*5 million is a reflection of how things feel, not real time
It's several months since my last covid update (https://aglie.blogspot.com/2022/01/omicron-update-and-two-years-of-new.html) so here's a snapshot of what life like these days.
Covid continues to be a menace, but we have plentiful rapid home tests now and Dd momentously got his first Moderna shot about two weeks ago. Also this spring, D got a first booster shot.
Cases are way closer to home now. At least four or five kids in Dd's class and a similar number of Jack's baseball teammates caught it in May or June. My mom had a mild case in two weeks ago, presumably thanks to the combination of a flight from virus-riddled Hawaii and a relatively recent booster shot. Only older people are eligible for a second booster. Cases among my once-boosted peers are sometimes pretty mild but also pretty gnarly (though so far not requiring hospitalization of anyone I know who was vaccinated).
Seattle Public Schools remained more or less open for all of D's second grade year. Public health, and thus our daycare, have reduced the duration of isolation and quarantines, so a case in Dd' classroom translates to 2-3 days of missed school for the affected class rather than over a week of shutdown for the whole school, as happened with the first case in November 2021.
The constant string of variants keeps changing the science subtly. Recently I came across this blog, which is super helpful and informative. https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/ . I credit it with helping me choose Moderna over Pfizer for Dd.
We've all (ok, maybe not everyone) become statisticians too now. I'm still regularly watching the case counts in King County, but like in the early part of 2020, we all know that the official counts are massive undercounts of the real case load. Therefore, anecdotal impressions of how many people around us are catching us are not a crazy thing to pay attention to. More and more, studies of covid remnants in sewage provide the most meaningful metrics.
I'm still afraid of long covid and most things I've read are pessimistic and still based on unvaccinated subjects.
Some more food for thought on the subject comes from our recent trip to British Columbia and Alberta, Canada. King County has a "fully vaccinated" rate of 82% while Canada has a rate of 84%. While the definition of fully vaccinated is a moving target, these numbers come from the New York Times today and I trust they have made a solid effort to report comparable numbers. In short, our county has taken a civilized approach to vaccination and masking, yet our numbers are shocking compared to our neighbor to the north. As noted, all of these stats are imperfect, but still there is such a difference it must be significant. Our trip was the first time I have felt like we were in a post-covid world where we ate indoors at restaurants and went to the grocery store without a mask on.
Could we have similar numbers if King County had been able to close its borders?
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