Coronavirus prep

Theoldguy1 wrote: »

ythannah wrote: »

Psychgrrl wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

jenilla1 wrote: »

missysippy930 wrote: »

lemurcat2 wrote: »

India's numbers are probably undercounted, though -- I found plenty of articles even from 2020 saying that. And it's clear that many places that were for whatever reason hit less hard early on got hit harder later, and the current situation in India is terrible.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/22/989768074/how-india-went-from-a-ray-of-hope-to-a-world-record-for-most-covid-cases-in-a-da

Older pieces include: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54176375 and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53510307

I agree it’s devastating and extremely sad. People are dying because of oxygen shortages.

Just yesterday, my daughter said her boss thinks she has covid. My daughter told her to get tested. She said no, it’s probably just a cold🤷🏻‍♀️How many people think this way? Her boss won’t get the vaccine either.

A couple of months ago, my husband's boss had "really bad allergies or something" for over a week, kept getting worse and worse. She didn't want to get tested because she didn't want to be forced to quarantine. She ended up in the hospital with COVID (she's OK now but she was sick enough to stay in the hospital for a week.) Meanwhile, she spread it around work, the health department found out and came in and sent a bunch of people home to quarantine (including my husband who ended up negative.) Three other people at work ended up coming down with COVID shortly after. There are a handful of people at his work who say, "Yeah, we've all already been exposed. We don't need the vaccine now." WTH, people. So yeah, plenty of people "think this way."

I was telling my mom just last week that I was hoping that COVID would help end the "work through illness" culture that exists in some professions. It was not at all uncommon in my workplace for people to come to work with really bad coughs . . . basically as long as you weren't vomiting or had a high fever, you'd come into work. This wasn't due to economic insecurity (we had the ability to work from home, we had sick days). It was just "how things were."

But I think the mindset will be hard to change, even with the year we've just had.

For some of us, being able to work from home has helped stem the risk to others. For some, like me, not having to get up, make myself "office ready," drive to work, and actually go in, has led to me pushing through and working form home when I should have been resting.

When I was very ill for a week at the beginning of the year I was offered the opportunity to work from home. No, I need to lie on my couch and run to the bathroom every 20 minutes and occasionally nap because I'm worn out trying to fight this thing, not work.

It's pretty much always been expected where I work if we were working from home due to being sick we were still working.

Good Lord.

There was no such thing as working from home in my organization prior to March 2020, they like to monitor employees closely. I'm sure they still do, just over VPN rather than in person.

I was hospitalized briefly for surgery in March of this year and my roommate was doing work-related virtual learning from her hospital bed. At full volume. I couldn't get out of there fast enough.

Here goes our hopes (at least mine).... But honestly, I am not surprised.
By Apoorva Mandavilli
May 3, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET

Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe

Widely circulating coronavirus variants and persistent hesitancy about vaccines will keep the goal out of reach. The virus is here to stay, but vaccinating the most vulnerable may be enough to restore normalcy.

Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.

Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is already clear, however, that the virus is changing too quickly, new variants are spreading too easily and vaccination is proceeding too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/health/covid-herd-immunity-vaccine.html

Theoldguy1 wrote: »

Psychgrrl wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

33gail33 wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

jenilla1 wrote: »

missysippy930 wrote: »

lemurcat2 wrote: »

India's numbers are probably undercounted, though -- I found plenty of articles even from 2020 saying that. And it's clear that many places that were for whatever reason hit less hard early on got hit harder later, and the current situation in India is terrible.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/22/989768074/how-india-went-from-a-ray-of-hope-to-a-world-record-for-most-covid-cases-in-a-da

Older pieces include: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54176375 and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53510307

I agree it’s devastating and extremely sad. People are dying because of oxygen shortages.

Just yesterday, my daughter said her boss thinks she has covid. My daughter told her to get tested. She said no, it’s probably just a cold🤷🏻‍♀️How many people think this way? Her boss won’t get the vaccine either.

