Weekend Plans Post: The Home Stretch?
Colorado recently revamped how its giving shots out. We used to have 3 phases… Phases 1A and 1B, Phase 2, and Phases 3. Now we have only two: Phases 1A, Phase 1B.1, Phase 1B.2, Phase 1B.3, Phase 1B.4, and Phase 2.
We were in the old Phase 2, now we’re in Phase 1B.4. Moving up! We’re in the 1Bs now!
Phase 1B.3 starts being eligible for shots tomorrow.
Fingers are crossed. We just gotta get to the finish line. Two more months to slow the spread.
And then… oh jeez. What then?
Well, You get the shot, right? And then you take off for a week. Just don’t risk it. Stay in the house, burrow down. After that… well, start easing back into it. Go to work if you must (masked, of course) and still be careful, careful, careful.
But then? Well, start doing things again. Go grocery shopping for yourself again. Like, not just the “while I’m at the pharmacy, I’ll get some baking potatoes ’cause we’re out” kinda shopping, but the GET A CART shopping. Wander slowly up and down the aisles. Take a moment to check out every single new product that you might have missed. Blue Diamond Almonds has Ghost Pepper Almonds now. Huh.
After the grocery store, maybe wander to Costco. Stroll slowly. Heck, we reached the point a few years ago where we got good at knowing that we wanted the stuff in this corner, those two aisles, and this other aisle down there. Now? Just leisure. Go down the office supplies aisle. Yeah, you don’t need any. That’s fine. Maybe there have been pen advancements.
After that, perhaps eat out at a restaurant. It doesn’t have to be fancy! Chili’s! Chipotle! Olive Garden! Get the soup, salad, and breadsticks and just lose a couple of hours. (Tip outrageously, of course.)
Oh, the climbing gym! We can go climbing again! Go bouldering! My gosh, I’m sure I’ve forgotten everything.
And… jeez. Once everything *REALLY* settles down, maybe we can go to Disneyworld again. Catch a fireworks show. Go to the Frozen sing-along and become honorary citizens of Arendelle. Go through Pirates of the Caribbean and notice how much has changed since the 80’s. Visit the Haunted Mansion. Just, you know, sit at a table and eat something.
Just gotta make it another two months.
So… what are you most looking forward to doing?
(Featured image is “Waiting”. Taken by Maribou.)
I get my second dose today and I still feel like it’s gonna be a good six months before I consider eating a meal INSIDE a restaurant. Carry out, sure. Maybe even go to a place with outdoor seating and sit there if the weather is good.
I’m contemplating traveling (by train, would be overnight, would get a roommette) to go see my mom in May but I am going to wait a bit longer to see if we get Surge 4 of Wave 1 or not. Because I can’t believe this is going to be over. I may need counseling before I can go back out fully into the world but I still think it will be at LEAST six months before it gets more “normal” for me than “hey I don’t feel like I’m taking my life into my hands to go buy milk”
I have nothing booked this weekend because second shot and I’ve been hearing horror stories of people being absolutely flattened for like a day because of the immune response to it. Even arranged to have simple to fix food on hand in case I just can’t. Hoping I will be pleasantly surprised.Report
Good luck. I have heard a number of flattening stories but also a couple of “I had a headache, I took some aspirin, I took a nap, then the next day was back to normal” stories. Keep us posted! I know that pretty much everybody here is antsy in the pantsy about getting their own shot and your stories will reduce our own uncertainty.
And I think that covid will be about as unlikely as any other catastrophe you could imagine if you wait until after the two-week period to travel. (Train could hit a bison between here and there!)Report
If there’s any genetic link to how one reacts, I’m in for a decent experience: my mother reported almost no side effects (sore arm, mainly) after her second shot, and my uncle (my dad’s brother so currently the closest genetic link on that side) said he had a sore arm and a mild headache that didn’t even require tylenol.Report
About four hours in, definitely sore arm, slight back-of-the-head headache, but that’s also a common stress headache for me so I’m unwilling to say it’s linked to the vaccine.Report
this morning, yeah, I do feel a little crummy – muscle aches and tired. Not any worse than the tail end of a regular cold for me, and frankly, it reassures me because I take it to mean the vaccine “took”
also was extremely thirsty last night and drank a lot of water, which is not optimal before going to bed.Report
I think what will make things feel normal is when everyone starts getting sick from the flu again.
