Lots of new cases in fully vaccinated people of the delta variant in the US (Miami, I’m looking at you). Most mild but not asymptomatic.
Can’t wait for the boosters to come out.
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A little bummed - I have discovered a large swollen lump under my armpit. Dr Google advised it can be a vaccine reaction and can take 3-4 weeks to go down. It is a little annoying.
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Say hello to your lymph node! This happens to me any time I get a vaccine of any kind. It will go away! A warm compress can help a bit.
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I kept seeing stuff on Twitter about how we’re all going to be in another lockdown in the fall. I am dealing with this by avoiding Twitter, mostly, but I’m wondering how likely this is and whether I should be preparing.
(And whether we should go ahead with planning our NOLA recon trip or put off the move for ANOTHER year. 
)
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I saw that Missouri is really bad off right now too. (And we were planning to see fully vaxxed
friends/family in STL this fall.)
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That wouldn’t have occurred to me at all. One, I don’t think people would do another lock down at this point, and two, I’ve been looking at the case numbers and looking back in time to when we last had something around that level. Right now Florida’s 7 day average is 1,171 and the last time we had that was September briefly, then a year ago June. It makes me feel like I’m time travelling backwards in a good way. Whenever I see the media going on about the delta variant “spreading like wildfire” (way to be clickbaity) I try to remember that’s within the cases of Covid that are happening and overall those cases are significantly down from where they were in January or middle of last summer.
Looking at Illinois (per Google), the current 7 day average is 234 new cases which hasn’t been seen since March 2020. Louisiana, despite not exactly leading the pack in vaccinations, also has a seven day average that hasn’t been seen since spring 2020.
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I think it’s fair to say that cases WILL rise in the fall. If you can move travel to the summer, I would. I think now is also a great time to do any moderately risky things (any health stuff you’ve been delaying? dentist checkups? family visits?) that might feel less good in the fall or winter.
…buuuut I doubt it will be a full lockdown. Like meerkat said, our definition of “good/bad” case numbers has shifted! Which is great.
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Michigan had 91 cases yesterday, I can’t remember when we saw that last. A few months ago we had 9000 some days.
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I think that there will absolutely be more INTERNATIONAL lockdowns in the fall. but like others have said, I’m not so sure domestically. The US is in an incredibly privileged position right now relative to most of the rest of the world.
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Missouri seems to be the worst in the nation, but at the levels we were seeing early last summer, not last fall and winter. So like, they are not doing well, but it’s also not a super scary level.
I still thought the vaccines were just supposed to protect against severe covid, and not necessarily any spread. (Missouri is of course having issues because they are under 40% of the state fully vaccinated.)
Also when they report population fully vaccinated- is that eligible population? Or total? How are kids counted in Biden’s 70% goal, for instance?
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I saw that Missouri cases were “doubling every few days” in an article, I forget how many was “few”. Which did ring alarm bells, reminding me of the beginning of this whole thing when we all learned what exponential growth was.
IL and Chicago do seem to be in pretty good shape right now though. That is why I was surprised to see talk of lockdowns on Twitter. But, well, Twitter.
Work just announced that they are not requiring vaccinations, and have lifted mask requirements for vaccinated individuals. Nobody is checking that you’re vaccinated. Supposed to be on the “honor system”.
sigh
I’m disappointed, but it doesn’t really change anything for me. I really feel for those who are immunocompromised or have other health risks who are dealing with this.
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Check for anyone trained in MLD in your area…I don’t think there’s anyone, but I could be wrong. Vodder school international or lymph Ontario
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From what I understand they originally didn’t have enough information to confirm the vaccines did or didn’t stop spread. Now that so many more people have been vaccinated they do know the vaccine not only protects against severe COVID but also against the spread.
For the 70% Biden goal it was 70% of those 16 and older. That’s because when the goal was made they were the only ones eligible.
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OK, that makes sense with the 70% goal. Here it is always reported as “70% of Americans” and that just seems impossible, because that basically means 100% of those eligible.
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What on earth is going on in Australia, where they’re saying that contact tracing shows people getting Delta variant just by briefly walking by someone who’s infected!? Yikes.
I wonder if they had masks on or were vaxxed, I’ve lost track of whether Australia has mask mandates or where they are re vaccines.
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I kind of hope that there is more to that case of people brushing past each other than what the cctv captured. It does seem scary if there was actually no other contact that wasn’t captured.
Our vaccine program is a hot mess but more and more people are getting vaccinated (though someone who was fully vaccinated and infected was spreading it recently too). No mask mandate when there aren’t active community cases (that we know of, and we tend not to know about them until they’ve been infectious in the community for a few days).
I need to put my name down for a vaccine. My age group isn’t considered eligible yet but I have a friend who signed up to a wait list to be notified when we are eligible and they were given an appointment.
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I think the last time there was a situation like this it ended up there was way more exposure and the guy was lying because it was a criminal venture of some sort right? Not saying that’s what’s going on here, but I’m a long way from full panic on behalf of the world on this one story. But also, you have to keep in mind among this crazy huge world we have, there are people with such weak immune systems they need to live in clean rooms. Infection is a whole chain of events, each stage with a ton of variables.
In fact, in case you’ve never run across it, meet the chain of infection!
You can see how there would be ways to influence every step of that process.
Much more stressful to me is the situation in India. One off events are more salacious and we can fixate on them mentally, but honestly single events without enough investigation yet come down to being clickbait at this point.
We know delta is infectious. We know vaccines are the best intervention. Nothing about that has changed, even from previous variants. And more to the point, we know more variants will keep emerging the more spread there is. We need to vaccinate the world, in short.
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So far my reaction is less panic and more WTF at the statement that 5-10 seconds of exposure supposedly infected people. Just because that is so different from what we have been told all pandemic. But, well, different variant.
I agree, what is going on in India is terrible. Other countries cannot get supply of vaccines, while here we have plenty and people won’t get them. That pisses me off.
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What we’ve been told is on the whole though. It’s always been way more nuanced than that. Every variable of that chain has influence. Take if you will, a person with a high viral load at peak infection, walking past someone who doesn’t know they have an aggressive cancer that’s suppressing their immune system, and a cough timing lines up perfectly, along with wind flow and a cloudy day with no UV and…. You get the idea. One in a billion chances line up sometimes when you have billions of people with billions of contacts with others. That doesn’t mean science or policy should fixate on those possibilities- and how we address it doesn’t change. And that’s even assuming the 5-10 sec transmission actually occurred and we’re not missing something.
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