A couple of months ago, my husband's boss had "really bad allergies or something" for over a week, kept getting worse and worse. She didn't want to get tested because she didn't want to be forced to quarantine. She ended up in the hospital with COVID (she's OK now but she was sick enough to stay in the hospital for a week.) Meanwhile, she spread it around work, the health department found out and came in and sent a bunch of people home to quarantine (including my husband who ended up negative.) Three other people at work ended up coming down with COVID shortly after. There are a handful of people at his work who say, "Yeah, we've all already been exposed. We don't need the vaccine now." WTH, people. So yeah, plenty of people "think this way."

I was telling my mom just last week that I was hoping that COVID would help end the "work through illness" culture that exists in some professions. It was not at all uncommon in my workplace for people to come to work with really bad coughs . . . basically as long as you weren't vomiting or had a high fever, you'd come into work. This wasn't due to economic insecurity (we had the ability to work from home, we had sick days). It was just "how things were."

But I think the mindset will be hard to change, even with the year we've just had.

But I have experienced "post viral cough" that can last up to 6 weeks. Even a regular cold or flu cough last about 10 days. I can't imagine anyone taking off 10 days for a cold. I don't get sick as much now, but when my kids were small it could happen 3 times a year. Like my work would not allow anyone to take off that much sick time for minor illnesses, I can't imagine most offices would. We get like 3 paid sick days.
Although I guess those who can work from home could do that, we didn't have that option before, we do now.

I understand that taking ten days off is out of scope for the majority of people, but I'm talking about a culture where people take no time off and assume whatever they have won't be communicated to others (or that it doesn't matter if it is). The point is that people often assume that what they have is no big deal and stories like the one above show that it sometimes IS a big deal.

Again, this is in the context of people being able to work from home, which I know is an option that wasn't freely available in the past and still isn't available for many workers now. I'm not at all judging people who need to go to work in order to keep their job or don't have sufficient sick days available.

Why we need better leave, and why everyone should have sick leave. I was really proud of our system--the UC gave everyone 128 hours of paid COVID leave that could be used for quarantine/isolation, to care for others, to help kids with online school. And they gave an additional 80 hours a couple months ago. I haven't used mine, but I have employees who have burned through all their paid leave with multiple quarantines and other COVID-related issues. The additional paid leave has truly been a blessing.

In previous years, I've watched office after office on campus go down with the flu, so clearly we were passing on the cooties. I would love to see us change our culture, but I think a lack pf paid leave (for whatever reason) will impact peoples' decisions to stay home. And I get it.

No offense, but other than a government entity (which I assume is like most, broke) and just raises taxes, how can an organization afford an additional 5+ weeks of sick time a person?

This is largely a cultural thing. I live in Finland and nobody here has any limits to paid sick days per time period.

Well, actually we do, but it’s literally a full year. How long is fully paid by employers depends on field of business (collective agreements) and duration of employment - I currently get maximum 6 weeks of company-paid leave per sickness and it only counts as the same sickness if it renews within 30 days, after that the 6-week limit resets. This means if I break my arm and go on sick leave for a month, and then need to have surgery on that arm to fix something 6 months later, it’s a ”different” sickness and the 6-week limit resets. 2 weeks per sickness is out of pocket for employers, after that the government reimburses a certain percentage (80% if I remember correctly) of salary, which is the same amount of money the government pays workers who have to take sick leave longer than what employers pay. This is on top of 5 weeks of paid vacation time per year per person, and our paid vacation is 1.5x salary due to weird historical reasons.

The only organizations I have ever heard of that can’t afford the sick leaves their employees take are tiny 1-5 employee organizations. Handling paid leave is cultural and systemic, there are different ways of handling it but most organizations can definitely afford it.

snowflake954 wrote: »

hipari wrote: »

Theoldguy1 wrote: »

Psychgrrl wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

33gail33 wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

jenilla1 wrote: »

missysippy930 wrote: »

lemurcat2 wrote: »

India's numbers are probably undercounted, though -- I found plenty of articles even from 2020 saying that. And it's clear that many places that were for whatever reason hit less hard early on got hit harder later, and the current situation in India is terrible.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/22/989768074/how-india-went-from-a-ray-of-hope-to-a-world-record-for-most-covid-cases-in-a-da

Older pieces include: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54176375 and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53510307

I agree it’s devastating and extremely sad. People are dying because of oxygen shortages.

