How are you all dealing with coronavirus and the restrictions... #2

No you wouldn’t with the way immature people are lashing out at people just doing their jobs, wait staff, airline staff and other workers is beyond belief!

I completely agree with you - and I live in Idaho, where 99% of my neighbors are unvaccinated and unmasked. That is why I have to pay extra money for N95 masks or better, and why I also wear goggles, double gloves (disposable under cheap cloth gloves from Target), a KN95 mask over my N95 mask, and clothing from head to toe - even covering my ears. I look "crazy," but at least I've not had to pay for exorbitant medical copays that everyone else around here has to pay because of their continued negligence and utter disdain for the disabled and the elderly.



Anyway, if this is not allowed, I put it inside a Trigger warning thingy. It can be deleted. I just don't know what is allowed to express, because religion has infiltrated politics and this pandemic and our overall mental health related to all of it.

@BreakForTheLight - Good luck on your test and the job interview! I hope the test is negative, and I hope your job interview is positive!

I miss traveling, but I could never have enough energy to trave these days, especially with what you went through. Yikes!

Well my dad was worried about me so I went ahead and booked my 3rd the week before Christmas, fingers crossed I don’t get a nasty reaction.

I just read that AZ antibodies fade around 5-6 months like Pfizer but AZ are claiming the T-cell response is higher and remains, if so that’s good news and would support mixing vaccines.

They don't allow AZ here in the U.S., but I've had Moderna for 3 full shots. So far, so good. But I also remain isolated, double-masked, sometimes goggled, usually fully clothed from head to toe, and double-gloved (disposable under cloth). I also spend time showering and doing other rituals after any potential exposure. So I act as though I'm fighting off the plague. I just can't afford to be an undiagnosed autoimmune case, since my nephew had a really bad breakthrough case of Covid-19, despite being fully vaccinated a month past his second jab. He said it was his autoimmune disorder, which runs in our family. So I freak out a little.

But I trust the vaccines. I just wished that they would stop competing and just create one vaccine for most, and then focus on finding the right ones for the severe risk populations (including increasing proper screening and diagnoses for them, too).

Lupus, GI problems, cancer, and prediabetes (not full diabetes) runs in our family, and so does obesity with 25% of my family. It's mostly my father's side (he's European American and no longer alive). My Japanese mother's side of the family seems to deal mostly with heart disease (not from obesity, but other factors), osteoporosis, etc. I lost a few of my mom's relatives to either heart disease or from things like one of them not being vaccinated with that one shot when you stub your toe. He died from something completely preventable. Another one died of a heart attack, but she suffered from alcoholism. None of my family have CFS/ME, which I have. But I do have thyroid issues and some blood abnormalities.

Sorry, I kind of went off on a tangent here.

It's great to see how other countries are dealing with this pandemic. I'm right there with you all in the good fight. I just tend to go overboard a little (or maybe a lot).

I wished that they would just recommend boosters for everyone every 5 months, so that we are fully covered with no gaps in between the waning. I also wish there were a way to eradicate this once and for all somehow. I really wanted this pandemic to be over by now.

@Discombobulated I was worried about the same thing getting my 3rd just before a holiday! I am relieved it worked out well and hope you have good results also! I guess there's no way to predict how 'bad' our reactions will be each time - it just seems to vary so much for everyone.


I had a new experience the other day - I went to a packed restaurant with tables so close together I struggled to get into my seat. No staff wearing masks, which actually seems more fair since none of the customers are. It was like the old days. I felt brief bursts of anxiety rather than paranoid the whole time I was there.

I think it's wise to get it as soon as possible especially when you are exposed to so many people every day.

I was worried about getting the booster as well. I was shivering the night after & the next day after getting Pfizer, but we also had a broken heating so not sure if it was the shot or just getting used to the cold. And I had quite a bad headache the first day. 2 days after I was fine.

Germany and the Netherlands might be heading for another lockdown :/ for NL I can understand, but German still has a lot of restrictions currently. That are now getting even stricter. Is everything so far been completely pointless?

Yes I find it very interesting to read other countries reactions too, this thread has been more enlightening than many news reports for that reason - we’re all ordinary people on the ground.

Does the US have J&J? Because that is similar to the AZ I believe in that it uses the adenovirus so also has T cell response. Also I think the Russian and Chinese vaccines do too.

