staying home
I decided not to go up to visit the friend on the farm.
All my COVID rapid antigen tests come back negative (they're the 90% accuracy sort), but I'm still tired and exhausted and 'bronchial' (as I've been on and off for months), and I didn't want to be expending the effort of navigating a strange place and my health and the risk levels all at once.
So I called my friends at 6:30am this morning (yes, they were awake) and told them I wasn't going. I feel a little bad that it meant the guy who I was supposed to be sharing driving with would have to drive all the way up himself, but...
I've rested most of the day, laid in bed and read. The chest still isn't feeling great, although a couple of puffs of ventolin helps. Also, I'm feeling a bit overheated, although that could be because I've been cooking for the last hour.
At this point, sadly, I think that the assumption truly is going to have to be that anyone who is doing anything out in the community (even basic shopping) is likely to contract COVID.
As of midnight tonight, they're loosening the definition of what's a close contact and so what entitles one to a PCR (definitive) test. And the PCR tests are what the case numbers will be based off. So we could find ourselves in the situation where everyone has COVID, but the official numbers are 150,000 because that's the limit of the number of tests that we can process in a day.
(Actually, the official numbers would be more like 20,000, because the only reason that they got through 150,000 tests a day was because they were 'batching', which is where you bulk-test the samples and get the results for the batch: if it returns negative then all those samples are negative. If it's positive, then you run the samples individually. This works when you have a low rate of positive cases. But when you have a lot of positive cases, then every batch turns out positive and you end up having to process all the samples individually. So the official number of cases are limited by the processing power of the labs.)
Anyway. This is basically the equivalent of "if we test less, we'll get less cases". Except promoted by political operators who are our highest elected officials. And running for election next year.
You thought Trump was bad.
--
The people I really feel for are the immunosuppressed, people with respiratory issues, anyone with co-morbidities, and people with kids too young to get vaccinated.
Plus, you know, I'd really like to know more about this 'mild' version of COVID: yes, fine, if it's less debilitating and still leaves one with antibodies, great. But is the percentage of Long COVID cases still 10-30% for Omicron?
My sister works with the National Disability Insurance Scheme, whereby people apply for reasonable measure towards accessibility in their lives and the government knocks all of it back the first time, makes them jump through innumerable hoops the second time, and then hires lawyers to make sure that they can't get anything through the third time. You'd better hope to God, your bank account, and your superannuation (retirement fund) that you don't get something that hits you hard enough that you can't work. Because if you can't work, the capitalists would prefer to bury you with a stake in your heart.
Not even to mention our hospital and medical staff who've been effectively thrown to the wolves. Did you know that federal politicians locked hospital workers into a no-more-than-2%-wage-rise in early 2020? But, oh, they're doing such a great job...
*grr*
Finally, I would like to state here and now (if I haven't already) that contracting COVID is not a moral failure. It's not "The Covid Prosperity Gospel" where you do all the right things and therefore you will never get COVID. It's risk mitigation. And although you can mitigate risk, you can reduce risk, it is really hard to entirely remove it.
All my COVID rapid antigen tests come back negative (they're the 90% accuracy sort), but I'm still tired and exhausted and 'bronchial' (as I've been on and off for months), and I didn't want to be expending the effort of navigating a strange place and my health and the risk levels all at once.
So I called my friends at 6:30am this morning (yes, they were awake) and told them I wasn't going. I feel a little bad that it meant the guy who I was supposed to be sharing driving with would have to drive all the way up himself, but...
I've rested most of the day, laid in bed and read. The chest still isn't feeling great, although a couple of puffs of ventolin helps. Also, I'm feeling a bit overheated, although that could be because I've been cooking for the last hour.
At this point, sadly, I think that the assumption truly is going to have to be that anyone who is doing anything out in the community (even basic shopping) is likely to contract COVID.
As of midnight tonight, they're loosening the definition of what's a close contact and so what entitles one to a PCR (definitive) test. And the PCR tests are what the case numbers will be based off. So we could find ourselves in the situation where everyone has COVID, but the official numbers are 150,000 because that's the limit of the number of tests that we can process in a day.
(Actually, the official numbers would be more like 20,000, because the only reason that they got through 150,000 tests a day was because they were 'batching', which is where you bulk-test the samples and get the results for the batch: if it returns negative then all those samples are negative. If it's positive, then you run the samples individually. This works when you have a low rate of positive cases. But when you have a lot of positive cases, then every batch turns out positive and you end up having to process all the samples individually. So the official number of cases are limited by the processing power of the labs.)
Anyway. This is basically the equivalent of "if we test less, we'll get less cases". Except promoted by political operators who are our highest elected officials. And running for election next year.
You thought Trump was bad.
--
The people I really feel for are the immunosuppressed, people with respiratory issues, anyone with co-morbidities, and people with kids too young to get vaccinated.
Plus, you know, I'd really like to know more about this 'mild' version of COVID: yes, fine, if it's less debilitating and still leaves one with antibodies, great. But is the percentage of Long COVID cases still 10-30% for Omicron?
My sister works with the National Disability Insurance Scheme, whereby people apply for reasonable measure towards accessibility in their lives and the government knocks all of it back the first time, makes them jump through innumerable hoops the second time, and then hires lawyers to make sure that they can't get anything through the third time. You'd better hope to God, your bank account, and your superannuation (retirement fund) that you don't get something that hits you hard enough that you can't work. Because if you can't work, the capitalists would prefer to bury you with a stake in your heart.
Not even to mention our hospital and medical staff who've been effectively thrown to the wolves. Did you know that federal politicians locked hospital workers into a no-more-than-2%-wage-rise in early 2020? But, oh, they're doing such a great job...
*grr*
Finally, I would like to state here and now (if I haven't already) that contracting COVID is not a moral failure. It's not "The Covid Prosperity Gospel" where you do all the right things and therefore you will never get COVID. It's risk mitigation. And although you can mitigate risk, you can reduce risk, it is really hard to entirely remove it.