Just yesterday, my daughter said her boss thinks she has covid. My daughter told her to get tested. She said no, it’s probably just a cold🤷🏻‍♀️How many people think this way? Her boss won’t get the vaccine either.

A couple of months ago, my husband's boss had "really bad allergies or something" for over a week, kept getting worse and worse. She didn't want to get tested because she didn't want to be forced to quarantine. She ended up in the hospital with COVID (she's OK now but she was sick enough to stay in the hospital for a week.) Meanwhile, she spread it around work, the health department found out and came in and sent a bunch of people home to quarantine (including my husband who ended up negative.) Three other people at work ended up coming down with COVID shortly after. There are a handful of people at his work who say, "Yeah, we've all already been exposed. We don't need the vaccine now." WTH, people. So yeah, plenty of people "think this way."

I was telling my mom just last week that I was hoping that COVID would help end the "work through illness" culture that exists in some professions. It was not at all uncommon in my workplace for people to come to work with really bad coughs . . . basically as long as you weren't vomiting or had a high fever, you'd come into work. This wasn't due to economic insecurity (we had the ability to work from home, we had sick days). It was just "how things were."

But I think the mindset will be hard to change, even with the year we've just had.

But I have experienced "post viral cough" that can last up to 6 weeks. Even a regular cold or flu cough last about 10 days. I can't imagine anyone taking off 10 days for a cold. I don't get sick as much now, but when my kids were small it could happen 3 times a year. Like my work would not allow anyone to take off that much sick time for minor illnesses, I can't imagine most offices would. We get like 3 paid sick days.
Although I guess those who can work from home could do that, we didn't have that option before, we do now.

I understand that taking ten days off is out of scope for the majority of people, but I'm talking about a culture where people take no time off and assume whatever they have won't be communicated to others (or that it doesn't matter if it is). The point is that people often assume that what they have is no big deal and stories like the one above show that it sometimes IS a big deal.

Again, this is in the context of people being able to work from home, which I know is an option that wasn't freely available in the past and still isn't available for many workers now. I'm not at all judging people who need to go to work in order to keep their job or don't have sufficient sick days available.

Why we need better leave, and why everyone should have sick leave. I was really proud of our system--the UC gave everyone 128 hours of paid COVID leave that could be used for quarantine/isolation, to care for others, to help kids with online school. And they gave an additional 80 hours a couple months ago. I haven't used mine, but I have employees who have burned through all their paid leave with multiple quarantines and other COVID-related issues. The additional paid leave has truly been a blessing.

In previous years, I've watched office after office on campus go down with the flu, so clearly we were passing on the cooties. I would love to see us change our culture, but I think a lack pf paid leave (for whatever reason) will impact peoples' decisions to stay home. And I get it.

No offense, but other than a government entity (which I assume is like most, broke) and just raises taxes, how can an organization afford an additional 5+ weeks of sick time a person?

This is largely a cultural thing. I live in Finland and nobody here has any limits to paid sick days per time period.

Well, actually we do, but it’s literally a full year. How long is fully paid by employers depends on field of business (collective agreements) and duration of employment - I currently get maximum 6 weeks of company-paid leave per sickness and it only counts as the same sickness if it renews within 30 days, after that the 6-week limit resets. This means if I break my arm and go on sick leave for a month, and then need to have surgery on that arm to fix something 6 months later, it’s a ”different” sickness and the 6-week limit resets. 2 weeks per sickness is out of pocket for employers, after that the government reimburses a certain percentage (80% if I remember correctly) of salary, which is the same amount of money the government pays workers who have to take sick leave longer than what employers pay. This is on top of 5 weeks of paid vacation time per year per person, and our paid vacation is 1.5x salary due to weird historical reasons.

The only organizations I have ever heard of that can’t afford the sick leaves their employees take are tiny 1-5 employee organizations. Handling paid leave is cultural and systemic, there are different ways of handling it but most organizations can definitely afford it.

Italy here. But how much do you pay in taxes there? Therein lies the rub. Coverage like the kind you're getting for sickness (and other things) costs a lot. Italy is always eyeing your coverage and the people want it, but we're already broke with the generous coverage we do get.

