I got the booster shot Friday night (at Wal-Mart of all places). I had Pfizer for the first two but signed up for the Moderna booster. May as well get some variety; variety is the spice of life and the spice must flow. They asked if that was really what I wanted and told me they had plenty of all the brands so I could have whichever I wanted.
Makes sense. While I was there, it being a Wal-Mart, I saw plenty of maskless people who probably hadn’t even had a first dose yet, and certainly weren’t going to cause any shortage in boosters.
They told me I didn’t have to sit on the bench for 15 minutes, but maybe at least stay in the store so if I did have a reaction it wouldn’t happen out in the parking lot or on the road. That was funny in retrospect - if you bought a couple of things (as I did) and stood in line at the checkout, there was no way you were getting out of that store for well over 15 minutes.
As far as side effects, I lucked out. It may have caused shoulder and muscle aches and fatigue, but I wouldn’t know since I spent the next couple of days packing and carrying heavy boxes up and down steps and snowy hills. So I was destined to get muscle aches and fatigue anyway one way or the other.
The move is almost complete now though, and my office at the new house is almost fully set up and functional now. Just in time for the holiday. At least I have one day of mostly rest tomorrow before my mother in law shows up.
Unfortunately, in the USA we have recently begun to encounter patients refusing blood based solely on the COVID-19 vaccination status or COVID-19 infection history of the blood donor. These patients have adamantly demanded that physicians disclose details of the donor from whom they may potentially receive blood, including whether the donor received a COVID-19 vaccine. These same patients, some of whom are likely to imminently require blood, have refused to consent to transfusion unless they can be assured that the blood donor did not receive a COVID-19 vaccine, regardless of the risk of morbidity and mortality. Prevailing thought processes among this population include concerns of becoming infected with COVID-19 or developing long-term effects from the vaccine itself via the blood transfusion, beliefs that the vaccine is a device created for genetic modification by those with ulterior motives, or that people who choose to receive a vaccine are in some way inferior.9-13 While these ideologies appear to be most prevalent in North America, particularly in the USA, they are not isolated to a single hospital or specific geographic region of the country, as physicians from multiple institutions across the USA have been approached by patients directly, or consulted by other physicians questioning how to best address these concerns. These occurrences have become an issue to such extent that the AABB (formerly the American Association of Blood Banks)14 and Canadian Blood Services15 have issued guidance on how to address circumstances in which patients requiring blood transfusion request blood from unvaccinated donors.
TLDR: there is conflicting data showing that (a) Omicron & Delta are fairly similar in virulence from an individual patient perspective, and (b) Omicron appears to be significantly less likely to cause severe disease on a population level.
A possible explanation is that the greater ability of Omicron to infect vaxxed or previously infected patients means that a larger proportion of the infected population have some partial pre-existing resistance to the disease. So it’s not so much that Omicron is less severe, it’s more that Omicron is less restricted to the most vulnerable fraction of the population.
Additionally, the three Tas newspapers (Hobart/Launceston/Burnie) have mostly returned to keeping their Covid news behind their paywalls. There’s basically no free news in Tasmania apart from broadcast TV.
A somewhat similar dynamic applies to cricket. Hobart has an international cricket ground, but it is very much last in line when it comes to distributing events. The big games go to the mainland grounds, Bellerive Oval gets what’s left (if anything).
Due to Covid chaos, this year the big post-Christmas game (the Boxing Day Ashes Test) has been shifted from Perth to Hobart. This was a big deal for local politics, and the state government is banking on gaining popularity from it.
Unfortunately, this means that the Tas government is severely disinclined to do anything that might disrupt the match. So any move to, for example, limit crowd sizes or reinstitute quarantine requirements for travellers from Sydney is unlikely to happen until after the match finishes on the 30th.
Totally true, the vaccination makes one effectively immortal. Sure, there’s now been a drastic uptick in swordfights, freak lightning storms, and Queen music in cities that are left-wing strongholds, but it’s a small price to pay. After all, who wants to live forever?
Courtesy of Omicron and the idiotic Christmas “reopening” of every state except WA: Queensland and South Australia have now joined NSW and Victoria as uncontrolled plague states.
