Day 725 of the Pandemic

 In five days it will be the two year anniversary of this whole Covid-19 mess starting. I have rode the roller coaster of emotions and worry. I have even now been directly exposed.

Last month on my day off I started to feel sick. A slight temperature and my sinuses were draining causing me to cough. I stayed at home and by Monday I felt better and went back to work. But that wasn't the end. Tuesday my husband Brian stayed home and went and got tested for the Flu and Covid. The next day we find out he tested positive for Covid. I called work that evening because before logging in each day we need to do a health check. One of the questions has to do with spending more than 15 minutes with a person known to test positive. I called and let my supervisor know and had to notify our HR person. I was asked if I was fully vaccinated and said no and was told to take the next 10 days off. Did I have it and give it to Brian or not that I don't know. Most likely I brought it home since his contact with people is much less than my own and there was a person the week before that came to work everyday coughing and then was out the week I went back. I was never tested. Brian and I both stayed at home for the 10 days the only place I went was to the grocery store. We had a vacation weekend planned we didn't take. I had a funeral to attend I didn't go. Not because we didn't want to do these things but for the sake of all the others attending both events.

As of Monday we have been told we no longer have to wear masks if we aren't vaccinated and we will no longer have to do the health check. I know quite a few people that work for other companies have said the same thing. Even the grocery stores have stopped making it mandatory for the employees. As a rule Brian and I do wear masks when we go out and will probably continue to do so for a while. We still don't venture out a lot and most places we try to keep our distance from others. 

On February 15, the day Brian was tested the CDC website shows for Pinellas County a 7 day average of  702 new cases and now almost a month later Pinellas County 7 day average is 732 new cases. Down to 42 deaths and 101 new hospitalizations of confirmed cases and 66% of the residents over the age of 5 are vaccinated. The state of Florida shows 5.8 million cases and almost 72,000 deaths and the US statistics show a total of over 79 million cases and over 963,000 deaths.

As far as I can tell the world is going to go on I know there are people that haven't and will not do anything different as they did before this whole thing started. Others have altered their life so much they will never get back to where they were before even if they wanted to. This is the last entry I will have before the publishing of the Dawn of the Pandemic. 

I am still trying to figure out the moral of this story. Will it be another 100 years before the next pandemic or will it be sooner? Did we learn anything from all of this? I hope that before I finish editing the book I have an answer. 

Stay safe. I guess we can still say that. 

Day 689 of the Pandemic

Here we are just 41 days shy of the two year mark. Someone posted on Facebook the other day we should all get on with our lives it has been two years. Well, I am afraid this is life and for the most part people are getting on with what they can. I personally am still dealing with the death of my father. The thought that he won't return is still a mixed bag of feelings. I have been told that by not seeing him sick or not seeing him after his death is a difficult thing to absorb. I know he isn't living in the wilds of Alaska but some days it would just be easier to believe that he is. I look to the sky and I see the moon and I still think somewhere out there we are still seeing the same moon and stars so he is and always will be with me.

A few weeks ago I heard a new word and now I guess it is the talk. Endemic, a constant presence or usual prevalence of a disease in a population within a certain geographic location. A pandemic such as Covid-19 spreads world wide quickly. Each new variant means a change in the way the vaccine works against the virus so there will need to be booster shots and each variant will continue to be an epidemic disease spreading across the world and not contained to a particular geographic area. 

Each variant named for letters of the Greek alphabet instead of where they were first found it is a nice way of not saying this is the Chinese disease or the India variant. Since where it starts doesn't matter. Each new variant will make its way to where ever you are. We have had many variants of the virus over the last couple years. After the initial Covid-19 outbreak it wasn't until September of 2020 when they discovered the Alpha variant in the United Kingdom then by the end of 2020 we had the Delta variant found first in India spreading especially through the summer of 2021 across the United States. And we are now into the Omnicron variant that was first discovered in South Africa and has now as well spread world wide. Where the Delta variant (most likely what my father had) caused more hospitalizations but didn't spread as quickly as the Omnicron variant which at this time seems to make most infected less sick than the Delta and some have shown to have symptoms like not being able to taste or smell and having trouble breathing but when they have their noses swabbed as normal testing procedure they may test negative. This variant seems to be more in a person's throat than in their sinuses but at this time testing remains the same. The information on the variants I found between the webpages of the World Health Organization and Yale Medicines website. 

As this virus seems to do through out the fall we had a steady decline in cases so of course people feeling pretty safe ventured out for Thanksgiving and in Pinellas County there were no new cases that week. Starting November 30 over 300 new cases and it just went up from there through December. At my work it wasn't til Christmas Eve one of my friends didn't come into work and she had all the symptoms but tested negative but 3 or 4 other people in the same room as me at work tested positive. I sit towards the back of the room and only have one person that sits near me and some days there is no one within a few rows of desks to me. By the end of December the county was showing over 900 new cases and by mid January the average new cases were over 2,000 in Pinellas County. Now the beginning of February and the numbers show a total of 192 thousand cases in Pinellas County with 2,900 deaths. In the U.S. over 5.5 million cases and almost 66,000 deaths. A comparison in the 2017-2018 Flu season the worst in the last 10 years saw over 700,000 hospitalizations and over 50,000 deaths. 

A person who goes looking for statistics and facts on Covid can go crazy looking at numbers and charts. It isn't as though you can go to one source and know it is for sure what you need to know since the information changes quickly and is based off the data they have received to date. That is about as accurate a statement as any I read and also just about as vague. 

At work after the holidays we would have liked to have been sent back home to protect those of us that haven't and were not sick but instead I felt like I was 10 and my neighbors mom just called my mom and said hey Joey has chicken pox has your kids had them yet. Bring them over for a sleep over then they will have all had it. Well doesn't seem to work so well with Covid. I know a few people at work have had it multiple times. Some are vaccinated or so they say. Some were out for 2 weeks and others if they stopped showing symptoms were asked to come back to work sooner. So do you believe the government or the company you work for. Does anyone actually have my best interest in their decisions they make. 

I haven't really spoke about booster shots but before the holidays the power's that be were recommending for those 65 and older to get a booster shot. Now the CDC recommends to anyone over 18 should get the booster shot at least 5 months after the initial vaccination. I have heard if you have the Pfizer vaccine to get the Moderna booster shot to have better coverage. Johnson & Johnson that was the one shot company the CDC now recommends that you get the Pfizer or Moderna booster as well. 

My final thought Pfizer's revenue is up 134% since December of 2020 and net income has increased from $594 million to $8.15 billion by September of 2021 and Moderna net income from -$272 million in December of 2020 to $3.3 billion by September of 2021. Just for comparison sake  Apple's net income in March of 2021 $23.6 billion and ended December of 2021 $34.6 billion. Not nearly the increase as the drug companies which it has been said are making profits of $65,000 per minute as I found in an article on reliefweb.int and another on Yahoo that stated they will make as much from the vaccine revenue in 2021 as the total company revenue for 2020.

All very interesting. And like a said earlier a statistical nightmare to try to keep up with. 

Stay safe out there and Dawn of the Pandemic the book is coming very soon.