Ted Todorov

Let's see when the deliveries materialize (we ordered ours too). The good news: the long lines for PCR tests in Manhattan seem to be disappearing -- we got tested last Thursday at the local LabQ van - walked right up, showed out QR codes, done in a minute. Negative results came back in about 16 hours

danwiz

I just ordered ours too. Wonder how long they will take to ship. I also wonder what the difference is between ordering from the USPS website vs. the xxx.gov website.

PerryD

Cook County has a vaccine mandate for restaurants that started a couple weeks ago. Culver's is still open and requested to see my card before I ordered the other day, but it looks like Popeye's and McDonald's near my work chose to close their dining rooms instead. It hadn't occurred to me that this could happen, but it makes sense rather than putting pressure on fast food cashiers to check people's vaccine documents. I haven't seen this McDonald's indoor dining close since the beginning of the pandemic. Talking to the McDonald's manager, they are planning to stay closed indefinitely.

JoeyOhhhh

Ordered my tests yesterday.

Also walked into Staples this morning for paper and they had kits available. Picked up two

spainlinx0

I went to the original gov site, and when you click to order it simply redirects you to the USPS page that was linked in this thread.

fujishig

How crowded were they the past couple of months? A few of the fast food restaurants around here still have closed indoor dining but I think that's because of a worker shortage and/or cost/benefit analysis. I highly doubt (unfortunately 0 McDonalds cares that much about the feelings of their workers if the dining rooms were making money hand over fist.

Or maybe there are other requirements like spacing that are newly enforced too?

PerryD

Yeah, I didn't think to ask the manager if the closure if it was due to the mandate, so I can't say 100% that's the case. Popeye's was locked up, but McDonald's allowed you to order via their kiosk for carryout. I wouldn't say they were particularly busy in the restaurant generally 3 or 4 other tables in use, and I remember them closing some of the tables to create spacing, and a card on the table that was green that you flipped to red to indicate that the table needed to be cleaned after you left. There is a Wendy's that I eat at often, I can check them next week to see how they are dealing with the mandates and indoor dining.

jfoobar

They will care when lawyers tell them to care. The first time an employee gets assaulted by a customer for trying to enforce the vaccine mandate, ok. The second time, they run a serious risk of getting sued and losing (or at least choosing to settle) and/or being compelled to hire a dedicated security guard ($$). If I ran a fast food place with a vaccine mandate, I think I would seriously consider closing the lobby also.

PerryD

Yeah, previously I was only asked for my vaccine card at some of the metal shows that I attended, and trust me, you don't mess with those security staff. I feel bad for fast food cashiers to do the same. What do they do with small children? Do they ask their age first? What a mess.

rexinnih

OK, test kit order in. Now how long will it take?

bunkaroo

I’m sure we’ll have them right around the end of the Omicron wave.

Barth

To be honest, I think we've hit the peak and are getting super close to this being officially declared an endemic. I'm not sure what all these free tests and masks are going to do? We're probably going to see some high death numbers over the next few weeks since the case numbers were high and it's always a trailing trend. After that, unless we get a strange new variant, I think we start heading towards our new normal. Just my thoughts, I'm not a scientist and I wasn't in honors math or science, just my opinion. Complete guess.

tanman

To be clear I'm not basing this on anything scientific just my hunch (maybe more like hope). But I think this is going to be the last big peak. One thing is Omicron is so infectious that it will burn through a majority of the population leaving a majority of the population with immunity either natural or vaccine driven. This will really cause push it towards being an endemic disease. We were really fortunate that it's Omicron, Delta's less aggressive brother, that's so contagious. This would have been a disaster if Delta was this bad. Even though the hospital is full the acuity of patient's are not as severe. We still have people die from COVID for sure. But not nearly as much as before. Which is actually bad in terms of capacity because people dying off was one of the main ways we freed up ICU beds.

zyzzle

In some ways, Omicron was one of the best things that could have happened. Unless a new mutation comes along and is much more highly infectious and lethal than omicron, I also think we're past the worst... Those who were unvaxxed and caught omicron will create some herd immunity and this natural immunity core will make newer cases less frequent. It hopefully will then be a slope of COVID then naturally going away for lack of hosts. But, that's the absolute best-case scenario. I hope it happens, but I'm still 50/50 on the odds of that actually being the case.

Ted Todorov

Interesting. Having been to a McDonalds in ages, but in NYC, which has had restaurant vaccine mandates for many months now, I haven't seen any evidence of closures lately. There is a taco chain I walk by often they are certainly open. And the place I go to absolutely do check, and NYers are happy to comply. (Higher vaccination rates here??). Keep in mind that NYC has a huge percentage of restaurants with outdoor seating, so the anti-vaxx crowd can still eat there, just not indoors.