In 2020 there was almost no Seasonal Flu, because everyone was staying away from each other and wearing masks and washing their hands and so on. (In fact, it’s an interesting illustration of how big a deal COVID-19 actually is, because even though there was almost no flu we had an immense surge in COVID cases…)
So when people start getting the flu again, it’ll mean that we’re back to normal, because it means that people are going out without wearing masks, breathing their germs all over everyone else, rubbing their noses and then touching door handles, refusing under any circumstances to wash their hands, and so on.Report
I don’t have much grading to do this weekend. But I do have laundry. The weather is supposed to be nice, so I’ll prolly do some outside stuff, and there’s a board game or two the wife and I might play.
Good luck with your shot symptoms, fillyjonk. My wife had a rough go for like a day and a half with the second shot (moderna). Even with that, she was still happy to get the shots.Report
Phases 1A, Phase 1B.1, Phase 1B.2, Phase 1B.3, Phase 1B.4, and Phase 2.
This is the bureaucratic obverse of Our Phases go to 11.
It’s my birthday weekend and we’re contemplating going to the same local foodie place where we went for our anniversary 6-months ago… they have cabanas and various other precautions… and it made us realize, since my last birthday we’ve been out exactly once, 6-months ago on our Anniversary… at this place that has…Report
My state opened eligibility up for 1B.3 today, even though less than 50% of the 1B.2 people who want to get vaccinated have been able to. I’m in 1B.2 and have an appointment for Monday. My wife is in the same group and is probably a week or ten days away from being able to sign up for an appointment. Granted, we have chosen to stay with our regular provider (Kaiser Permanente) rather than putting ourselves on a dozen different lists.Report
We registered my wife since she’s teaching… the interesting thing about the experience was that it was literal translation by techies of all the ‘essential’ and ‘at risk’ groups from whatever document they were given. A ‘select all that apply list’ that strated in 1a… like, Emergency Room Doctor, Surgeon, Nurse, over 80, nursing home resident, nursing home worker… As if there was a theoretical possibility of someone who was all of those things … which would trigger the immediate dispatch of a helicopter vaccine tech to that hero; then each page got less selective such that you could start to parse, I wonder how camera and sound-boom operators made it into the category with day-care workers… but well below Teachers and Media, mind you. [No politics, just facts].
While we both have ‘an ID number’ other than telling us we have an ID number, there has not been a single update or email or anything since we ‘registered’ on Feb 17th. Not even an email to confirm that, yes, you are in sub-section 4 of 1b.3 of the third roll-out of the second wave of vaccine, congratulations.
The rest I’ll save for the politics thread on the vaccine roll-out 🙂Report
Maryland is in phase 1C out of 3. But there are only three subphases in phase 1, and no subphases in phases 2 and 3, so we’re really halfway there, except there are hardly any people in the first two subphases of phase 1, so we’re really just starting.Report
You guys function on a different planet from me.
Here in South Africa, I have no expectation of getting a shot in 2021. South Africa had to suspend our AstraZeneca shots because it’s proven too ineffective against out variant of the virus. But I am extremely relieved to know that the 5 people I personally know that work in health care have been vaccinated with the J&J vaccine that our government managed to procure by scrounging around for unused testing stock. Yes, that is what we have been reduced to. Because all the rest have been taken.
For the rest of us? We just have to carry on.
Within a South African context, I am extremely lucky that me and most of my friends and family are members of the priviledged section of society. I do not mean that sarcastically at all. White. Middle class. Employed and in positions that largely allow remote working. Living in suburbs where social distanding is actually an option. So we can keep ourselves relatively safe.
Oh, the word ‘relatively’ works so hard: Our entire risk profile is just totally different from yours.
We have been shopping ‘like normal’ for months now. Masked, yes. Try to socially distance? yes. But what can you do if the guy at the counter wears his mask under his nose? He travels to work in a minibus taxi carrying 15 people for 1.5 hours from a township where multigenerational families live in a shack so he recons WTF with wearing a mask properly. And how can I blame him?
Our schools are open. Masked and no social activities and tempratures taken when the kids enter the school etc but seriously – how much can you really socially distance primary school kids? We just don’t have a choice because more children are dying of malnutrition (missing government sponsored school meals) than of covid. My own children are in no such danger but our public school is also open so… what do I do? I send them there and hope they don’t return with a virus that kills me or my husband.
We go to restaurants but we dine outside. And we tip double because we know business is bad for the waiters.
We see friends but outside and no hugs.
