Ontario just announced that booster shots will be available for all over-18s starting in January. Once it’s been six months past your second jab, I think (mine was at the end of June). Very happy to hear that.
Our daily case counts are soaring, though the climb in the positivity rate is relatively flat (not great, but not rocketing upwards), and the number of COVID patients in the ICU is basically steady. I guess we all knew that winter would bring another climb, but Omicron is the wild card. I’m not terribly worried by the numbers at this point, and I doubt we’ll have more lockdowns, but it’s wearying all the same.
Just got my booster in NB. Fifty and up is eligible as long as you had your last vaccination sometime in June. I’m expecting 40 and up to be announced maybe next week.
I had 2 doses of Pfizer as my original and chose to boost with Moderna on the theory that if mixing doses shows an increased response then I might get a bit of benefit from mixing up the booster.
I had the A-Z the first two times. That wasn’t on offer when I went for the booster, and the nurse asked me if I wanted Pfizer or Moderna?
I said I didn’t have any preference; she was the professional; what would she suggest? (Rather like asking the sommelier’s opinion. )
She seemed surprised and asked me if I was sure I didn’t have a preference? I said no, and then asked if most people wanted a particular one? She said “Oh, yes!” Very emphatically.
I noticed the line up for Pfizer was 3 times as long as for Moderna and recall during the initial vaccination that people were searching for Pfizer over Moderna. I was expecting a mixed dose when I got vaxxed as I just booked whatever was available and, at the time of my 2nd dose, NB had just gotten a shipment of Moderna. I turned up and it was Pfizer.
My first shot was AstraZeneca and my second was Moderna. I’m hoping that I get Pfizer for my booster. Partially because it will be fun to say I’ve had all three (for the trifecta!). But I also think that it makes sense to tweak the immune system in different ways for the same virus.
Received my booster this morning, so I’m now AzPfiPfi (pronounced Azfeefee) and ready to fight Omicron.
I just spent the last hour cancelling travel reservations for next week. My kids are disappointed, but understand. I’m disappointed too. My worry isn’t about health so much as logistical. Getting PCR tests back in a timely manner for the flight home and missing it or any of us testing positive and getting stuck in quarantine in a hotel room for 2 weeks is not appealing.
That would require a media that was competent and actually understood their own reporting.
Every time the media reports on a situation I am personally familiar with, it’s apalling how wrong they often are. Your average journalism grad knows nothing.
Consider the Alec Baldwin shooting on the ‘Rust’ movie set. The media’s initial reporting on that wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. One reporter described what happened as, ‘Alec Baldwin pulled out his gun, and when he did, ammunition flew towards the victim.’ That was written by someone who clearly knows nothing about guns. Early news reports also said that there was target shooting going on with movie guns between takes. That never happened. The6 also couldn’t get the difference between blanks and dummy rounds straight, leading to a lot of confused reporting. They mistook reloading bullets for loading a gun, I guess because they had never heard of reloading.
If you follow aviation and space reporting, there are a couple of good reporters (Eric Berger, for example), but most of the reporting is laughably bad. If you don’t know the difference between a galaxy and a solar system, you have no business reporting on space news. But I’ve seen that error multiple times in mainstream news stories.
We need to stop hiring journalists from J-schools and go back to the old days when journalists were often working class people with experience in a field that they then report on.
I mean, if there is one thing you expect from a journalism grad is that tyey be able to write with proper spelling and grammar, but even that is declining. I see a lot of just godawful writing from journalists, even in major magazines and newspapers.
Expecting them to clearly explain statistical news is asking way too much.
Most of the Ontario ICU admissions remain unvaccinated. About 60% of these are on ventilators. The 160 number has been fairly stable over almost two weeks despite rising case counts, in the daily news but not emphasized, but some modelling suggests it could be 400 in January after holiday gatherings. Omicron is very infective but at the moment most are not getting as ill as other variants. Vaccination is clearly a factor even though its protection against omicron seems to be significantly less.