It's more or less the same in Belgium. You can be on sick leave for a year, 1 month at the cost of the employer, the next 11 months at a slightly reduced "salary" from the government. After that, you'll be considered as having a long term sickness and will go on an even more reduced disability benefit from the government.
But indeed @snowflake954, we have a very high tax rate, which is scaled up according to salary. The highest is 52% and that will apply for let's say a middle class salary. Those 52% are divided between real taxes (for everything the government needs to make a functioning country), and a rather large part goes straight to a "wellfare" portion, which will cover hospital and care facilities funds but also pensions (as from an age of 62 to 67 depending on your career), disabilities and sick leaves. Yes, it is a lot but I wouldn't trade it for any country in the world, as we all have access to top notch care. And yet still, people here are complaining ...

SModa61 wrote: »

Ok, now here is the dumb (but sincere) question of the day.

1) if receiving the vaccine causes our body to produce COVID antibodies AND
2) If one contracts COVID one's body produce antibodies

How can a doctor determine that a double vaccinated person has officially contracted COVID, especially for those cases that are asymptomatic? Wouldn't they be checking for antibodies to diagnose, yet a vaccinated person would have the antibodies regardless as well.

These are the odd things I think of when I do too much driving.

They don't use antibody tests to diagnose the virus. The diagnostic tests look for presence of the actual virus, not the antibodies.

Antiopelle wrote: »

snowflake954 wrote: »

hipari wrote: »

Theoldguy1 wrote: »

Psychgrrl wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

33gail33 wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

jenilla1 wrote: »

missysippy930 wrote: »

lemurcat2 wrote: »

India's numbers are probably undercounted, though -- I found plenty of articles even from 2020 saying that. And it's clear that many places that were for whatever reason hit less hard early on got hit harder later, and the current situation in India is terrible.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/22/989768074/how-india-went-from-a-ray-of-hope-to-a-world-record-for-most-covid-cases-in-a-da

Older pieces include: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-54176375 and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-53510307

I agree it’s devastating and extremely sad. People are dying because of oxygen shortages.

Just yesterday, my daughter said her boss thinks she has covid. My daughter told her to get tested. She said no, it’s probably just a cold🤷🏻‍♀️How many people think this way? Her boss won’t get the vaccine either.

A couple of months ago, my husband's boss had "really bad allergies or something" for over a week, kept getting worse and worse. She didn't want to get tested because she didn't want to be forced to quarantine. She ended up in the hospital with COVID (she's OK now but she was sick enough to stay in the hospital for a week.) Meanwhile, she spread it around work, the health department found out and came in and sent a bunch of people home to quarantine (including my husband who ended up negative.) Three other people at work ended up coming down with COVID shortly after. There are a handful of people at his work who say, "Yeah, we've all already been exposed. We don't need the vaccine now." WTH, people. So yeah, plenty of people "think this way."

I was telling my mom just last week that I was hoping that COVID would help end the "work through illness" culture that exists in some professions. It was not at all uncommon in my workplace for people to come to work with really bad coughs . . . basically as long as you weren't vomiting or had a high fever, you'd come into work. This wasn't due to economic insecurity (we had the ability to work from home, we had sick days). It was just "how things were."

But I think the mindset will be hard to change, even with the year we've just had.

But I have experienced "post viral cough" that can last up to 6 weeks. Even a regular cold or flu cough last about 10 days. I can't imagine anyone taking off 10 days for a cold. I don't get sick as much now, but when my kids were small it could happen 3 times a year. Like my work would not allow anyone to take off that much sick time for minor illnesses, I can't imagine most offices would. We get like 3 paid sick days.
Although I guess those who can work from home could do that, we didn't have that option before, we do now.

I understand that taking ten days off is out of scope for the majority of people, but I'm talking about a culture where people take no time off and assume whatever they have won't be communicated to others (or that it doesn't matter if it is). The point is that people often assume that what they have is no big deal and stories like the one above show that it sometimes IS a big deal.

Again, this is in the context of people being able to work from home, which I know is an option that wasn't freely available in the past and still isn't available for many workers now. I'm not at all judging people who need to go to work in order to keep their job or don't have sufficient sick days available.

