liv | Entries tagged with covid

We (

jack and I) got Covid at Worldcon, or possibly travelling back from it.

( some covid, some con report )

So, all in all, good, but not worth risking my life and livelihood :-( I won't do that again, even if my entire family are going and I want to be with them.

Moooooood sick

So there was an update to the Cochrane review on masks to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. It concluded that Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks.

The reception of this review has been fascinating, though extremely depressing. ( discussing Covid evidence and misinformation )

The latest news is that the editor-in-chief of the Cochrane library has semi-retracted the notorious review. As reported by Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times, Soares-Weiser has issued a statement that Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation ... [our] wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize. (I am aware that some people are boycotting the NYT due to its horrible transphobia; right now they are the outlet breaking this news, so feel free to wait until other press wires pick it up if you don't want to give them clicks. Also, I bypassed the paywall by turning off JavaScript; up to you whether you're comfortable with doing that.)

The remainder of the article summarizes some of the (non RCT) evidence in favour of masks, and notes that the Cochrane review lead author has a history of anti-mask views and even pandemic minimizing. I have a lot of time for Tufekci, but some people don't like her because she doesn't come from a scientific or medical background, and she tends to take into account evidence from a range of sources and in particular doesn't accept some of the most extreme Covid catastrophizing. IMO she's been pretty consistently right, supporting masks and opposing restrictions on outdoor socializing from very early on, campaigning for Long Covid sufferers but rejecting absurdly high projections of levels of severe long-term organ and immune damage. In my view the important thing is the statement by Soares-Weiser where she is very clear that the Cochrane review has been misinterpreted as being definitively anti-mask.

So there you go, that takes us more or less back to the status quo ante, before the January update of the Cochrane Review. We have some evidence in favour of some types of masks in some situations, but we can't definitively say 'masks work' or 'masks don't work'. I think that may be some of the reason why some of the mask debate has become so painful and polarized; a lot of people don't feel comfortable with the idea of a mitigation that has some effect but isn't perfect, they want interventions to either "work" or "not work". Same as the vaccination debate. Vaccines, like masks, give some protection, but they're not, as Tufecki puts, it, a talisman or a magic wand.

Moooooood thoughtful
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

Purim in the UK in 2020 was a superspreader event. ( celebrating in a time of plague )

Moooooood ambivalent
Whereaboooouts Shushan HaBirah

I keep seeing comments from people who, like me, believe that we should be doing more to avoid catching Covid repeatedly, complaining that others, the pro-Covid or the vaxxed-and-relaxed or the post-pandemic factions, are stupid. To which my response is: stop being on my side!

( covid attitudes )

A much more useful take on how we can use our minds for Survival in the Great Age of Plagues is

siderea's recent multipart Covid post.

siderea starts from the assumption that simply being smart, passively existing as a person with high intelligence, doesn't magically protect you from disasters. You have to actively use your mind to seek out and evaluate information and act on what you learn. And she is also very aware that Those who have more money and power will be better able to protect themselves.".

I don't agree with everything in

siderea's post, and anyway it's only an introduction to a hopeful future series. I do think it is a useful collection of issues to consider regarding what an intelligent person can do in the circumstances we find ourselves in. Curating information as well as evaluating it. Reasoning from (sometimes imperfect) knowledge, not just abstract thinking. Procedural as well as semantic knowledge. Acting on your conclusions even if that goes against authority or social consensus.

One thing I am sure of is that letting yourself believe that your good health is a reward for your superior intelligence is a dangerous mistake. It's not only that it's mean, it's morally bad to call other people in less fortunate circumstances stupid (which it is). It's that investing in such a belief is likely to lead to bad decisions, in the same way that imagining yourself too smart to be scammed directly puts you at risk of certain kinds of deceit.

Moooooood grumpy

So we're living through a pandemic, so not surprisingly this sometimes affects my plans. Every time I happen to mention taking any sort of precaution, noting that the price of LFTs has gone up or that the clement weather made eating outside pleasant, a bunch of anons comment to tell me that actually I should be catching Covid more.

Does this happen to other people, and you're just quicker to screen / delete such comments? Or have I picked up several followers who are really invested in me personally getting Covid? It's very evident that people who post from established identities generally agree with me that Covid is bad. Of course, there are plenty of good reasons for being anonymous, anything from can't be bothered to create / log in to a DW account to being on a state level hitlist. And quite possibly people choose to comment anonymously on this topic because they don't want to face opprobrium from me and my friends who think infectious disease is a bad thing. But if I have no idea who you are, what your expertise is, what your relationship is to me, it's harder for me to take your arguments seriously.

I'm going to restate the anon commenting rule I have: if you want to comment anonymously, that's completely fine, but please sign your comment with some kind of identifying name even if it's just "anon1" or a single initial or another throwaway ident. That means I can at least tell which comments come from the same versus different people! I don't want to put anyone at risk, but totally unsigned comments make conversation a bit of a pain. I haven't been super strict about deleting them because I know people forget. But here's your reminder: anon comments need some kind of signature.

ETA People are ignoring this rule, so I've turned on anon comment screening. If you make an anon comment I will unscreen it only if it is signed in some way – nonsense idents are fine but there has to be something.

Anyway, I'm making a thread here where people can put those kinds of comments if you're so moved (either anon or identified, up to you). If you really want to persuade me I should be catching Covid and transmitting it to others, this is the place for your arguments. I note that calling me a scaredy-cat wasn't effective at making me do stupid things when I was eleven, so it's certainly not going to work now. If you want me to increase my exposure to Covid, you need to make a case for why it's actually good. I agree it probably won't kill me on a scale of weeks, but "not immediately deadly" doesn't make this infectious illness desirable.

