So sorry to hear this. Must be quite discouraging the second time around. Glad you get the option for Zoom instruction. I assume your students are returning from all over. I'd continue with Zoom for as long as possible. Wishing you the best!

Thank you for the well wishes. I did teach class on Zoom, but I was wiped out and just got up from a nap. A little more fatigue this time, and what was more unusual was dry eyes. But my fever and chills overnight seemed less than last time. One student also emailed me this morning they have Covid, so they were grateful for the Zoom, too. Unfortunately, I can only Zoom while I am authorized to quarantine. I do get an extra day since Monday is Labor Day.

My sister has tested positive. She has a doctor appointment this evening and will hopefully get the Paxlovid. They also have a small house but at least an upstairs and basement where BIL can stay away. DH and MIL are so far good.

Yesterday I ate dinner outside but a thunderstorm is coming, so I will probably just eat back here at my desk.

Anyone interested in Red Hot Chili Peppers tickets Thursday at Bank of America Stadium.

I’m so sorry you are sick and hope you feel better very soon!

I'm sorry you're missing the RHCPs!

Hope you're better soon!

How long ago did you have it the first time?

Mid-April of this year. So the last week of classes in the spring and then after the first week of classes in the fall.

I am not understanding what/who you are livid with? You sound like you were out and about, did what you could as far as boosters (masking has been proven ineffective at best). Illness is part of life. Germs are all around us. If you leave your home you are taking on risk as are all of us. It's been a part of the human condition for centuries, some people are more or less susceptible. It is what it is and if you waste energy thinking this virus could have been stopped you are deluding yourself. Be glad you got vaccine and that your body was helped by it!!

Wishing you a quick recovery.

Mid-April of this year. So the last week of classes in the spring and then after the first week of classes in the fall.

😥

But the new Omicron boosters are approved for Pfizer and Moderna and should be available next week. 👍

I ordered myself some pho for lunch.

Pho sounds perfect. Get well soon!

I hope the new booster works better than the rest….

The original Vs (and the boosters because the formulas haven't changed) were developed to work against original Covid.

However, as we all know the virus has mutated ('cuz that's what viruses do), and the Vs are not as effective against a mutated virus.

Think about it like this - there is a wanted poster up in the sheriff's office of a criminal. The wanted poster is distributed all over the country, so that as soon as the criminal is recognized they can be arrested.

However, the criminal knows that his picture is plastered all over every law enforcement facility in the country, so they change their appearance. Now LEOs don't recognize the criminal on first sight, but eventually do, and arrest him - hopefully before he commits any more crimes.

The V is like the wanted poster - it informs the body what to look for, and how to fight the original virus.

The mutated virus is the criminal with a disguise. Once the body which has been trained to recognize the original virus recognizes it the defenses that it "learned" from the V are deployed. So a V'd person can become infected, but the body should eventually start to fight against it.

@springroz, I've not seen actual percentages on boosters, but i thought they had done fairly well? Hospitalization dropped dramatically in some areas. What's going around now, there has not been a booster for yet.

@gsciencechick how are you feeling today? My MIL never felt bad, never even said she felt tired, but was terribly congested. Hoping you are no worse and on the road to recovery!!

Yes, Tina, the boosters did extremely well in preventing severe illness and hospitalizations.

Hearing about all the boosted and double boosted cases sounds like a near miss to me. I sincerely hope the next booster works better at prevention.

I’m so sorry that you are ill. Hope you feel better soon!

Apparently, I'm not allowed to use certain words on Houzz. 🙁

We've been holding out all summer for the new booster. Usually new boosters are only released for those over 65 and the immunocompromised so it might be awhile before everyone else can get it.

These new boosters have not gone through clinical trials yet.

No more fever but still feel tired. I didn't have to teach on Zoom today, so I just chilled in the recliner a decent portion and did some online grading. I didn't feel I needed a nap today, but I'll probably just go to bed early. It was nice enough to open the windows, and DH was gone for the day so I don't come out until he leaves.

Still trying to give (it) away the Red Hot Chili Peppers tickets.

I have to post a picture of what I want to say

So, so sorry, gsciencechick. I do not like the plan we have for living this way, not one bit. .