And the kids see grandma but we just… try not to think about the possible consequences.
Because we just don’t know when that vaccine is coming, and we can’t put our lives on hold indefinetelyReport
That sounds awful, Susara. Good luck.
Merck and J&J are working together to up production. I’m hoping that they keep pumping them out until there are enough shots for everybody on the planet.Report
I’m sorry if my post seems to communicate only that it’s terrible here and you guys should be grateful for what you have 😉 I was more attempting to raise the issue of risk profiles, and how we make decisions based on the different circumstances that we have.
In the case of covid, for instance, we all know that the measures to control this virus inherrently hurts the economy. Because the majority of South Africans are poor, our government have had to drop our lockdown levels much faster than what they would have preferred or what is medically best practise.
But my social circle are middle class, with circumstances that enable us to isolate much more strictly than what the government requires. So our family could decide to home school, or not see friends at all, not see my 81- year old mother at all, only do online shopping. But we do all those things – carefully, with masks and social distancing where we can. But with the understanding that there is a risk.
So when I hear that American children have not been to school in a year, I am horrified. I know what our 12 weeks of remote learning did to our children’s mental and intellectual health – to think Americans have been doing this for a year is mind bogling. To read the level of isolation that so many posters on this group is living under… it’s terrible.
All this means that weirdly we actually have a much more normal life than what you do. But yes, it’s a risk.
Part of the reason why we are willing to take that risk, is because we know we are in this for a much longer haul. If you’re in the water when someone shoots at you, you can dive and hold your breath for a minute. But if you know the guy is going to be there for another week then at some stage you just have to take your chances with the bullets.Report
Looks like South Africa has had a huge drop in the number of new cases recently. But I guess the new variant transmits more easily, so who knows if the decrease will be sustainable.
Do you think the official numbers are accurate?Report
I trust our hospitalisation numbers, and those are coming down very nicely. The infection rate numbers are off by a factor of 10 at least, but I think that is true world wide.
The new variant has already taken over here; there are indications that some of our poorer communities have a 60% infection rate. As long as we don’t get a third variant to which exposure to the first or second doesn’t provide immunity, we should be much better off going in to winter.
Interestingly, our schools managed to open last year, and again this year after the peak of our second wave, without an accompanying increase in infections or hospitalisations. So somehow the imperfect measures we have in place at our schools are quite effective in general.Report
My college class WhatsApp chat group was discussing vaccine reactions yesterday. We are mostly high 50s (a couple of low 60s) y.o., and distributed all over the world, mostly across Europe, with some USA, LatAm, and, interesting for comparison, Israel.
The anecdotal consensus was:
If you hadn’t had a previous COVID infection
1. First shot had no symptoms in Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines , very, very, very mild ones in Moderna.
2. Mild symptoms in Pfizer’s second shot, similar to Modena’s first. Rough 2-3 days of high fever nausea and headaches in Moderna’s. Probably attributable to the difference (3 vs 5 weeks of additional antibodies building) between the two. No one knew of an AZ second shot.
If you had had COVID, it was bad from the first shot. The more recent the infection, the worse the reaction. Again, 3-4 days, perhaps a week, in which you felt like you were going through Covid again. This applied to asymptomatic cases too. Even if you didn’t have symptoms before, you are up for a rough week.
I had my first Pfizer shot last Friday. A colleague had a Moderna one two days before that. He got a big sore lump in his arm, like a bad insect bite. I had nothing.Report
this tracks with the experiences of friends of my mom’s. One of them got Pfizer, and after her second shot only had a sore arm. The other one got Moderna and she had to go to bed for a day after her second shot. My mom got the Pfizer and only had arm soreness and a mild headache after her second shot
I got Pfizer and I’m feeling the second shot a little (mainly muscle ache and fatigue) but it’s not BAD, if today were a teaching day I’d probably have just gone to work and powered through (though maybe asked my dept. chair if I could lie down on the sofa in the conference room between my classes)Report
I’ve been packing and packing, preparing for the move in a few weeks. Schools are in session, or some version of at home and in person. Saw some school buses out and about Friday. School team sports is back and they are competing. I’ve been doing jujitsu for about 9 months now. No one has gotten covid. Restaurants are opening up, and the politicians are a posturing to the press over who should be getting vaccines to the Mayor, so….things are getting back to normal. I sense a “screw this we’re getting back to our lives” mindset in many folks here. Bout time.Report