Why we need better leave, and why everyone should have sick leave. I was really proud of our system--the UC gave everyone 128 hours of paid COVID leave that could be used for quarantine/isolation, to care for others, to help kids with online school. And they gave an additional 80 hours a couple months ago. I haven't used mine, but I have employees who have burned through all their paid leave with multiple quarantines and other COVID-related issues. The additional paid leave has truly been a blessing.

In previous years, I've watched office after office on campus go down with the flu, so clearly we were passing on the cooties. I would love to see us change our culture, but I think a lack pf paid leave (for whatever reason) will impact peoples' decisions to stay home. And I get it.

No offense, but other than a government entity (which I assume is like most, broke) and just raises taxes, how can an organization afford an additional 5+ weeks of sick time a person?

This is largely a cultural thing. I live in Finland and nobody here has any limits to paid sick days per time period.

Well, actually we do, but it’s literally a full year. How long is fully paid by employers depends on field of business (collective agreements) and duration of employment - I currently get maximum 6 weeks of company-paid leave per sickness and it only counts as the same sickness if it renews within 30 days, after that the 6-week limit resets. This means if I break my arm and go on sick leave for a month, and then need to have surgery on that arm to fix something 6 months later, it’s a ”different” sickness and the 6-week limit resets. 2 weeks per sickness is out of pocket for employers, after that the government reimburses a certain percentage (80% if I remember correctly) of salary, which is the same amount of money the government pays workers who have to take sick leave longer than what employers pay. This is on top of 5 weeks of paid vacation time per year per person, and our paid vacation is 1.5x salary due to weird historical reasons.

The only organizations I have ever heard of that can’t afford the sick leaves their employees take are tiny 1-5 employee organizations. Handling paid leave is cultural and systemic, there are different ways of handling it but most organizations can definitely afford it.

Italy here. But how much do you pay in taxes there? Therein lies the rub. Coverage like the kind you're getting for sickness (and other things) costs a lot. Italy is always eyeing your coverage and the people want it, but we're already broke with the generous coverage we do get.

It's more or less the same in Belgium. You can be on sick leave for a year, 1 month at the cost of the employer, the next 11 months at a slightly reduced "salary" from the government. After that, you'll be considered as having a long term sickness and will go on an even more reduced disability benefit from the government.
But indeed @snowflake954, we have a very high tax rate, which is scaled up according to salary. The highest is 52% and that will apply for let's say a middle class salary. Those 52% are divided between real taxes (for everything the government needs to make a functioning country), and a rather large part goes straight to a "wellfare" portion, which will cover hospital and care facilities funds but also pensions (as from an age of 62 to 67 depending on your career), disabilities and sick leaves. Yes, it is a lot but I wouldn't trade it for any country in the world, as we all have access to top notch care. And yet still, people here are complaining ...

It’s true, taxes are high. I continue to be a happy taxpayer because the government is organized, after all, rather effectively (compared to other countries) and everything works smoothly for the most part.

Sick leave benefits are one thing, but I also graduated college with a master’s degree and zero student debt because there’s no tuition and my part-time job was enough to cover the cost of living together with government-paid student aid, I had free nutritionally-high-quality school lunches from elementary until high school, infrastructure and public buildings are in decent shape, I don’t need a car because I have reasonably prized well-functioning public transportation, I get almost a full year of paid maternal/parental leave, I have free top-notch healthcare and nobody has to worry about being homeless due to financial hardship, covid ruining the economy or hospital bills leading to bankruptcy. These are a few benefits that come from a somewhat effectively running welfare state, definitely not an exhaustive list.

Yes, people always complain because things aren’t perfect, but striving for perfection creates improvement. I know I personally complained today because my maternity nurse called and she wants me to come in for an extra test within the next week and they’re only open during ”office hours” = when I work. This post, the fact that I get an assigned nurse to care and call me at home for free, and the fact that maternity healthcare that must happen during work hours is cause for paid absence, reminded me to stop complaining about the minor inconvenience of shuffling my meeting schedules to go to the clinic that takes care of me for free.

The only countries I’d ever trade this for are maybe the other Nordic countries and possibly places like Belgium.