Seems like there will always be two distinct camps about the vaccines: those who think they failed because people still got Covid, and those that think the vaccines succeeded because although many people got Covid, the rate of death and severe hospitalization dropped among the vaccinated.
But I agree, the initial “breakthrough” cases were a shock to me. Then I adjusted my thinking.

The people who think the vaccines failed want to believe they failed.

And there is enough (mis)information out there to back their claims.

Where are you getting your information on v and boosters?

I get much of my information on vaccines and boosters from ICU nurses and doctors that work in hospitals. Front line knowlege of the differences of illness for those that are vaccinated and those that are not.

The people who think the vaccines failed want to believe they failed.

I don't agree. I think it would have been far preferable to have been forthright from the start and explain that unlike other childhood jabs we receive, these are not for prevention of disease primarily, they are to mitigate the severity of the disease.

I experienced this difference when my children were given the chicken pox jab, though I was not told upfront about it. This salient point came out when a child might have gotten chicken pox, which was the first time in my experience a person could come down with a disease he had been jabbed against.

Lying, or not being totally candid undermines trust. Everything from mask wearing to the need for home testing to how long quarantine should last has been changed back and forth. I am fine with science being a work in progress, but I think those doing public messaging should pay attention to the real possibility of losing publlic trust. Jab uptake is at historic lows for childhood disease prevention.

You can blame the conspiracy theorists all you want, but at the end of the day, the people in charge had a responsability to put out a cogent, understandable message in order to preserve public health now and in the future. Instead we were treated to chaos. I pray my grandchildren will live as disease free as their great grandparents on down, but I am not so certain.

Jo and Zalco, I agree; I think the messaging from the CDC was poor.

@Zalco/bring back Sophie! Absolutely! I hope when you say it, someone will believe it. My words just seem to make people angry.

Zalco, good points except I don’t think the American public would accept a ”we don’t know” from those that are suppose to know.

A high percentage of the American Public seem to think they heard people like Drs Fauci and Brix say that wearing a mask or getting the vaccine would protect you 100%. They never said it.

If I knew from the early days of the pandemic that mask wearing and getting vaccinated helped in prevention and spread most others should have known the same.

I don’t think the vaccines failed.

The Vs we all initially received were authorized for emergency use and did not get FDA approval until a few months later. Data about effectiveness was ongoing and collected from the population and not just from clinical trials, as it would be if we weren't forced into emergency use. So it's unrealistic to expect the same level of certainty from the CDC as you would from a V that had gone through all phases of the trials and had been approved by the FDA.

gsciencechick

So it's unrealistic to expect the same level of certainty from the CDC as you would from a V that had gone through all phases of the trials and had been approved by the FDA.

Be that as it may, the government should have communicated properly to begin with so as not to undermine trust. Instead we were given a snow job in order to ensure maximum uptake. It was a short sighted tactic which has badly backfired. Trust has been breached and we are all paying a steep price for that. Asserting that common sense suggests we should have known better than to believe our officials is the opposite of what living in this country has meant to me all my life.

I don't think the CDC mislead us deliberately.. I think the expectation was that the V would prevent infection. When that wasn't the case, the focus switched to the fact that the v prevented severe illness. Yes, there was back pedaling after the fact, but it was a pandemic--there were lots of learning curves.

Jo, That may be true. Viruses mutate and Fauci told us we needed a higher uptake than what we had to get to a better place from the start.

The government should have come out and explained the facts about this as often as necessary. Instead there was chaotic messaging where the government did in fact change its story without any plausibly good reason, like the value of testing, the necessity for masking, the need for better air filtration, the length of isolation needed post infection. Having the President's press secretary mock the need for in home test kits one day, a CV measure adopted the world over, and then days later the government sending out said kits, is unfortunate and does not signal a well thought out plan, but rather ad hoc manipulation of facts for the appeasement of certain constituencies.

Public health officials have no business learning on the job during a pandemic. They have advanced degrees, participate in war gaming scenarios, and have experience managing more mundane health matters within communities. We have an A team for these matters, I am certain of that. The breakdown was political and everyone could sense it. Truly this has been an inexcusable response.

“manipulation of facts” the same family as alternate facts.

When a high percentage of people believe a person who says outlandish things —- sorry, never mind.

I FORGOT THE SAFE WORD! I know we had a safe word to use so posts wouldn’t get flagged, I used it.