There was one incident that hit the press from a couple of months ago, but it was mainly about the disobedient customers being arrested (tourists from Texas IIRC).

fujishig

Do we know how the variants came to be? I guess I don't understand the optimism that another variant isn't lurking around the corner.

jfoobar

Until there is another variant that actually sticks and spreads, there is reason to worry about it but not really a good reason to let it guide public health policy. There have already been dozens of variants and descendants that you have never heard of and probably new ones this week that you will never hear of because they don't spread substantially. That's just how it goes. Consider this list:

https://cov-lineages.org/lineage_list.html

One good reason why we shouldn't let it guide public health policy is because we have no idea if the existing vaccines will even be effective against it. The further we get away from Alpha, which was what the current vaccines were designed to protect against, the odds of the vaccines being ineffective go up and up.

One thing we do seem to know now is that the current vaccines, while still protecting well against serious illness, are pretty much doing doodlysquat to prevent actual infections. It is for this reason that vaccine mandates are at least partially unnecessary right now and would be mostly unnecessary if more people had actually been vaccinated (thus alleviating the odds of any one ICU being overcapacity with Omicron patients). Alas, that ship has also sailed. We are deep into the realm of diminishing returns on vaccination at this point. There are very few people currently unvaccinated who are likely to ever be, at least as things stand right now (barring a new nastier variant, for example). As vaccine mandates (for going into restaurants, for jobs, etc.) are increasingly viewed as coercive, as they will be, they will become even less popular than they are now and will be dropped.

Sadly, we are increasingly throwing the baby out with the bathwater here since masking and social distancing still work very well and we are seeing a decrease (often politically motivated, such as in Virginia schools, the UK overall, etc.) in this as well. Estimates suggest that just as many more people will die of Omicron before the surge is completely gone as have died already and few seem to care. The Biden administration is actually doing the right thing here with a focus on testing and better masks, but approval ratings are dropping through the basement anyway. That harkens real effects (see "loosening") also. At the end of the day, a new rapid spreading variant that is more dangerous than Omicron is going to be absolutely devastating and I don't see any way to avoid it at this point. All we can do is hope it doesn't happen.

dsa_shea

We are still waiting for our Omicron Overlords to vacate our premises. I hope that this is the first and last time my family gets Covid. However, even if it becomes endemic, workplaces and establishments will still need to have some policies going forward unless this thing becomes even less severe. If it continues to be a virus that is highly infectious but the same severity, workforces and the general population will still have periods of decimation.

Nick Danger

I just tested positive for Covid. All three of us in the household feel kind of sick, but nothing major. I have a runny nose, cough, and loss of appetite, and I get tired more easily. I wouldn't have even gotten tested if someone else hadn't notified me that they tested positive.

The bad part is that my girlfriend has been trying for months to get an appointment to see a neurologist. She finally got one, and it was to be in a few days. Now it may be more months before she can make progress in finding out what uncommon illness is causing her so much pain.

Abob Teff

I'm not sure if you meant this the way I am reading it, but I could not disagree more. That is absolutely why the things we have learned should drive public health policy. Successful crisis management is having a plan in place before the crisis and recognizing how to adapt during the crisis. We should be developing solid public health policy to avoid the shitshow that we have lived for the last two years.

Abob Teff

I ... uh ... wait ... what? Did I miss a really good thread somewhere?

Rest up ... tots and pears!

emanon

There was a casual mention or two about her moving in, but apparently too mundane an event in DangerWorld to warrant a potential thread of the year.

Nick Danger

I got my Covid test at Walgreens. Their lab is PWNHealth. My positive test result posted at 12:45 AM. I saw the result after I woke up. At 2 PM I got a phone call from PWNHealth. I answered the phone. When they asked, I gave them my birth date and zip code. I thought it was some kind of official call with important information.

Then they tried to sell me antiviral meds. WTF?

jfoobar

No, I didn't mean it that way. For starters, the plan you speak of already exists. Heck, there was a pretty decent "plan" in place before Covid. The Trump administration just failed to follow it until it was far too late to stop the spread. In retrospect, however, I'm not sure it would have made a big difference even if they had.

A specific plan cannot be developed until we know what the new variant is, if there is one at all.

What I am saying is that we cannot let the possibility of a new rapid-spreading and deadly variant guide our immediate responses because we don't know if there is going to be one (doom crying by a subset of health experts aside) and we don't know if any of the medical mitigation strategies in place (current vaccines, antivirals, etc.) are going to be effective against it. Yes, would it be prudent for everyone to continue to mask up and social distance? Yes, but that ship has sailed. It would take a new variant substantially more deadly than Delta to get through the fogbank of ignorance and noncompliance we are currently sailing through.

The political reality is that these measures are increasingly and wildly unpopular and the fallout of this is, right or wrong, landing squarely on the shoulders of Democrats. The "right thing" medically and scientifically will only ensure that there is an almost complete GOP takeover of the Federal government in 2024. No matter what your or my position might be on voting rights, gay marriage, pot legalization, whatever, I think we can agree that if/when the next pandemic hits, the country would be in a much safer place if someone other than Trump or a Trump clone is running the show.

RichC2

PWN Health works as like an intermediary health admin/doctor, they get paid $6 to be the doctor that orders the tests and interpret results so the lab doesn't have to.

It's dumb. Lab Corp uses them too if you order a test from the website, unfortunately you can't generally order the correct useful tests with them - only the ones they offer which will have misleading descriptions from time to time.