I'm going to be even scarcer than usual around her for the next few weeks. I've got some vacation time coming up and I think I'm going to try to unplug from everything and see if that helps my burnout.
Anyway, the links are all starting to seem the same. There are only so many ways to say "get vaccinated," I guess!
If you've seen the news about the Provincetown outbreak and other breakthrough infections and are feeling worried, this thread may help:
I know I sound like a broken record
But here's the thing
The vaccines are largely working as expected
We had an outbreak in P-town with lots of vaccinated folks infected
— Ashish K. Jha, MD, MPH (@ashishkjha) July 30, 2021
Personally, I'm glad we're back to more mandates/encouragement to wear masks because I think we should all keep wearing masks indoors until kids can be vaccinated. I am very grateful to be living in a place where the school district has already announced masks will be required indoors, although they are apparently getting sued for their troubles. The new CDC guidance makes me worry a little less about that lawsuit, at least.
This thread from Amanda Knox is really good and thought-provoking. (Note: Both the thread and the article discuss plot details of the movie Stillwater that would probably be considered spoilers.)
Does my name belong to me? My face? What about my life? My story? Why does my name refer to events I had no hand in? I return to these questions because others continue to profit off my name, face, & story without my consent. Most recently, the film #STILLWATER.
Based on Jennywenny's recommendation in the comments last week, I decided to check out the Ten Percent Happier podcast. The episode I picked to try is called Getting Over Yourself, and is an interview with Joseph Goldstein. He mentioned a type of meditation where you just notice which sense has your attention. I tried it on a walk later in the week and it is an interesting exercise. I didn't really notice more things, but I noticed them more fully. I might try it again.
In case you missed it, last weekend I posted a Something Splendid over at Adjusted Latitudes - a photo that made me miss New Zealand and my family there so much when I came across it that I knew I couldn't turn it into a "where in the world" quiz. It is too obviously New Zealand!
I had a scary experience Thursday. I had just sat down to work, a little later than usual because Petunia had slept in a bit. I felt a tickle in my throat, coughed, and then my heartbeat went screwy. I do not know whether to call it an irregular heartbeat or heart palpitations or something else, but I knew that if I didn't lay down I'd probably pass out so I went to the sofa and waited for it to pass. My husband was in the shower. By the time he came out, my heart was beating normally again and I was feeling a bit better. I called my doctor's office, thinking I'd make an appointment for later. They had me talk to the triage nurse, who had me measure my pulse (that pulse oximeter I bought last year came in handy again!) It was still jumping around quite a bit so said I should go to urgent care.
I was seen quickly at urgent care, but even so by the time they took an EKG everything was back to normal. None of the tests they could do told us anything about what had happened, so I was sent home and told that if it happens again I should go straight to either the ER or urgent care so that they can try to catch the irregular rhythm and see what it is.
So I'm left with waiting and hoping I never know what happened, because the only way to find out is to have it happen again! I am also wondering if the fact that I feel stressed so often and/or the fact that I am struggling to get enough sleep contributed to this event. Of course, whether these factors contributed or not, it would be better to reduce my stress levels and get enough sleep. The trick is in figuring out how to do that when one reason for my elevated stress levels is the difficulty of navigating this ongoing pandemic with one child still unvaccinated and when the reason I'm not getting enough sleep is that same child's sleep difficulties.
Still, I need to try to make things better. We're trying various things our pediatrician recommended on the sleep front. There isn't much more I can do there, unfortunately, so I'm working on the stress levels. I've started prioritizing my Friday rollerblade outing. I can almost always get away in the early afternoon (this time of year, I want to be done with my rollerblade and leaving Pacific Beach before 4 p.m. to avoid a post-beach traffic jam), I just sometimes have to "pay" for that with an hour or two of work after dinner. That is not a bad trade at all. Rollerblading again helps, but it is not enough. We have a vacation coming up, so maybe that will help. I am also planning to spend some time in my hammock this weekend, relaxing and thinking about how I can really relax. If you have some favorite things that help your relax when the world around is so not relaxing... drop them in the comments! I am definitely open to suggestions.
Anyway, let's see what links I have for you this week.
This thread and the linked Lancet article about the cognitive effects of COVID is... sobering.
LONG COVID THREAD:
The people running the BBC Horizon "Great British Intelligence Test" challenge on over 80,000 people took the opportunity to see if they could detect any differences by whether people had had covid or not...
As is this interview with Cรฉline Gounder, particularly the part about how much more easily the Delta variant spreads. However, I found her comments on outdoor transmission (still likely to be rare, except perhaps at crowded events) reasuring.
