WA is open!.. On the 3rd of March.
Honestly I feel like we’ve got as good as we’re going to. 
here we go…
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I accept there was no ill will towards individuals, but accepting that does leave me with questions. Was your intended tone for the post hyperbolic, or are you actually irritated? If you did post out of irritation, who do you blame, if not individuals?
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I actually was irritated, if not for my own circumstances or situation, but because I am sure many, many people took them at their work at the whole 7-12 days and were kind of counting on that, or maybe they can’t afford to buy them, or they can’t even find them locally in person (which definitely has been true here, in a quasi-rural corner of a blue state). It’s been 3 times that now.
I suppose I should revise. I don’t blame the vast majority of average individuals just trying their best (well some, anyway), to do their job. Your average Joe or Jane or whoever at the PO or shipping company or manufacturing plant or whathaveyou. I do blame High Level Individuals in High Places who are Decision Makers™ who decided too little, too late, and then effed it up anyway. I am sure there have been some analytics to support that, if they didn’t have enough supply, or hadn’t yet even communicated to suppliers about it, or the logistics of getting them out with a potentially compromised workforce, that it would be a cluster. Don’t make promises you can’t keep, or even expect to keep within a reasonable degree of wiggle room, is my feeling. At least hedge some bets. Like maybe don’t give a time frame if you aren’t sure you can meet it or even come reasonably close? We are no longer even reasonably close. The optics are very bad. Or at the very least, make some sort of statement? A public apology for the delay? Though to be fair I haven’t kept up with the news these past few weeks for other reasons, so maybe there has been, and if so, my bad.
I am also sure that none of those individuals are or will get in “trouble” for the failure to plan, despite the fact that for any one of us “average” people heads would have most definitely rolled if we had messed up to such an extent in our own fields. It will just be an “oh, well”, and swept under the rug, perhaps until the next election cycle. There’s never accountability until the next election rolls around, and even then, it boils down to who plays the game better.
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The birthday party I went to last weekend, (that I definitely would not have gone to if I hadn’t just had Covid) definitely had some Covid transmission go down. All vaccinated people in their 20s and 30s, too. Very very glad I’m already done with that, and recently. 
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Huh, according to Chicago’s health officer, in a gathering of 50 people, there is a one in 5 chance that someone has Covid. A week ago, it was a one in TWO chance.
In other news, the city followed IL and dropped the mask mandate as of the 28th. Not unexpected, I guess.
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Yeah I just read an article earlier today that nationally we’re down 90% from where we were one month ago?
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Yeah, I mean, that seems like a REALLY steep and fast drop. Hope it continues….
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I have such mixed feelings about encouraging my kids to mask after the mandate ends- they JUST had covid, so are extremely unlikely to be infectious.
But actually they both seem pretty enthused about continuing to mask to set a good example without me or the Boy even saying anything, and it would be weird if I encouraged them NOT to mask, so I guess we are all still masking! I appreciate their civic-mindedness. They are good kids, really.
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Wish I had a functional immune system 
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I got a refund check for the COVID tests I bought in January! $70ish back in my pocket.
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I’m just going to throw this out there, you all can tell me I’m crazy if you think that.
So, it appears that Covid can readily spread to and among various animal populations. Besides deer, I’m thinking of pets, all the mink that were culled in Denmark, now the deer, and the most recent other animals listed in the second article.
I remember reading that researchers in China, where the virus at least initially was reportedly well-contained, looked for it in lots of animals to see if they could identify the species that initially hosted it, before it jumped to humans. And they could not find a host. This article is almost a year old, but I cannot find anything more recent that reaches a different conclusion.
These two things are not hanging together for me - the virus seems to travel easily between various animal species and animals in the same species; yet in China, where the virus first appeared in humans, they were not able to find it in any animal species there.
I’ve been quietly wondering if the theory that the virus was released into the populated from the lab in Wuhan, and not the nearby wet market, was correct.
I think this is not generally accepted, so, please, tell me why I’m wrong. As I said, it’s just not hanging together for me.
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Oh, I think a Wuhan lab accident is definitely still on the table for the origin story. I don’t think China specifically engineered a virus to cause a pandemic, or chose to release it from the lab on purpose like some conspiracy theorists do. But as someone who has worked in many labs, I see mistakes caused by human error all the time. I’ve also seen the hubris of some scientists unable to admit, even to themselves, that they or someone else in their lab made a mistake. Totally plausible to me that someone in the Wuhan lab was accidentally exposed to a virus collected or engineered for research, and it spread from there.
all agencies agreed that two origin hypotheses remained “plausible”: a “natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”
The one conspiracy I will concede to is that I bet part of the reason we aren’t talking about the lab accident theory more is that the US has funded a lot of research at the Wuhan lab…if that’s the source, it’s not a good look.
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Agree with all of the above.
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One other thing I forgot to add before. They may not have found covid in any animal species, but they also didn’t look very hard. The New Yorker article I posted gets into how China shut down the wet market and other places with possible animal reservoirs to prevent spread…without actually testing the animals first. They did test some animals here and there, but they weren’t as thorough as they could have been. It’s definitely plausible the virus did come from an animal, and they just missed it.
The article theorizes China didn’t really want to find the source because neither theory makes them look good. It’s better for China if we never really know. And we probably won’t, because now it’s too late to do a thorough, independent investigation of the strains in the virology lab and all the relevant animals from late 2019/early 2020.
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I hear you on them not looking very hard!
I understand they’ve done a good job of containing it in people (reportedly), but if it were in the animal population, I think that would be much harder to control. On the one hand, you have to be looking for it to find it. On the other, if it spreads very easily through wildlife and is easily transmitted to humans, I think it would quickly show up in the human population where they are looking for it.
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We’ve definitely seen a few cases in household cats so who knows what all critters are incubating this thing.
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I have been doing this Project READY curriculum (Reimagining Equity and Access for Diverse Youth, for librarians) and this module is called Connecting in Person with Others and is about how important face-to-face connections are and now I feel personally attacked
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This just popped up for me, I’ll be interested to see how this proceeds through peer review and so on.
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