I don't think anyone could have predicted the level of mutations that we have seen. I think most people figured it would eventually be squished by the V's and then mutations would just sort of burn out.

Temperature back to normal. I actually tested negative on the rapid test today. I did not test Tuesday or Wednesday so I did not see the progression. I hope I do not get a rebound.

Glad you are improving gscience! I am grateful we have the vaccines/boosters. We have seen two of our church members (neighbors practically) that we have known for years pass away from Covid. We had another friend hours away from a ventilator and a friend hospitalized for 90+ days from Covid. This illness is not like anything we have seen in my lifetime. My father was still alive - and hospitalized in the early weeks of Covid. I remember my sister and I sitting and watching news reports of number of people in the local hospitalized. Scared to death for our dad, and worried too, that we might catch it. So happy that has changed.

@springroz - although people may disagree with you, I don't think you have made anyone angry

: )

I had it back at the end of June (only time), so I'm assuming it was the Omicron kind. Tested positive the same day I got my second booster (symptoms started a couple of hours after the shot). I am going on a cruise in October, and I will be masking up on there since they've dropped testing requirements for the most part as well as taking some of my at home tests. I ordered another set from the link in the thread here; hope I get them before they run out! I had ordered my second set (8 tests) after I used my first order (only 4 tests). I wasn't going to order more, but since we're going on the cruise and also a hotel trip in Nov, I figured I might need them.

There was never going to be a response involving nationwide cooperation as far as v’s. Never. The attitude from the get go was partisan politics it was never a nationwide ” let’s get ’er done ” . There was never any question about multiple ongoing mutations since the only way to prevent that was immediate nationwide cooperation on all fronts especially v. So there you have it we did it to ourselves. Did we as a nation learn anything??? highly unlikely. c

Yay! Negative tests 3 days in a row! Still some stuffiness and a little tired, especially at night.

Our next door neighbor took the Red Hot Chili Peppers tickets, and then I am good to go to our other concert. DH will drive adn then we only have about a block to the arena from the hotel. DH and MIL still negative and symtpom free so it looks like they are in the clear.

Doing a happy dance here!

Airborne viruses mutate at an astounding rate, so it is unrealistic to expect a vaccine to work 100% However, look at it this way, covid only had an initial .4% rate of spread, which is four times that of the flu, (that's around .1% and even then many folks die from that, which makes any little bit the flu vaccine can do to help something on the plus side). Look how many people died around the world with even 4 tenths of a percent rate of infection. So if they vaccine is even 60% effective, it is preventing thousands of people from getting sick. This is statistical math, which I guess most people aren't familiar with, they want 100% fool proof math, which is not how natural systems work, they are so varied and complex. Lots of people owe their existence to birth control that was 99% effective . . . small percentage multiplied over large, large numbers over time, time, time still has considerable effect. It's complex and variable math, which is why it seems awfully sophomoric to me to criticize "experts" who can't give you immediate, fool proof advice all the time no matter what. You don't even want to listen to the long set of "maybe" or "ifs" that they would couch there advice in, it's called confusing. Or who knows, I know it gets your post erased on here. But we have to make decisions like this on a whole host of important issues every day.

I think the only reason I have avoided Covid is I have not returned to work, which like GS, was teaching which would expose me to considerable risk every day, no matter what. I used to get the flu every year too when I was teaching. Have enjoyed not having that to deal with, even though I miss teaching a lot. The other thing I have avoided is airline, bus or train travel . . . sigh.

Edited to add that covid is one reason many teachers are deciding to retire early, they are getting on in years and just don't want the constant health challenges. And of course fewer and fewer young people are choosing teaching or nursing as career paths . . .

Yay!! Have a great time at that concert!!

Lucky neighbor.! Glad you found somebody to take the tickets. Super pumped that you are getting to go to the concert or maybe even already went and in the clear from crazy covid.

Yes, we are home! I felt pretty normal the whole trip, just a little tired today. Lots of rain on the way home, and it took an extra hour, but we are home safe. I am scheduled to go back to work tomorrow, and I will test again in the morning, but I have remained negative.

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Ghost

Great pics! Glad you had a good time. :)

I went to bed at 9 p.m. last night and I need to go back to school today. Still testing negative.