This long thread about what sociology research can tell us about how to deal with anti-vaxxers is really good. Read the whole thing, but I thought this point about how "coolers" (people within the community of the anti-vaxxers who can show them a way back to reality) function was particularly important:
But w/increasing numbers, it becomes more difficult to marginalize the efforts of coolers. They represent the weight of reality crushing fantasy. We need to identify & support more of these insiders w/in the reference groups that matter to COVID deniers & antivaxxers. 28/x
For the past week I've been playing around with an AI image generator, thanks to @images_ai, and using it to "make" dozens of "paintings" of "Los Angeles" (big " " finger gesture). I've been completely blown away by how beautiful/inspiring the images are. A sample (more soon): pic.twitter.com/fgnRss7bjQ
I don't know if I'll have many links for you this week. I got frustrated/depressed by the news about the Delta variant spreading and the heat waves and floods and other climate-related disasters and I decided to spend less time on Twitter and am instead working on a jigsaw puzzle my parents lent me. My husband has already done this one so he is staying away and therefore it is taking me longer to do (which is a good thing since I was looking for an offline distraction).
I am on the fence about what to do about social media long term, but for now I am cutting back and that seems to help a bit.
I don't just delete my accounts because I have gotten some real value out of Twitter. I've learned a lot about various topics over the years, and it was how I was ahead of the game during this pandemic. Tweets that came across my feed were why I'd stocked up a bit on staples before the lockdown. They are why I bought and started wearing masks early. Tweets (and the articles linked in them) have helped me figure out how to keep my family safe while also not being complete hermits.
This is breaking down now, though. I very much want to find reliable information to help me figure out how to keep my unvaccinated 11 year old safe right now, and I am not finding that. Instead, there is a lot of yelling about whether we should be mad at unvaccinated adults or whether our anger/ridicule is keeping them from getting vaccinated. There are a lot of anecdotes about breakthrough infections among the vaccinated, but when I do find real data on that it is still very, very rare.
So... what are we doing? I am working on new rules for us based on these observations. I will put links where I have them, but I don't have as many links as I'd like:
The Delta variant is definitely easier to spread. I have seen scattered reports of outbreaks in outdoor events, but so far those are events where people are close together for long periods of time, like weddings and parties. I haven't yet found any systematic survey of the risk when outdoors, though.
Fully vaccinated adults and teenagers are still really well protected from infection, even with the Delta variant. If they do get sick, they are more likely to have mild symptoms and less likely to end up hospitalized.
Older adults and people with compromised immune systems seem to be at higher risk of breakthrough infections.
There was one anecdote I came across of a family like ours, where 3 out of 4 members are vaccinated. Their 11 year old got infected on vacation and then passed it to the rest. I think vaccinated household contacts of an infected person are at particular risk of breakthrough, but I haven't seen data on this. It makes sense to me that the vaccinated parents of a sick child would end up sick, because their exposure rate would be so high.
I saw a thread from a patient group that is tracking long COVID that indicated there are some long COVID cases among breakthrough infections. I have also seen plausible arguments from infectious disease experts that you'd expect fewer long COVID cases among the vaccinated who get sick, because there should be lower viral load. I think we just do not know yet what the risk of long COVID is for vaccinated people.
Looking at all of this, I think Petunia is the family member most at risk because she is completely unprotected. She has mild exercise induced asthma but no other risk factor, so if she gets sick, her risk of serious illness is low, but I have no way to assess her risk of long COVID or MIS-C.
If Petunia gets sick, there is a good chance that the rest of us will, too. Our risk of serious illness is low but I don't really know what to think about our risk of long COVID.
Basically, we still need to be careful because the pandemic is not over and our vaccine protection cannot be complete until Petunia turns 12.
I wish all people who are eligible for vaccines would get them and that we'd all wear masks indoors until either transmission is really, really low or vaccines are available for everyone. But neither of those things will happen.
So what will our family do to keep safe? Here's my plan right now:
We all wear masks in any indoor public place. I bought another box of KF94s. Petunia will wear those while shopping, etc. The vaccinated people in the family can wear our cloth masks, but I wore a KF94 for a recent doctor's appointment and I think that if in doubt, I will err on the side of the better mask.
None of us will dine indoors at a restaurant until we are all vaccinated. We will eat outdoors at restaurants, though, looking for well-spaced patios.
If we go to an outdoor event, we will not be in close quarters with other people whose vaccination status we cannot know. While the kids were in Arizona last month, my husband and I went to a local rugby game. That felt fine because it wasn't packed, so we could sit more than 6 feet away from other people. I would not go to a crowded event right now.
We will still see vaccinated friends and family without masking, but will bias towards outdoor get togethers. Luckily, the weather in San Diego right now makes that an easy choice.
