BBQs etc. before it got cold.
I still get asked by some colleagues whether I thought that Covid was as serious as flu and I had people comparing it to their glandular fever...
I noticed a peculiar attitude amongst some British staff who (unlike the majority of European colleagues) seem to try and find loopholes in and (un)reasonable excuses to not apply whatever restrictions are in place I had to spend an unreasonable amount of managerial time to explain why they can’t visit customers or hold Christmas dinners etc. It was unexpected for me to witness a really odd attitude of them trying to make their case by quoting from (incorrect) newspaper articles rather than checking official government websites for rules.
Amongst relatives of employees we had about half a dozen deaths that I know of but if anything that’s obviously an underestimation.
We had slightly more than half a dozen resignations from people wanting / needing to be closer to their families and consequently moved back to their country of origin. We have about 100 staff who are not originally from the U.K. and many have not seen their family back home since Christmas 2019. We have a few who are currently abroad as they have family members on life support, some since before Christmas. Under “normal” circumstances they would come back to the U.K. by now and prepared to leave again if there was a significant change to the better or worse, but with travel rules and restrictions constantly changing and airlines cutting down flight schedules more and more, some people feel stuck abroad, especially given that more and more countries would not let them back in coming from the U.K.
Amongst the few who went home for Christmas to see their families literally everybody had their booked return journey back to the U.K. cancelled, altered and delayed.
The Financial Times reported yesterday:
“Coronavirus has caused an exodus of immigrants from the UK, triggering what is likely to be the largest fall in Britain’s population since the second world war, according to a new statistical analysis of official data.
A blog published by the government-funded Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCOE) on Thursday estimated that up to 1.3m people born abroad left the UK between the third quarter of 2019 and the same period in 2020.
https://www.escoe.ac.uk/estimating-the-uk-population-during-the-pandemic/
In London alone, almost 700,000 foreign-born residents have probably moved out, the authors of the blog calculated, leading to a potential 8 per cent drop in the capital’s population last year.”
Well I should hope so. One lazy mistake could be disaster.
I'm fine, but think I must have had Covid but showed little or no symptoms (back in March/April when this started up I had a period of a three day headache that was a bit like waking up drunk only without the booze). Until they roll out an effective antibody test I guess I'll never know, but I suspect the whole bloody world must've been exposed to it by now. Lockdown in winter is just normal behaviour for me in Canada, but I really miss pubs, and my better half really wanted to visit her family in Spain for Xmas. There's a lot of space in Quebec, so it's not impossible to go out if the weather allows, and luckily I can teach online but like others mentioned above, my wife is considered an essential worker but not essential enough that she's being offered the vaccine
One thing that is kind of funny - they've announced a 9pm-5am curfew. Any fool out in sub-zero temperatures ain't going to live long enough to pass the 'rona round.
Yemsky that sounds terrible. My mom tested positive and she was fine. And she’s getting close to retirement age. She lives in Texas and she went to Xmas dinner with the rest of my family. No masks, because Texas I guess. Nobody else got it. None of it makes sense to me. And I don’t know anybody who has died of it.
To put that in perspective, I have travelled to Poland twice. Both of the people who I have travelled to Poland with are now dead. Heart attack and motorcycle accident, but still, 100% of the people I have been to Poland with are dead. but I don’t know anybody who has died of Covid. It just seems strange that we are a year into this terrible pandemic And my framily is fine. Friends=fine. Facebook “friends”= fine. Coworkers=fine.
And then here on the strut I read about you guys with friends and loved one you lost to Covid and it just doesn’t make sense to me.
Why are some people hit so hard? How is is that my mom is the only person I know who has had it and she acted like it was no big deal? After all this time?
Rambling, I guess. Just trying to wrap my head around it.
"About one in 10 people in private households across the UK are estimated to have had antibodies against the coronavirus in their blood in December 2020, according to the latest results from an infection survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The detection of antibodies in the blood is an indication of a previous infection, but doesn’t indicate exactly when that infection took place. In England, about one in eight people – equivalent to 5.4 million people – would have been expected to test positive for antibodies during the same period."
I guess for Gary / The US and A that folks there have hella space, whereas in Ye Olde England we live on top of each other and a lot of people have no fusks to give if it means them not earning enough to eat. Plus there are an (un)healthy number of morons who don't believe it / believe they are too young to die, who will spread it like warm butter on hot toast.
Southern California is supposedly like that too, with emergency vehicles driving around the block around the hospitals beucase there is no room to take new people in; running out of oxygen, etc etc. It sounds like a living hell. And yet... I was just at a hospital a few weeks ago for a vasectomy (left side this time, but that's a different story) and it was super chill. So maybe that's LA and San Diego is a different story. For what it's worth i can see why people like Fentanyl. That shit is amazing. But anyways, there is just that weird disconnected feeling where what I see on the TV and read about doesn't match what my personal experience. It's a strange feeling. Could be a numbers game too - there are a bazillion people in southern california, so even if thousdands die it is a small percentage of the actual population and maybe that's why I don't know anybody who has had it.
Back to my mom, she caught it from one of the choir ladies at church. And that made me laugh, because surely that was jesus telling them to stay home. So it's around xmas, and most of my family lives in texas, and not only is mom still invited to xmas dinner, but they all go out for japanese food as one big happy family! In public, at a restaurant. I would have said "hell no". So, i'm standing by for my big "I told you so" moment and it never comes. Nobody else caught it and my mom felt fine. My chance at smugness was robbed from me and it still leaves me feeling a little befuddled. Nobody learned their lesson because i guess there wasn't one to learn. What does it all mean????