The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 185 (685)

There's some new and disturbing--at least to me--news on long covid. Breathlessness is a common symptom of long covid patients. Findings from a pilot study of 36 patients suggest covid may cause microscopic damage to lungs, damage that is not detected in routine tests. In other words, the efficiency of the lungs ain't what it used to be. The pilot study looked at three groups. One was patients diagnosed with long covid who had normal CT scans of their lings. Some of these patients had had long covid for a year. A second group was patients who had been hospitalized with covid over three months earlier. Finally, there was a healthy control group. Patients inhaled xenon gas while undergoing an MRI. Even when all other tests were normal, long covid patients showed "significantly impaired gas transfer" from their lungs to their bloodstream. I'm concerned enough about what my asthma does to my lung function; this on top of that would not be pretty.

Some people talk about exposing themselves to Omicron to add a layer of natural immunity. This is not a good idea. It might be easier just to let Stealth Omicron or BA.2 find you. Early results peg it as being 1.5 times more transmissible than Omicron or BA.1. There are 127 cases of BA.2 known nationwide. It's been found in half the states. So if you've missed out on Omicron, maybe its evil cousin will get you.

As part of a protest against vaccine mandates, convoys of truckers are heading to Ottawa from as far away as British Columbia. Police estimate that 1,000 to 2,000 people will attend the demonstration. It may be that Canadians are too nice for demonstrations of the magnitude they had in Europe; if I remember correctly, one protest there had 40,000 participants. Americans Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Joe Rogan have voiced their support for the Ottawa protest. The Canadian Trucking Alliance said in a statement that it "strongly disapproves" of protests on public roadways, highways, and bridges.

Many public events were canceled or scaled back in 2020 and 2021. Many of those same events are happening in 2022 though there are some differences from 2019 and earlier. The Winter Olympics are a go in Beijing though without public ticket sales and with American announcers working from studios in Connecticutt. Carnival 2022 has been canceled in Rio de Janeiro. Some social events typically held at the time of the Super Bowl have been canceled, but the game itself will go on as ever. Mardi Gras parades and floats are back In 2021, houses rather than floats were decorated. Still on are the National Cherry Blossom Festival, South by Southwest, and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival held in the California desert.

The Olympics are, of the events listed above, of the longest duration and widest participation. How they turn out may say a lot about where the coronavirus leads us on its road to endemicity. The Games will take place in a bubble with everyone within that bubble tested daily as well as upon arrival at the airport. Friday, 29 of the 736 athletes and team officials who arrived tested positive. Other athletes and officials are delaying arrival because they tested positive before their departure from home. Before those people would be admitted to the Games, they must show negative test results on four consecutive days and then spend a fifth, buffer day. Those tests could present a bit of a problem, though. They have to be PCR tests, which can return positive results for weeks after someone stops being contagious. Teams affected by coronavirus so far include the US men's bobsled and skeleton team, the Norwegian cross country ski team, the German skeleton team, and the Russian bobsled and figure skating teams. The daily covid test results may be more interesting this year than the event results are.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 184

The covid-19 case numbers for the local university won't be posted until around 4:00 pm. Still, the husband received an email this morning from the chair of the undergraduate teaching committee in his department. She noted that she'd had a fair number of students with covid-19 in her classes and wondered if anyone else was seeing the same. The husband has not had any student tell him they had tested positive, but since he teaches virtually he can't really say if anyone in his class isn't there for a week or two or looks under the weather. I'll have to ask him if there's any sort of follow-up email. 

I mentioned that the local university's football game with its rival school had been postponed due to covid-19 "issues." The issue is or was that there were so many covid-19 cases the school could not have fielded a team this weekend. I do not know how many players total are on a college team, but they must have had a lot of cases. To cap it off, the players were fine until the rest of the student body returned. That's when football-team cases started to appear and over a couple of weeks to rise.

As for the charger to this laptop, my guess is that there is something loose inside it. It charged the computer overnight, and there is still current coming from the wall to the laptop. I'm not going to chance moving it before the new charger arrives on Thursday. I will keep an eye on the task bar just in case the cord icon disappears and the number on the battery icon starts to decrease. 

As I walked this morning, I was thinking again about how a memoir of 2020 would end or at least lead into the ending from the penultimate page. Those thoughts led to a listing of events by month. When I asked the Google about events by month in 2020, the first site listed was a very detailed list from CNN. Each month started by listing the number of  covid-19 deaths in the US and in the entire world. I did not find it hard to believe that CNN was listing events I did not remember. There have been so many newsworthy happenings overshadowed by the pandemic, the upcoming election, the wildfires, that it's hard to think of the lesser ones. 

The second round of covid-19 tests at my mom's assisted living facility yielded no positives. As a result, they're starting up some group gatherings with a maximum attendance of 10. They're also going to start letting residents eat together, though distance must be maintained. Given that I wear a variety of hearing aid, I can imagine two people, both hard of hearing, sitting six, eight, or ten feet away from each other and neither can distinctly hear what the other one is saying. It might make a good scene in a situation comedy.

Early voting starts here on Friday. That's also the date on which they will mail absentee ballots. Pre-pandemic, I had volunteered to be one of the officials working at early voting sessions. Needless to say, that's not happening now. It will be interesting to see the stats on how many people vote early, vote by mail, or vote at the polls on Election Day. The state legislature this year made Election Day a state holiday and extended the hours the polls would be open from 13 (6:00 am to 7:00 pm) to 14 (6:00 am to 8:00 pm). I told the husband I wondered how many people would show up to vote during that last hour. I may be surprised, but I'm thinking not many will. Maybe I should say that I hope I will be surprised by there being a nontrivial number of voters in that last hour. It remains to be seen whether the pay will be adjusted for that extra hour. Many people leave after voting thanking us for volunteering. Technically, we aren't volunteers in that we do get paid. On an hourly basis, that pay does exceed minimum wage, but there's no overtime for hours nine through 14.

HWSNBN held an indoor rally in Nevada, a state limiting indoor events to a maximum attendance of 50. Older son said that HWSNBN can get around such restrictions by saying it is not a rally but a peaceful protest. When asked about the lack of masks or social distance in the crowd, HWSNBN remarked that the lack of masks and distance was not a problem; he was a very safe distance from the crowd and had no one standing near him. Yes, it really is all about him. 

The World Health Organization yesterday reported a record one-day rise in the number of new covid-19 cases, 306,857. The biggest contributors to that total were India, the US, and Brazil. Make America great? Hey, we're up in the top three here. There were also more than 5,500 deaths, taking the global total to 917,417. How soon will we hit one million? Too soon, I suspect, too soon.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 74

Coronavirus cancellations continue! (I shall resist the thought of adding more hard C sounds to this sentence.) This morning, I modified the website of our local quilt guild to reflect that the workshops scheduled for early October have been cancelled. If that sounds as if it might be too far in the future, a quilt show scheduled for February 2021 in Atlanta several weeks ago announced it would become a virtual show. Among the reasons cited were the difficulty attendees might have in making and breaking travel or lodging reservations and the fact that making the switch from on-site to virtual was much cheaper now than it would be further down the road. I've been waiting to hear whether the early October Fall Fiber Festival at which I usually work might be cancelled.

Older son sent me the reopening plan put out by the Brazilian ju jitsu gym to which he sometimes goes. It is so well laid out not to mention so safely conservative. The plan runs from whenever the state enters its Phase III of reopening to January at the earliest. Meanwhile, the gym or fitness center to which we belong has offered no real specifics as to how they plan to reopen. They did note in the latest email that their summer camps would be opening on schedule and that registration for camp was ongoing. They offered no details of what mitigation measures they might have planned, but you can't tell me they will be able to keep 5- or 6-year-olds at a social distance all day every day. I certainly would not be sending my kids to camp this summer.

No complaints about the governor today. He announced that the state would remain in Phase I of reopening for at least one more week, and that moving to Phase II in a week was not a given.
I can live with that.

And Minneapolis burned last night. I'm sure the stress and pressures of the pandemic contributed at least a wee bit to people's being on a very narrow edge. Older son pointed out that the Los Angeles riots of his childhood did not occur until after the officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. These riots occurred despite the cops in question having immediately been fired and an investigation started. I'm not going to visit the question of whether the riots would have happened if the cops had immediately been charged with murder. Not gonna go there.