Today’s topic is me as your internet mom lecturing: You, personally, are responsible for taking care of the body God has put into your care.
(Make that bodies, plural, if others in your family, your workplace, or your community are dependent on the decisions you make on their behalf. But today I’m mostly talking about the specific body your soul is animating, and then the rest will follow by extension.)
Yesterday when I picked back up on the COVID-blogging, I did something unusual and largely resisted making any public policy prescriptions. And understand: One of my early childhood memories is me laying in bed circa 1981, thinking about the Reagan-era Cold War discussions on the news, and forming a youthfully-innocent recommendation on how to achieve world peace. (It was: Mind Your Own Business. If you want to know how my third-grade self tended to think.) So for me to go never mind all that is a big deal.
And I’m going right now, to you my readers, that where Omicron is concerned: Never mind all that. You have much more pressing things to re-think right now.
Here’s a nice summary from a physician with the NHS about more or less what I gave you links on yesterday. (Yes, he’s writing in Al Jazeera. I like them as a source for learning about the existence of Africa/South Asia stories that the US press doesn’t cover. In this case, though, it’s just a guy who is looking at the view from his practice and the current, very limited data on the latest COVID outbreak in the UK, and it looks like we’re seeing a similar view of the horizon.)
Here’s The Atlantic’s summary of the state of the science as of this morning, which includes significant discussion of the part about how you’re contagious before you know to test, and that reality includes vaccinated folk. (FYI – Coronavirus coverage at The Atlantic is not behind the paywall. So you can just go read and check behind all the links and see what you think.)
So let’s talk about public health, and why I am very much urging you to reassess and update where COVID is concerned.
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Updated (7:30pm EST 12/21) to add this link to the White House’s press release:
On Monday morning, a mid-level staff member, who does not regularly have contact with the President, received a positive result for a COVID-19 test. Three days earlier, on Friday, that staff member had spent approximately 30 minutes in proximity to the President on Air Force One, on the way from Orangeburg, South Carolina to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This staff member is fully vaccinated and boosted, and tested negative prior to boarding Air Force One, as is required for everyone traveling with the President. This staff member did not begin to experience symptoms until Sunday, and was tested on Monday.
Fortunately so far President Biden is asymptomatic and testing negative. But guys: Fully vaxx’d, boosted, and coming down with COVID?
Vaccination status is not a sufficient protective strategy.
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In my opinion, the US has had one single public health success in managing the pandemic, and that is in making vaccines available to the entire US population. I have many complaints about many things, including some of the details of this thing, but this one thing did happen, and I’m grateful for it.
If you were hoping widespread vaccination would do the trick, I do think a vaccine-oriented approach to ending the pandemic was a reasonable hope.
Unfortunately, what I’m seeing with the growing wave of infection and transmission within groups of vaccinated persons is that many of us need to reassess the extent to which we were relying on personal and population-level vaccination as our primary means of self-protection.
I want to be very clear here: I think there remains strong evidence that vaccination is a good strategy for most adults’ personal health.
(–> Though I qualify with “adult”, my youngest child is fifteen and fully vaccinated; I’m hesitant to make any further comments on vaccinating young people because I’ve had no call to look into the question for children-generally. Since I don’t have younger children, I’ve only assessed what applies to my specific offspring with their various personal medical histories, states in life, etc.)
Furthermore, even though it is becoming very clear that vaccinated persons are experiencing breakthrough infections and spreading the virus among themselves, I think there is still strong logical evidence in favor of using household vaccination as a way to reduce (but not eliminate) risk to vulnerable persons. In other words: Even if you didn’t think your child personally needed the protection of vaccination, it would still make sense to vaccinate your child if you or another family member is higher-risk for COVID complications. No, I am not satisfied with the data I’ve seen on household transmission as of yet, but seriously? If you are spending two-thirds or more of your day in close quarters with somebody, it’s gotta be easier to get less-sick if that person is also less-sick and for less time? I mean, just guessing? But yes?
So vaccination remains a good strategy even though it cannot be a total strategy.
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The reason I am writing yesterday and today is because public health moves slowly and Omicron does not. Over the next week or two or three, if you are relying on vaccination-status as your means of not getting COVID, you are very likely to make decisions that will put you at significant risk of infection.
(Again: If you are a person who is indifferent to being infected, I’m unclear on why you aren’t scrolling @catworkers like I told you to yesterday. If you exhausted that feed, can I recommend @hourlyfox, @corgieveryhour, @rabbiteveryhour, and probably also a long talk with a good friend?)
I know a lot of people who have serious reasons to minimize their exposure to COVID-19. Many of you have, very rationally, taken the approach until now of using vaccination status (or immune status generally, if you also include prior-infection history) as a means of striking the balance in the trade off between the real and serious risks of isolation and the real and serious risks of infection. I am not in any way suggesting you panic. I am saying that you need to update your strategy, and that at this time you are the only person who is going do that for you.
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Listen, I know many of you reading this are hopeful that whatever governments are local-to-you will take appropriate public health measures. There’s a reason I’m not commenting on what those measures should be, and my reason is this: They aren’t actually happening in a way that will protect you.