I really understand your caution, especially if you feel others around aren’t taking care. My niece had a nasty dose of covid too despite 2x vaccination. Yet before vaccinations were available my friend’s elderly father with several pre existing serious conditions had covid with no symptoms…. It’s quite perplexing.

Thank you @Discombobulated. BTW, not sure if you celebrate Thanksgiving in your country, but if you do, Happy Thanksgiving!

The US does have J&J, but it is not as affective as the others. In fact, the suggestions for boosters for a few months now have been for J&J recipients to get the mRNA vaccine - either the Pfizer full dose or the Moderna 1/2 dose booster. Some, like my friend, who received the one-shot J&J vaccine decided to "start all over" and receive the Pfizer first and second doses, almost pretending that he was "never vaccinated" (even though he was). He did fine with that, and he's in his late-50s with a few underlying conditions. He is a trainer at the gym, so he's survived Chicago living at the gym this entire time with one mask. Here I am afraid to go anywhere, and I wear a double-mask whenever I do.

For those who are immunocompromised, they've been able to get the full Moderna "booster" (though they don't call it that for the Moderna 2nd shot for J&J or 3rd shot for either Moderna or Pfizer two-series shots; they just simply call it the 3rd jab or 3rd shot in the series or something to that effect). They (the government, including the CDC and FDA here, like to keep us confused, it seems, LOL

@SprinkL3 yes that does sound confusing! Idk but your friend might be in a good position to have had that J&J shot 1st as hopefully he’s got the benefit of T-Cell response from what I’ve been reading.

Okay so looks like I’m the first to post about Omicron here. Here we go again. 2 cases here already. Masks back on in stores (probably they should never have been off). Just hoping this one isn’t going to be as bad as feared.

OMICRON UPDATE - Per "Your Local Epidemiologist":

Cases reported in their tabular:

South Africa = 99 confirmed, 990 probable

Botswana = 6 confirmed, 9 probable

England = 2 confirmed

Hong Kong = 2 confirmed

Italy = 1 confirmed

Israel = 1 confirmed, 7 probable

Belgium = 1 confirmed

Czech Republic = 1 confirmed

Netherlands = 61 probable

Germany = 3 probable

Denmark = 2 probable

Austria = 1 probable

Global Totals = 113 confirmed, 1,073 probable

@Discombobulated - Yes, my friend is in a healthy position. My nephew has had a breakthrough case and survived. He has an autoimmune disorder, so his condition and his medications prevent him from absorbing the vaccines fully, but he nonetheless was fully vaccinated when he had a breakthrough case. He was just in the hospital for surgery a month prior, and then he celebrated his birthday with other young persons in their 20s and early 30s, who accidentally gave him Covid-19 (since many of his friends weren't vaccinated). He wound up in the hospital again, but not in ICU. He was just there for observation for maybe one or two days. He claims that the vaccines saved his life from severe disease or death. Many of the deaths from breakthrough cases are among the unvaccinated, partially vaccinated, or immunocompromised persons (the young disabled, the middle-aged disabled, the elderly disabled). It is therefore imperative that all persons get the vaccines unless there are allergic reactions to all vaccines. Some people may be allergic to some vaccines but not others, so they elect to take the vaccines that won't give them an allergic reaction. My nephew had the Moderna vaccine - which is notably the vaccine with the lowest rate for breakthrough cases among healthy persons WITHOUT immunocompromised conditions.

Vaccine hesitancy is largely due to the following reasons:

1. Safety and efficacy concerns

2. Preference for physiological immunity

3. Distrust in government and health organizations

4. Autonomy and personal freedom

But to dispel any rumors/misinformation/disinformation and allay any concerns, Johns Hopkins Medicine has stated the following science-based information:

*****

Even with new Variants of Concern (VoCs), vaccines still protect you from the other variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that can lead to the disease COVID-19. Like the influenza vaccinations, it is important to protect yourself and others from spreading any communicable diseases during a pandemic, due to possible "crisis standards of care" that could pose a threat to getting care in emergency rooms and intensive care units when Covid-19 cases are too high and thus may take precedence in some hospitals and treatment facilities.

