Calling it year 4. While technically correct, doesnt really reflect the lived experience of everyone on the planet except for a few folks in Wuhan.
I mean it started here in the US in March 2020 for everyone I’d say, Feb 2020 for some of us. So most of 2020, all of '21 and '22, and 2023 begins year 4.
My lived experience has been approximately 400 years. March 2020 alone was about 50.
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Yeah I was just thinking other day how crazy that shit was. I remember driving to work on empty interstate with huge signs saying to stay home and when showed up they were basically like take as much office equipment as you can carry home to work remotely but we had a baby and no extra space so was working on a friends porch
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March 11 - March 16 2020 was the wildest fucking time of my life. I will never forget the Thursday that all sports shut down & Tom Hanks got Covid through that weekend. I worked something like 65 hours in 3 days with like 2 hours of sleep each night, trying to coordinate and keep what I do functioning.
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Oh. Fuck me. Yeah. I just got the maths wrong.
Jesus. Thats grim.
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I have a journal of my night shifts when I was on nights when things were going to shit at my hospital. I’ve read it a few times since. It’s wild.
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Sounds like my election week sleep in 2020.
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Yeah, as one of the last people still being very strict with masking, this covid shit is really getting old. I had expected it to most likely last 2-3 years, with a chance of lasting forever. Now I’m just hoping for not forever.
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I’m still strict with masking. I may be going to Disney World now, but it’s with masks on.
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Honestly having kids I’m kinda resigned to fact we going to catch it annually sometime between Halloween and New Years and just crossing fingers we don’t get too sick
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Skimmed this. In rough a week:
- I intubated 45 patients
- An attending who I worked with for three years died. His death was on the top of cnn for days because he was the first doctor to die
- Bill and Hillary (yes those ones) bought us pizza
- I apologize a lot to the people I’m treating for the decisions I’m making
It’s…… something
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Jesus.
Have you been dining in, or only doing outdoor dining? That’s been the biggest thing I’ve missed. We did dine in tonight at the lure of free food, but we didn’t take our masks off. Deep breath, mask down, take a bite, mask up, chew, exhale, inhale.
I’m not worried about the infection itself in the short-term/acute phase, it’s the long-term impacts that scare me. If you aren’t worried about those, then your approach seems optimal.
Outdoor dining only with one exception at Disney World to take my kids to an indoor character meal. It was nerve-wracking.
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Long COVID has absolutely wrecked my dad since he got infected in August 2020. He went from being a workaholic who consistently worked 6 days a week (even when he’d take a week off for PTO he’d end up coming in at least a couple of days for a few hours) to being out for weeks at a time because he vomits multiple times a day, every single day. There was a glimmer of hope this summer because his doctor thought he might have some kind of gallbladder issue, so he got his gallbladder removed and…nothing changed.
So far my wife and I don’t seem to have any lingering effects from our own infections last month but watching my dad get ravaged like this was a huge part of why we’ve stayed masked up. We’ve gone to a couple of restaurants that were basically empty inside but her dad convinced us to go to a local Mexican restaurant a few months ago because “it’s not very busy” and we got there and it was completely packed and she was pissed about it. We weren’t as diligent about masking as you but we were still pretty much the only people there wearing them at all.
I’m hoping as more time passes and more research is done we find out that being quadruple or more vaxxed reduces the chances of long term stuff but there’s probably always going to be that small possibility no matter what.
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It’s happened to all of us in these trying times.
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As somebody who was a kid during the early years of AIDS, not that if was over by the time I was a teenager, but they showed this pretty good film like every semester in one class or another in High School
I don’t think I could watch a tick-tock film like that on the beginning/evolution of COVID.
I’m really sorry, that’s brutal 
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I’m really sorry to hear about your father, those are the types of stories that keep me masking - especially because as a poker pro that would mean total financial ruin on top of the rest. One of the hard moments was giving up on convincing my parents to stay as diligent as they had been, and leaving it up to chance what happens.
Hopefully your father turns the corner soon. I have a good friend having chronic heart problems now from long covid. I fear/suspect these stories will get more common, not less.
Right, theoretically it’s possible that X vaccinations or infections = it’s actually the flu. But we don’t know that for sure nor do we know what X is. But there’s also the hope of learning to treat/cure long covid and/or improving efficacy of vaccines, perhaps through nasal vaccines.
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