We have seen multiple incidences of the very leaders who imposed strict lockdown and isolation and mask-wearing rules brazenly breaking their own rules. Um, so . . . there’s a vector for you. I can likewise assure you that in institutions and jurisdictions where vaccine mandates, test-and-trace, and quarantine protocols are official policy, there are standard practices of ignoring, circumventing, or outright lying to get around the rules any time there is a perverse incentive to do so. Maybe people are behaving in front of your face? But they aren’t behaving.
Your understandable anger at this situation will not keep you from getting infected. You have to decide whether you’d rather be angry-and-sick or angry-and-not-sick.
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In any case, your anger is rapidly growing obsolete. Omicron is not playing by the rules put in place under the regime of earlier mutations.
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So where does that leave you? It leaves you with reexamining the ways you can take responsibility for reducing your risk of infection and reducing your risk of complications from infection. What are they?
#1 Clean Air
@CovidIsAirborne is a fairly good aggregator of info on this. Ditto @jljcolorado. I would say that for most of my readers, the big change you can make is to buy or build a good air purifier for your home (if you share air with people) if you don’t have one already, and ditto for your workplace, classroom, etc.
I haven’t seen anyone mention this, but y’all: If someone in your home is higher-risk for respiratory infections, do a serious assessment of how much you can cut down on sharing exhaled air. It’s okay to have weird sleeping arrangements so that your child with severe asthma isn’t spending a third of his life breathing whatever germs the sibling brought home, even if they need to share a room during waking hours. Your marriage will be just fine if your spouse who has comorbid risk factors uses the marriage-bed for intercourse but some other room away from your germ-exhaling self for a sleeping-bed. (Yes. I said that. Clean air is a great way to prolong your marriage and all the good things that marriage has to offer. If you’re too young to read about that, you need to get off the internet.)
#2 For-Serious Masks
Again, I am not making risk-benefit decisions for you. But if in your own estimation it is important for you and the people you breathe around not to get infected with COVID, it’s time to upgrade to N95s. Use them when you are indoors (or crowded outdoors) around people who are breathing, and also when you are indoors in places where people have been breathing, even if the people themselves have moved on.
Even (especially) if you are not concerned about your own risk, use an N95 when you’re visiting a high-risk person.
In close quarters, such as when you’re packed into an airplane, even if the air filtration overall is top notch, use an N95 to prevent exposure to the unfiltered air coming straight at you from the person who keeps taking your armrest.
#3 Your Underlying Health
Being perfectly healthy won’t prevent Long Covid, and it’s no guarantee against severe (even fatal) infection. In any case, you probably don’t have it in your power to be perfectly healthy. What you can do, though, is take small steps to be healthier than you otherwise would be. Then, no matter what happens, you’ll have that much more of an edge.
Get your blood sugar down to a consistently healthy level. Because it is so strongly associated with poor outcomes, this should be a very high priority. You can make improvements to your blood sugar numbers even when weight loss isn’t happening.
Eat healthy foods. Heavy on the fresh vegetables, and then whatever unprocessed or minimally-processed foods seem to work the best for you.
Exercise the amount that you can. Maybe that’s a lot, maybe that’s not a lot. If you’re currently dealing with Long Covid, another post-viral syndrome, or some other exercise-limiting illness or injury . . . believe me, I know. I know. It is very, very hard in difficult cases to know exactly how to balance out rest and activity levels. Do the amount that you safely can. It’s okay to err on the side of a little too much rest, you can always do a little bit more tomorrow.
But especially if you’re dealing with a serious illness or underlying condition, the amount of physical activity that you can safely accomplish is super important. Don’t fixate on the big picture here. You’ll go bonkers if you try to compare yourself to people who can follow some generic plan and push themselves and all that. Just do the amount today that you’re confident will be okay.
Get fresh air and sunlight. Go outside if you possibly can.
Cultivate friendships. Find people who support your mental and physical health and let them be the people who predominate in your life.
Discover the deeper meaning and purpose in your life right now. Chances are that if you are someone who has an above-average need to prevent COVID-19 infection, maybe your life is pretty difficult?
Maybe you are dealing with a lot of social isolation because you’ve been in this situation for a long time, even when others around you felt relatively safe. Maybe your risk profile has changed because of some serious losses that have occurred over the past year or two. Maybe your underlying health condition, or your state in life that has people so desperately depending on you, involves hardship.
Hard situations are just plain hard. They aren’t fun, and they usually involve you not getting to live life quite the way you’d hoped. Maybe you’ve been valuing the person you wish you could be, and you’re feeling like right now your life just isn’t all that. You can’t contribute, or be involved, or do the important-to-you thing that you have long considered to be who you should be.
Well, that picture of an “ideal” life might be perfect for somebody, but guess what? It’s not your vocation. If it were your calling, you’d be able to live that life. You’re not. Your calling is to live well the life you’ve been given at this very moment. Whatever that is. Richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, until death do you part: Live the life that you have.
Artwork: Albert Bierstadt – Storm Clouds (c.1880), public domain.
PS: If your reason for not-vaccinating yet is an understandable concern about running medical experiments on yourself, it may be that there is now enough safety-related data accumulated to put your mind at ease. Keep in mind that even if you don’t trust the US or XYZ other country’s data, there are studies being put out all over the world, in all kinds of different political, social, and environmental conditions, so you are much more likely today to be able to find information that answers your questions about the risks and benefits to someone in your situation. It’s worth looking into.
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