Going forward, this post is the only place I will accept pro-Covid persuasion. Comments along those lines on any other posts will be deleted and copied to this thread.

Moooooood annoyed

So I tested positive for Covid for a full 14 days. By that point I had decided that I was likely not to be infectious any more and could ethically emerge from isolation, but fortunately I did get my second negative test anyway.

( busy week, some Covid discussion )

Moooooood sick
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

Now I really do have Covid. Worst possible timing, because it's the middle of the High Holy Days and means I have to cancel leading services for Yom Kippur.

( covid, religion )

Moooooood pissed off
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

TL;DR: I'm sick, and it might or might not be Covid, and I'm grumpy.

( living with the virus )

Moooooood sick
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

I am drifting away from long-form social media again. ( general catch-up )

UK politics is Very at the moment, and we're in the third omicron surge in 2022, and lots of my very careful friends and people whose health I'm worried about are getting infected and I generally feel a bit despairing. But on a day-to-day basis my life is mostly good, and would be improved by checking in here more often, so I'm going to try to restart that habit.

Moooooood blah

Recently read: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. (c) Susanna Clarke 2020, Pub Bloomsbury 2020; ISBN 978-1-5266-2242-6

I bought this as a new hardback soon after it came out, because I'm exceptionally excited by a new Susanna Clarke and because lots of my friends were raving about it. I didn't settle down to read it for ages, but then I messed up a pandemic safety decision and ended up waiting alone in my partners' house for several hours. (Basically Judith was in a panto, I'd automatically assumed I wouldn't go because we haven't been doing indoor theatre at all, but forgot to factor in that if the whole family was going there was no point me staying away. Anyway, I missed the show, so I read a book while waiting for everybody to come home.)

Anyway, it's just as good a book as I hoped, really absorbing.

( detailed review )

Today I had my booster. I still think, even post-omicron, that focusing on boosters was the wrong policy; we should have started with first doses for children and the poorer parts of the world. But given that the mistakes have already been made and we have a highly transmissible, immune escape variant everywhere, I personally feel a lot safer now that I've had my mRNA booster. (I was AZ/AZ/Moderna.) In order to get it I needed

ghoti_mhic_uait to give me a lift to a small town 15 miles away, because this million boosters a day programme is a bit of a mess. But when I turned up it was all very efficient, big spacious sports hall, loads of marshalls, straight through to a vaccination station and straight out again, bam.

I currently feel tired, nothing worse than that, and I'm not even convinced I feel more tired than I did yesterday. It's been a long, dark, lonely autumn, and that's as likely as the vaccine to be the culprit.

Moooooood touched
Whereaboooouts House
Tuuuuuune Carols on Radio 3

So, it's the Ten Days of Awe between the New Year and the Day of Atonement, which is a good time for spiritual reflection, and I think better in a DW entry box than most other ways. As ever, you're completely allowed to skip.

( trying to stay connected through the pandemic )

So, happy new year if this is a time of renewal for you.

Moooooood refreshed

So I took a train for the first time in most of a year and a half.

( trying to balance fun and safety in a pandemic )

Anyway, that's where I am. Still basically fine personally, still anxious about the country and the world.

Moooooood anxious

So. The US CDC have suddenly announced that vaccinated people should wear masks, because new evidence (mostly in the form of leaked preprint data and internal discussions, which isn't great) shows that Delta is much worse than the previous variants.

( interpretations of Covid evidence )

Moooooood serious

I'm asking specific questions here and not looking for general speculation and chat about the topics. Ideally I would like UK-relevant answers too; sorry that makes this post boring for some of my audience.

( some of them are Covid-related )

TIA, people. I'm bored of this so bored. But since our leadership have surrendered to the virus, I need to figure out how to carve out some kind of life for myself.

Moooooood anxious
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

Busy week, at least by pandemic standards!

( vaccination mention, some socializing )

Moooooood relaxed
Whereaboooouts Diggerland, Rochester, UK

So. Um. This is now public: my employers just won a major grant to help train the whole world in Covid sequencing and analysis, to the same high standard that the UK's Covid Genomics Consortium (COG-UK) have achieved. For the next two years, I'm the education specialist in a massive cross-institutional team trying to save the world from the pandemic.

( work changes )

I think I have some emotions about this, but I'm not quite sure how to describe what they are.

Moooooood excited
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

Last summer I didn't do much because I didn't really believe the pandemic was over. This summer I know for sure it's not over, but the start of the third wave is the least bad time to have fun before everything closes down again. So

jack and I booked a self-catering place in north Norfolk, for the week before the day slated for removing all restrictions.

( perfect holiday )

I am starting to think slightly optimistic thoughts about putting this pandemic behind us.

( mentions vaccination )

Moooooood thankful
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

I am getting sucked into Twitter and away from DW, which is bad for lots of reasons, one of which is that it's endorphin-seeky behaviour and not healthy for me. So let me get back into the habit of posting by journalling about the last few weeks.

( Outdoor socializing )

Moooooood blah
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

So the pandemic started, for most of us not in Italy or China, sometime around March 2020, and the exact anniversary isn't really a specific day. I said I was starting counting from March 16, so here we are. It's been a year.

( I have nothing new to say about this, really )

So, I dunno. Just keeping on keeping on, I guess.

Moooooood bored
Whereaboooouts Pumbedita House, Cambridge, UK

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