Additionally, vaccines also help prevent hefty hospital bills due to long hospital stays, long-term rehabilitation for the unvaccinated who do survive with severe Long-Covid disease (which may be permanently disabling, thus causing more than hefty hospital bills, but also unemployment, career loss, possible relational loss, and definite financial loss), etc. Who needs $1000 to over $1,000,000 in hospital bills that could be prevented with vaccines?! When it comes to the economy, it makes more financial sense to use preventative measures rather than risk your own pocket book and the taxpayer dollars of others'. The vaccines are a win-win situation, even though certain disinformation campaigns will continue to spread lies based on political extremism and religious extremism. Lies do not equate to true religious practices, for one, so this is how easy it may be for cults to terrorize and cripple economies, infrastructures, groups, and individual human lives. Also, political extremism has also become blended with not only political-based disinformation campaigns, which includes extreme versions of lies intended to harm (not help) both individuals and groups, both the poor and the rich, and mostly the unvaccinated from their own parties and families - just to prove a political point and "to be right." They are far from "right."

For these reasons and more, there are many people who are now getting vaccinated for the first time, and there are many people who are getting boosters. There are many people who are doing what they can to spread truth (like I am doing here), which is NOT POLITICAL, NOT RELIGIOUS, but rather TRUTHFUL HEALTH-BASED INFORMATION BASED ON EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICES AND SCIENCE, AND CAN ALSO IMPROVE BOTH (DIRECT) PHYSICAL HEALTH AS WELL AS (INDIRECT) MENTAL HEALTH, insofar that fewer loss/grief traumas, fewer medical traumas, and fewer related traumas from avoiding severe or fatal illnesses are preventative measures supporting mental health.

There are way more benefits and fewer risks to getting vaccinated, when compared to those who aren't getting vaccinated or who only get partially vaccinated.

Yay, more doom and gloom! So sick of it all. I'm sure the entire world is. Just don't know what else to say anymore.

And sick of the sob stories from the side who shouldn't be complaining. I read a story yesterday about a family who had just come back from South Africa and had been stuck on a plane for 4 hours. I listened to the interview with the dad and he actually didn't seem to be that upset about it, but the article was written so dramatically, like it was some traumatising experience, and oh no now all these people will have to go into isolation and this dad can't see his other two daughters and it's such a horrible thing to happen to them! Yes, it absolutely does suck and the organisation was a mess at the airport and should've done better. BUT these are the risks you take when you travel across continents in the middle of a pandemic. It's not the first time people have been stuck abroad. If I would have had to quarantine after coming from the UK it would have sucked, but I knew it was a risk I was taking and I wouldn't expect a newspaper to turn it into a story

All these stories from people being a tiny bit inconvenienced by the restrictions annoy me so much. It's like people still don't understand that we're in an exceptional situation - a freaking pandemic - and things sometimes just suck. I'd much rather be stuck on a plane than on a ventilator in a hospital! Sure, complain to your friends and family because it IS a ****** situation, but do we really need to turn every tiny thing into a "news" article? Life isn't all smooth sailing, sometimes things go wrong and it's not nice and I totally understand people get upset, but we shouldn't be giving more fodder to the anti-everything crazies.

My sympathy goes out to the people who did all they could to protect themselves and still got sick. To all the people who have had important surgeries postponed because the hospitals are overrun by covid patients. Someone who's had to miss ONE party because they couldn't get tested in time and don't want a vaccination? Stop whining and just get yourself vaccinated.

1. They shouldn't have traveled in the first place, unless it was for work. They know that there are surges and mutations, despite the vaccination rates increasing. The pandemic is a global responsibility, so the entire world has to reach at minimum 75% vaccination before herd immunity is possible. Until then, we should all be only traveling for essential reasons or keeping it local travel so long as your group is fully vaccinated or meeting outdoors if mixed or unknown.

2. Given two years of this pandemic, you would think that people would abstain from international travel around the winter months, when cases are likely to tick upwards. Although mutations can occur during any time of the year, it appears that the worst cases occur during the winter months. They knew the risks of potentially being stranded if the virus mutated into another VoC or worse. They need to accept the consequences because their choices may cause more global and domestic spread, disease, long-term disabilities, death, medical traumas, grief/loss traumas, and otherwise.

3. Many elderly persons and disabled persons and immunocompromised persons have been consistently isolating in place. It's been very traumatic for us when the world doesn't care about us; they just want us to stay home and endure the trauma instead of their able-bodied, likely younger, likely more affluent selves. Welcome to our world, I say! But they only have to endure through a short amount of isolation, whereas our isolation is long-term and likely pre- and post-pandemic, too. It's not that we're "used to it," but rather, we've been struggling with that trauma - the "isolation trauma" - for many years, and it's gone ignored until the able-bodied, younger, working-class-and-above groups take issue with what we have experienced for the greater part of our lives! I agree, this boo-hoo, I have to isolate is an insult to those of us who had no choice because of the ongoing pandemic that just never ends.

