Quick COVID Check In

[jenny-livingston]

In my area (state and more locally, my county) things are moving in the right direction. We still have new cases each day, but our overall positivity rate has gone down significantly. This past week, family of family (my sister-in-law’s mom and sister) came back positive. I’ve mentioned friends and neighbors having it in the past, but I don’t currently know of very many cases right now.

I’ve been impressed with how my state is handling vaccine rollout. It seems as though it’s been complicated and messy everywhere, but we’re seeing an influx of supply and access being granted to more vulnerable populations. However, there is a LOT of vaccine hesitancy where I live and I worry that things won’t be well-controlled for quite sometime still.

We are still being very careful in our interactions and things we choose to do, but I see so many people choosing to carry on with their lives as if nothing is happening. It’s been strange to watch. I understand that we’re all “over this” and tired of following the “rules” of pandemic life. But I can’t help but think that we’d be in a much better situation if we weren’t already pretending this was over.

[paul-met-debbie]

Here in the Netherlands we came down from over 12000 new infections per day half December to about 4000, due to a strict lockdown (no schools, no shops, no bars, restaurants, musea etc, only 1 visitor allowed per day) and a curfew (21.00 – 06.00 h). Fortunately we are still allowed to walk the dog in the evening.

Now it seems to stabilize at this level, which actually is too high to feel comfortable. Hospitals are nursing 2000 covid patients and another 500 are on ICU. These also stabilized, which is just what the staff can handle without upscaling.

Unfortunately, government has decided to open primary schools (6-12 yrs.) starting this week, which seems to be more prompted by political (elections coming up in March) and social reasons than by common sense. This is especially strange because currently 50% of new infections are with the highly contagious British variant, and the South African-one has been seen as well in a few cases. It is questionable whether the current vaccines work against those. Probably they are less effective. So we all expect the infection rate to rise soon again. How they think they can win elections with this is a mystery.

So, not over by a long shot indeed.

One of our art-students has been infected recently at her work. She seems to be doing reasonably okay so far and tries to overcome this at home.

Vaccination had a slow and late start in the Netherlands (we are very good at overcomplicating things and talking endlessly before doing something), since the second week of this year only about 500.000 people have been vaccinated (out of 17 million Dutch), so a long way to go. Good thing is they vaccinated the healthcare workers (who jumped the queue with a political move) and the elderly in care homes first, and are now working their way down the age-list. Currently they are doing the 80+ group. Our group (18-60 yrs. with medical indication) is planned starting March, but everything is delayed because of poor supply and I don’t expect an invitation before April and we seem to be destined to get one of the lesser-working vaccines based on a virus-vector in stead of the better rna-vector vaccines.

So far they have been shooting with a small delivery of Pfizer and Moderna, but now this stock is almost gone and we are depending on the AstraZeneca ammunition (suddenly I find myself using war-language, which is very disturbing – I must meditate more and clear my mind). Also disturbing is that there seem to be no plans at all worldwide to vaccinate young people (< 18).

AstraZeneca seems to have delivery and production problems and they had a big and embarrassing public fight with the European Commission about their obligations, but that has not solved the problem. And this vaccine seems to be less effective (65%) than the Pfizer/Moderna ones, and have insufficiently been tested on the elderly (65+), so we probably only can use it short term on the 60-65 group, and then we have to wait for new supply of either Astra Zeneca or Johnson&Johnson. I call this last one the “Kuifje-vaccine”, after the two private detectives in the comic strip albums of Tin Tin (by Hergé). In English they are called Thompson & Thompson and Tin Tin is called “Kuifje” in Dutch, (because of his hairstyle), so this analogy does not work here, but the Dutch translation is Jansen & Janssen, and the vaccine I mentioned is co-produced (and developed) by the Dutch farmaceutical company Janssen in the Netherlands that belong to the Johnson & Johnson group. Well, enough rambling and confusing commercials now.

Anyway, we are still fully in the middle of it and the end of the crisis is not near at all. A good thing is, currently we are in the middle of a severe cold-wave and it freezes severely day and night, which keeps people from going to their work and visiting other folks, this can have a beneficial effect on the virus spread.

So, we maintain our private strict quarantine and go on with our lives as usual, hoping for the best for all.

[shannon]

Here in South Dakota our cases have decreased significantly. Our state has never been shut down. Our schools were shut down in March but we returned to in person learning in August and I work at the school and am in charge of keeping track of the children’s attendance and can say that we have had very few cases of Covid in the school and things have gone very well. I did end up getting CoVid 19 in November and my doctor put me on antibiotics right away and I did very well with it. I was just very tired and it took a long time to get over the tiredness. The majority do not wear masks at school but you can if you wish. We are not on a mask mandate in our state.

[jenny-livingston]

Shannon, first of all, I am so glad to hear that you were able to recover well. Thanks for sharing this information. I think it’s so interesting that there hasn’t been a mask mandate where you live. My state didn’t really “shut down” but there have been some restrictions imposed and mask mandates issued at different times. In my daughter’s school, there seems to be very little spread of the virus. The few (I think 3 or 4 total) cases in her small school have been traced to the children’s home setting. Overall, I’ve been impressed with how her school has handled COVID.