I wish I had prevailed in the discussion about where to take our vacation this year. I wanted to do a car trip here in California, but Mr. Snarky wanted to visit a new state. We settled on a trip to Washington state, with the majority of the time spent at National Parks. We will fly to Seattle. I am feeling far less good about this decision now than I did when we made the reservations but I think it is still not a very high risk.
We haven't cancelled our vacation but I am doing extra research to make sure I have a lot of restaurant options so that we can be sure we never eat indoors. As my kids got older, I starting doing less research ahead of a trip because they could roll with delayed meal times or a longer than expected walk a bit better. I am back to the level of research I did when they were toddlers. I don't mind doing this research (and even enjoy parts of it) so that's OK.
We'll all wear KF94 masks on the plane and the masks will go on when we enter the airport in San Diego and won't come off until we leave the airport in Seattle. We will hope that a flight between two cities with good vaccination rates will be OK, particularly since masks are still required on flights. And I will do my best not to worry.
This excerpt from Michael Bender's book about Trump supporters is definitely worth your time. It is interesting how the rallies made communities of like-minded people and how that filled a need for some people. This quote from one supporter who was at the Capitol on Jan 6, though, blew my mind:
“We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
Do you know about the Alaska bear cams? There was a bearapalooza Wednesday night and it was awesome:
Puffin selfie!
Just back from Wexford. I lost my phone on Saltee Island yesterday. A puffin came across it. Today someone saw puffin sitting on my phone, took it lads on ferry.
We turned on our AC for the first time last night. Petunia hadn't opened her window when we turned the whole house fan on, and so her room hadn't cooled down. It was after the flex alert that had been called to decrease energy usage in the peak hours, so we turned on the heat pump for about an hour. It definitely cools the house fast than the fan does, but we are still minimizing usage. The fan uses far less energy.
That may change once we get a solar panel and home battery installation completed. We're currently evaluating our options. One of the quotes we got is from the same company who installed our heat pump. In fact, it was from the same person who handled the heat pump installation. He heard that we hadn't used our AC yet this summer and suggested we do a test run soon, so that if there was any problem we could get on the schedule to fix it before it gets hotter and his company gets busier. So, test completed at least.
Speaking of getting hotter...
David Roberts' latest post on his Volts newsletter is really good. I can't tell if this post is free to all or limited to subscribers. If you can't follow the link - sorry! Basically, he argues that the most important piece of climate policy right now is clean electrification. He calls that the "main dish" and everything else - even if it is a good idea - the side dishes. The reason is that nothing else under discussion now can decarbonize us fast enough.
Roberts also had a really interesting podcast recently, in which he interviewed Canadian climate activist Tzeporah Berman about a new initiative for a global treaty limiting fossil fuel production. It is a really interesting idea, and Berman is very knowledgeable on the topic of climate change and environmental policy and how activism influences change. She is also a refreshing combination of realistic and optimistic. I am glad I listened to this interview!
I have a four day weekend for the 4th of July. I'd feel pretty good about that, except my husband has the entire week off next week so while I enjoyed my day off yesterday, I'm going to be pretty jealous next Tuesday when I go back to work and he does not.
Still, I'm going to enjoy the time off I have. I went rollerblading yesterday morning - and I think that will be the last time I go to Mission Bay this weekend. It wasn't too crowded yesterday morning, but there were already a fair number of RVs parked and the port-a-potties were already out, ready for the big crowds that this weekend always draws to the bay. There's a church parking lot in our neighborhood where we can go stand and watch the Sea World fireworks, and that will do for us.
Yesterday I also finished listening to David Roberts' conversation with Saul Griffith and Arch Rao about electrification. I always find conversations with Griffith encouraging. He clearly understands the challenge but he sees a path forward for us to electrify everything and he is very good at making the case for that path. A podcast conversation between Griffith and Ezra Klein is what convinced me that we needed to replace our furnace with an electric heat pump and I still refer people to it for a really clear-eyed view of how to make climate-friendly decisions without necessarily making huge sacrifices in your lifestyle.
This thread on the decrease in child asthma ICU visits during the pandemic is really interesting. My asthma is nowhere near this severe but the thing most likely to send me to urgent care for a breathing treatment is a respiratory infection that causes it to flare:
Lately, I’ve been reflecting a lot of how much racism has affected our understanding of the pathophysiology of asthma in children. And how the pandemic has exposed just how wrong so many of the underlying assumptions were. A thread ๐งต 1/11
Petunia came back from a visit to my parents and wanted to heart every single hamster she missed seeing on my Twitter feed while she was gone. I like Dory because she looks a lot like our Daisy:
