The View from the Hermitage, Day 368

I have not heard that my vaccination appointment for tomorrow has been moved, so the weather forecast must be suitable. They're moving the vaccination site over the weekend. The new one will be in the covered mall and occupy space vacated by JC Penny. Waiting will be able to be done indoors there as opposed to outdoors at the current site, a vacated KMart in a strip mall. I had an email link to a form that I will now not have to complete tomorrow on-site. I do love paperwork reduction.

The likelihood of another covid surge here in the US is still mixed. Looking at new cases during the past week, 13 states had increases, 13 states had decreases, and the rest were basically level. Michigan was the winner (loser?) on the case increase front, seeing a 53 percent jump from one week to the next. The big losers (winners?) on the case decrease front were Alabama, Arizona, California, and Georgia, all of which had declines over 30 percent. At least no state saw the virus results seen in Brazil. It reported its highest daily case increase since the pandemic began, one day after the death total hit a new high. 

US health experts continue to warn about relaxing mitigation measures too early. They say that Europe's spike in new cases and hospitalizations should be a warning for us. European countries were experiencing the same sort of drops that we are and started to disregard mitigation. One other reason for the different results in Europe and the US is that the US is getting more people vaccinated sooner, while Europe is fighting the greater spread of contagious variants. The talking heads warn, though, that those variants will be coming here if they aren't here already, and continued vaccinations are vital. 

The European Medicines Agency says that the AstraZeneca vaccine is "safe and effective." As a result, countries including Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Latvia, and Lithuania have announced plans to resume use. Ireland and Sweden say they will announce something "in a few days." The US will be giving millions of doses of its stockpiled AstraZeneca vaccine to Canada and Mexico. Canada just announced that they will start giving the AstraZeneca vaccine to senior citizens. 

Work continues on treatments for covid, work necessary because there will be new cases in people not getting vaccinated or people for whom the vaccine does not work. There are three broad approaches in the works: antivirals that directly affect the virus's ability to thrive inside the body; drugs that calm the immune system; and antibodies that can target the virus taken either from the blood plasma of survivors or made in a lab. Steroid treatments are also being studied, including the dexamethasone XPot was given and even hydrocortisone. Remdesivir is evidently not as valuable as early research suggested.

Finally, another result of a poll on the pandemic: Republicans underestimate the risks posed by the coronavirus while Democrats overestimate the risks. You probably saw that one coming, right?

The 49-Day Ceremony for my sister-in-law was interesting. My heart broke seeing my brother there all alone. Had hymns been substituted for the chanting, it would have seemed very much like a memorial service or funeral, taking away the incense-lighting. For some unknown reason, the camera on my laptop was not working, so my Zoom square was grey. This gave me the chance to jot down two things said that I want to remember. One was offered by a man who said he had worked in hospice care for decades. He said it was posted at his hospice: The trouble is you think you have time. Isn't it? How many things do we say we'll do later? I'm going to try to do some of those things sooner, I think. The other thought was much the same: I knew this day would come; I just didn't know yesterday that it would be today. And we don't know today if it might be tomorrow. More words to try to take to heart.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 203

Having lowered my standards, I am feeling better today. All will get done in good time, something  about which I feel good now. We aren't entertaining--and rarely did even before the pandemic--so why worry about what anyone else might think. I did, way back when, have a 10-year-old boy ask why my house was so messy. If a 10-year-old sees your house as messy, well, it is. Right now, there are no 10-year-olds on the guest list, so I'm safe. The big thing making unpacking and organizing so difficult is that the husband is using older son's former bedroom as his home office. I was using all the bookcases there to hold my yarn and my books on knitting, crocheting, and felting. Don't worry, I was told, you'll be able to move those things to younger son's former bedroom. Only after we get all of our stuff and all of his stuff out of that bedroom so that walls are available for bookshelves will I be able to move anything in. It's like a lengthy chain reaction, and it's acting better some days rather than others.

We skipped the Sunday morning walk in the park and instead walked the trails behind and beside our subdivision. Do not ask me to take those trails again. I would be lost all too quickly. Older son sometimes runs the trails if there are too many people out and about in the subdivision, so he knows his way around them. We ended up going almost four miles, and I do think the family dog would have gone farther had we wanted to. We decided to replace the walk in the park with a trail walk for the next three weekends, after which deer season will rear its ugly head. Even wearing the blaze orange sweater I knitted several years ago, I don't go into the woods at all during deer season. 

HWSNBN remains at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. As far as I can tell, the updates by his physician(s) are bogus. They say he might go home tomorrow, but the remdesivir they're giving him is a five-day progression that is supposed to be delivered in a hospital setting. They've also started him on a teroid, dexamethasone, to treat his dropping oxygen levels. The thing is that dexamethasone is not used for mild cases of covid-19. The fact that he is getting it suggests that the big picture is much worse than it's been painted up to now. There is no word on new cases from the Rose Garden event for Amy Coney Barrett or the indoor event also held for her. I think the nine or 10 cases identified so far are more than enough.

Assuming HWSNBN survives, will the experience change his views on mitigation measures such as masks? Probably not a snowball's chance in hell that it will. I am awaiting his claim that he caught the virus from s Democrat. He might even try to say he caught it from Joe Biden at the debate. He can't really tie his exposure to China, so the Democrats may be the next best thing. I just hope that he or someone in his maskless entourage didn't infect either of the Bidens or anyone in their entourage.

New York City's mayor may lock down nine Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods chosen by zip code because their covid-19 rates are spiking. New York isn't the only state with developing hot spots or rising case rates. It's my firm belief that we're still in the first wave of infections, meaning the second wave is yet to come. Things are only going to get worse for a while. 

And I forgot to start with my usual notice of how many weeks we are into hermitting. Today marks 29 weeks. That's a long time and time in which we continue to learn just how much we don't know about the novel coronavirus. 2020 just keeps on giving.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 161

Should I applaud for 23 weeks? After all, 23 is a prime number, and I do tend to like those. Whenever someone asks me to give them a number, I always open with 17. In three more years I'll have a prime age, not that I can't now claim to be in my prime. And I have been known to enjoy prime rib, especially with horseradish.

My mind is all over the place today. Can you tell? Dealing with Homeowners' Association headaches (I'm the secretary-treasurer, a job I volunteered for so as not to have my name or that of the husband come up as a possible president). Realizing that a standard poodle who no longer lives in the subdivision used to charge at me barking and snarling if I were running and dog and owner passed on the other side of the road. The owner assured me that the dog was friendly. Just not to me I'd always reply. Feeling as if I'm getting nowhere on putting the house back together even though I am purposely moving slowly to see that things that need to be dealt with don't get put away and put off. Having to return the sports bra I bought because rather than send the exact size I ordered, they sent me the sister size with a larger cup and smaller band. I specifically ordered the one I did to get the extra length in the band. Grrrrr!

The dean of students at the local university put out a video yesterday warning students, incoming and already here, that the university would not be playing around in terms of penalties for not following the covid-19 restrictions of wearing a mask, social distancing, and keeping gathering sizes 15 or fewer. There would be no second chances, no warning shots across the bow. Screw up, and you're suspended for the rest of the semester ... at least. It was probably good that he could note that several other universities have already suspended so many students here and so many more there. Chatter on Reddit suggested that the university might be using last night (Saturday) as a test case. Too many large parties then, and the school goes totally online. They said any announcement with regard to going all online would come August 28 (Friday) at the latest.

Refrigerator shopping is on the top of my list for this week, though any shopping I do will be online. I fall back on my primary care physician's saying that keeping myself pretty much totally isolated is not over-reacting. HWSNBN supposedly has a press conference scheduled for 6:00 pm to discuss covid-19 treatment. Rumor has it he'll be pushing convalescent plasma and not his old favorite hydroxychloroquine. I've read that scientific study of plasma is difficult because so many doctors are just using it, with no experimental structure or controls. Having a reliable treatment is half of all that I ask. A reliable vaccine and a reliable treatment since we all know that vaccines don't always work. 

And now I go to cook the couple extra packs of meat that were hiding in the back of the dorm fridge the husband loaded up from the kitchen fridge. We're having either pork or chicken legs for dinner, depending on what we're in the mood for when cooking has been accomplished.