Well my travel insurance health coverage just nixed covid coverage specifically following the “unessential announcement”. So…I suppose I save on gas.
Still, looking at the Ontario Science Table slides from the 7th is interesting. Slide 13 is base on South African Hospitalization/Cases. While you can see both spiking, the hospitalization rate breaks from about 3.5x to 0.75x the case volume. So hopeful, but that’s old data.
At this point I want to hear how we plan on expanding the health care capacity of our system. Obviously what we have is insufficient for a new normal like this.
I’m starting to feel a depression about the pandemic like I haven’t felt in almost a year. And It’s especially frustrating because none of this was unexpected. Everyone said that a) as long as “the west” or “developed countries” or whatever condescending designation you want to use hoards the jabs and the southern hemisphere goes without, variants are going to spread and bite us and b) winter’s gonna bring a surge either way because people are going to gather indoors. So I should be rolling with it. But the day-to-day percentage uptick in cases here, even as I acknowledge that ICU hospitalizations in Ontario have basically been a horizontal straight line for months, is plunging my mood off a cliff.
I know we weren’t “almost out of the woods” but I was thinking, maybe in October 2022 I can travel overseas again. Now I’m thinking maybe 2023.
At least Ontario and the doofuses (doofii?) in charge are doing the right things now. Boosters have been available for over-50s for a week or two now, and folks below that (I’m 48) could start booking on January 4th. That changed yesterday, and now we can start this coming Monday, including walk-ins, which is what I’m planning to do as soon as I get to the office after the weekend. They’ve also started handing out home testing kits at pop-up spots in malls around the province; I picked one up this morning. It’s only got five tests in it, but hopefully every few days’ll do me until jab three kicks in. And if I weren’t an atheist I’d be praying that I just don’t catch anything before xmas (first time meeting the GF’s family) or New Years (first NYE with her)…I know it’s selfish but she’s been the one good thing that happened to me since the pandemic started and I really want these milestones.
No idea what I’ll even be offered if I can make it through a line on Monday. My first two jabs were AZ and Moderna, and I kinda want to stick with the latter for #3 just in case other countries start getting wobbly on mixed vaccines again, but I know I’ll ultimately just take whatever I can.
Sorry this was rambling and scattershot. The numbers threw me a for a totally expected loop when I looked today, and no I can’t stop myself from checking.
Messaging has been incredibly bad, and I’m legitimately concerned that if they try broad strokes shutdowns again, they’re going to start losing public cooperation. Like it or not, after a year-plus of saying “the way out of this is vaccination,” if they are now saying “lol, psych” a LOT of people who were previously on board with all this are going to say “What the fuck is the point? I got vaccinated, and almost everyone did, and they were wrong, it didn’t stop this. Will the booster? Well they’re still shutting down. Fuck it, I wanna go to the movies.”
Then today Ontario’s chief medical officer said, as if revealing the secret location of King Solomon’s Mine, that the virus MIGHT be airborne. Huh? Well, of course it is. What the hell was he saying? Did people think the virus was transmitted by email?
I have a lot of very reasonable colleagues and online friends asking why Florida has the same case rate as Ontario, when they’re wide open. To what extent that’s true I’m not sure (from what I can tell they don’t do as many tests, but I only glanced at it) but these aren’t antivaxxers. They’re people who are edging closer to saying “I want to just live my life now and I’ll trust the vaccine to keep me from getting really sick.”
Agreed on most of the above. I was somewhat willing to forgive bungled messaging for maybe the first three months of this thing, then Ford & Co. continued to screw the pooch for many, many months, but by and large I think they’ve been okay lately. Rolling back their plans for loosening mask restrictions, for example, was the right move and they got ahead of things there.
I’m 100% pro-vax and have no patience for the yahoos. I still recognize that everyone has a breaking point and we’ll hit mine eventually. I really don’t want to be an asshole but if we get to a fourth or fifth booster and I’m still wearing a mask on the streetcar next September I’m really going to be selfishly questioning what my own efforts have been for, and I don’t like feeling like that.
