Which one means yer preggers?
Journal of the Corona Year â Ermahgerd Omicron!
12/13 â 12/20
Over the past week two things have been happening: the omicron variant is surging and my company is getting ready for their 30th Anniversary Party.
The party was supposed to be held last year, but the pandemic got in the way. So after a delay of a year, the party was back on and nothing was going to stop it.
Even before the emergence of omicron it was already complicated. People were flying in from all over the country. Cigars, gift bags, name tags, roving photographers, short personal videos, suitable entertainment, and kosher food were all required.
There was talk of hiring Billy Joel or even Jay Leno.
It was also being held across the Hudson at a venue on the Morris Canal Basin named Maritime Parc. No one knew why. This added the complication of needing a ferry to take people there. And then busses were needed to take people to the ferry.
This was all complicated enough. Then the omicron variant appeared.
The world first heard if it just after Thanksgiving. I remember a few months ago hearing about the lambda variant, but nothing much came of that. Somehow, without noticing, we jumped all the way to omicron.
Day by day the threat posed by this new mutation seemed to grow. We assumed we had seen everything over the past two years, but no.
I received an email from the management company of my co-op informing me that masks would have to be worn in all the buildingâs common areas. This was a NY State mandate.
In the days before the party dark pessimism enveloped New York. Perhaps this was due to holiday vacations, but Lower Manhattan began to feel deserted again. It was starting to look like 2020 all over again. People around the office began to speculate if the party would be cancelled.
Now, in addition to the busses and ferry, rapid COVID-19 testing was required. Iâm not sure if the company was being careful or if the Jersey City venue required it. The latter is more likely.
People joked, if you didnât have âCOVIDâ (as it is colloquially referred) before the party you will afterwards. There were discussions about how long people intended to stay. Will you be taking your mask off? But these were mainly concerns of the little people. The brokers didnât seem to care.
Now it is Monday 12/20. The morning of the party. I woke up assuming I would not be going. Iâm not a vital person to the company. No one would notice if I wasnât there. And who wants to go to New Jersey if they can avoid it?
But if there was an opportunity to be tested, it would be irresponsible to skip it. So I got tested. And then once I was tested, I guess I might as well go to he party too.
I owed to my fellow Marketing people to at least see where all their hard work went. And besides, I wanted to take pictures of Manhattan from across the river catching the sunset.
A meeting room was assigned for the testing. In it was a handful of young people wearing white lab coats. Maybe they were minimum-wage burger flippers, but they looked reassuring. The test wasnât as intrusive as the original test. The swab only entered my nostril. Half-an-hour later I got a text message. COVID was ânot detected.â So maybe I had it, and maybe I didnât.
COVID-19 was detected in a handful of people. They were sent home.
I got some great photographs.
The party was loud, hot and filled with maskless men standing face-to-face happily shouting at each other. French doors were open onto a balcony to allow a little fresh air in, and to allow brokers to smoke their complimentary cigars. I kept my mask on. Said hello to a few people. Then hiked out to the Bergen-Hudson Light Rail.
Three in hospital.
In other news, the Tas government has decided to reduce the entry requirement for plaguestate visitors from a PCR test to a RAT. Because the plague states had made no allowance for an increase in testing demand when the other states reopened, despite having months of warning.
Sooo, my brother visited with his offspring, and shook hands with their roomieâs father, who had been exposed to the virus and has been tested, but the results arenât in yet. He was sâposed to come over but heâs isolating until at least 1/3/22; he knows his body well enough to know it when any bug is gonna come over him. And of course, him staying in protects us, too.
Xiâan is a city of thirteen million people.
Due to ~200 cases over a month, theyâve reinstated a temporary lockdown.
Unlike Western âlockdownsâ, this does not mean âprofessionals work from home while the peasants have the choice of starving on the street or getting sick in the factoriesâ.
âŠso it has a decent chance of actually achieving something other than partially shielding the privileged from the escalating catastrophe that they are choosing to create.
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Out of stock, of course.
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They donât sell singles, two is the minimum.
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To me, $25 = a weekâs worth of dinners. Itâs not a trivial expense.
After the repeated recent demonstrations of sociopathically reckless Covid spreading fuckery from a minority of visitors, the Tasmanian government has now decided that it is a good idea to rely upon the honour system:
The government has responded to criticism of their slowness in notifying the public of exposure sites (and the embarrassment of the rapidly-expanding list) by choosing to just no longer notify the public of most exposures.
That list had hundreds of entries on it yesterday.
Flinders at the east end of Bass Strait, King at the west.
You will be unsurprised to learn that they are not terribly well supplied with healthcare infrastructure. The King Island hospital has six beds for more than 1,500 residents.
137 cases yesterday, 428 today.
Weâll probably be over 1,000/day by the time the consequences of the NYE idiocy appear.