4. I'm sick of doom and gloom, too. I'm sick of preventable situations continuing. I'm sick of all the divisions and politics infiltrating everything, but I'm even more sick of the type of censuring that is keeping us reacting instead of proactively discussing, advocating, and making affective change. When left to their own volition, a great percentage of the world will not abide by recommendations or science, so there needs to be laws and law enforcers to make this pandemic stop, and to prevent an ongoing endemic (including funding loss from it no longer being an emergency-based pandemic).

Let's hope omicron is the common cold variant, contagious but mild, so this thing can just freaking end already. I am so over it, like everyone else. I'm sick of wearing a mask everywhere, sick of the shots, sick of staying home all the time, sick of not seeing people, and tired of all the insanity. We continue to do worse here locally than we ever did before. The test results are quite backed up. One place did surveillance testing for a potential outbreak nine days ago and they STILL do not have the results. By the time they get them, it will be useless anyway.


What the heck is with the 61 people testing positive on the flight in the Netherlands? Were the pre-flight test results fake? The post flight results wrong? Do the rapid tests even work well enough to be useful? I am aware of too many false negatives for me to have any faith in those.

I'm with the rest of you. Completely sick of it all. Everything feels like one step forward, two steps back. My husband is heading back to being very cautious. We were invited to an outdoor event yesterday and he didn't want to go.


We have been doing relatively well, but now I wonder what the new variant will bring. Here we went from closed borders to few limits on people coming in who are able to validate their vaccines. It happened too quickly in my opinion. December-February is high season for Patagonia. Reading travel groups/forums, there are a lot of people planning trips and I can imagine there will be a lot of opposition from the tourism industry if the government tries to reinstate travel restrictions.

@Discombobulated - The Chinese vaccines Sinovac and Sinopharm are inactivated viruses, which is traditional vaccine technology. Here we also bought some doses of another Chinese vaccine, Cansino, which is like J&J, one-dose adenovirus. I think the plan was to use them in less accessible rural areas in the south.


I am pretty sure that Sputnik is adenovirus too. The tricky thing with Sputnik is that dose 1 and 2 are different formulations. Argentina ordered a lot of Sputnik and got the first doses as planned. Then Russia had delays with sending them the second dose formulation so people couldn't finish their vaccine sequence. I read that the US donated vaccines to Argentina, Moderna, I think, and they were going to use those as a second dose. It seems like no one knows how effective that will be since Sputnik only has approval in a limited number of countries and no one had tested it in conjunction with Moderna.

Here one 30-year-old had a clot reaction to AZ, so they restricted its use to people 55 and older. When I went for my booster, they were checking peoples' ages to make sure that only that age group got AZ as a booster. If it is true it gives more T-cell protection, then it may turn out to be a good thing that it is being used in older populations that are more at risk. At least with the boosters, the doses aren't going to waste as they might have otherwise. When it was initially restricted to 55+, most people in that age group were already vaccinated.

That's what a lot of people are wondering. A possible explanation is incubation time as it's quite a long flight. A less sensitive rapid test before departure and a PCR test after arrival? Unfortunately the quarantine enforcement in NL is highly lacking. People who arrived on earlier flights are being "advised/requested" to get tested and stay in isolation. Is anyone checking they actually do? Probably not.

13 cases of the new variant have been confirmed now.

I heard there were also 1 or 2 cases in Australia. I assume those people are now in strict isolation but I still wonder how. Wasn't Australia the country with some of the strictest rules, not even letting their own citizens come back into the country? How do they suddenly have people returning from Africa with a new virus variant?

I posted this on the current events Covid discussion, but I thought it might be interesting to share here too. The government has issued some data on the boosters here:

They looked at the period from August 11th (when boosters started) to November 20th.

A bit over 8.2 million people received boosters during that time.

Over that period, we had 1,956 Covid deaths nation wide. Of those deaths, only 45 were people who had gotten a booster (2.3%).

Total infections during that time were 118,639 new cases. 4,607 of these cases had gotten the booster (3.9%).

During this time a total of 50 people with the booster ended up in the ICU.

The information comes from the Ministry of Science and Technology's official data.

Did they indicate that those 50 people with the booster shots were immunocompromised, >65 years old, and/or high-risk cases?