I am waiting for the schools to close down again. Every day we get more messages from the district about new COVID diagnoses in students and staff. Our community, like all the communities in the Midwest, is seeing the surge. Two of the metrics they're using for making decisions about in-person versus virtual school, though, are lagging indicators. Is that a bad idea, using lagging indicators to make the calls? Is it smarter to pull the kids out now? They say, in the news stories, that they're not seeing in-school transmission -- people are contracting COVID elsewhere and the schools' prevention measures are stopping the spread. They say.
Joe has a couple of weight-lifting goals he wants to hit by the end of the year. I am not excited about the idea of visits to our local gym, where the mask policy is "we encourage you to consider wearing a mask." I haven't been to the gym since they stopped holding outdoor classes. But tonight at the CSA pickup I was talking to a physician acquaintance. We used to run on adjacent treadmills when our now-college-aged kids were in karate classes. She's still hitting the treadmill, even though her specialty brings her into daily contact with people for whom COVID would be particularly risky. "You just have to go when it's not too busy," she said.
It's probably just as healthy for me to get my heart rate up reading about Republican legal fictions, don't you think?
The women's retreat team is planning to keep meeting in person through the winter, in preparation for a retreat that can't happen until after the pandemic ends. I am not going to the November meeting. The idea of being inside with 20 other people for 2 hours stresses me out. I am considering an email to the leadership team to say that I don't think it's a great plan given our current COVID explosion. If I do, am I being that paranoid lady or that sensible lady? Unclear.
A writer named Jennifer Margulis has been posting about the costs of excessive COVID concern recently, arguing that COVID doesn't kill that many people, and it's getting under my skin more than it ought to. In her past work she has been an advocate for out-of-hospital birth, and one of the reasons I generally support this form of advocacy is that it significantly reduces maternal morbidity. It's dangerously incomplete to shrug about the overall death rate for COVID, because it makes a significant slice of people seriously ill -- some of them for a long, long time. Morbidity matters too.
One possible form of long-term COVID-related morbidity appeared in my Twitter feed today:
My 12yo just lost an adult front tooth and his other teeth are loose... it turns out from vasculature damage 9 months after Covid.
— Diana Berrent (@dianaberrent) November 10, 2020
Omg. PLEASE... I beg of you, take this seriously. For you. For your kids. For everyone.
Obviously, we should all be careful about giving too much credence to the assertions of people on the internet. But also-- YIKES.
I've been feeling for a long time now that my yikes-o-meter is inadequately calibrated for this particular era. Maybe permanent teeth falling out doesn't need to be an all-caps YIKES? Maybe Mike Pompeo's assertion that we'd proceed smoothly to a second Trump administration is only a one-exclamation-point YIKES?
Who can say? Not me. I am weary of making decisions with insufficient information.
Recent Comments