17 year old DS had his second pfizer on Friday morning. Sore arm that was mostly gone by the next morning, and nothing else. Sample size is small, but most teens I know who've gotten it have had very mild reactions.

Lyme would be amazing (I say, as I get ready for a very outdoorsy New England trip this summer). DS had lyme a few years back; we went to urgent care (in Georgia) with a mysterious rash just after getting back from Cape Cod and the doctor scoffed at my lyme fears and declared it "contact dermatitis." Luckily I ignored him and went to our ped the following Monday and got antibiotics (by then the rash was looking more bullseye-y, but it could easily not have). A few years after that another kid had a random illness with fever (no rash) after a tick bite; we were traveling and took him to an urgent care place in West Yellowstone, MT, where they prescribed antibiotics without a second thought, even though lyme isn't common there (the tick bite was in Missouri, though). So I am hopeful that people are getting more proactive about treating lyme anyway, but I'd much rather a vaccine than antibiotics for suspected lyme every few years. And dousing everyone with bug spray all the time. It's absurd that I can get my dogs vaccinated for lyme no problem but not my human family.

Seeing what kind of time commitment is required for rec league baseball for my just turned 8 year old (3x/week, could be any day except Sunday) makes me glad none of my kids are particularly athletic. I'm glad he's enjoying it, and I hope he keeps doing it for awhile, but I'll be very surprised if he's ever good enough that we need to worry about travel ball and all that sort of thing. I mean, I don't tell HIM that of course! (Although we did have a conversation where he told me he wanted to be a pitcher for the Braves when he grew up, and I told him there are lots of other baseball jobs, too. "Like a coach?" he asked hopefully. "Or maybe the person who does the numbers," I said. He's good at math.)

Sure, there's not a lot of research yet. The link cited one study from Italy and also numbers from UK Office for National Statistics: I find that more informative than I would a survey of random pediatricians, personally. I find the idea that epidemiologists are a less reliable source of information than anecdotal accounts from pediatricians because they're "still working from home" a little bewildering, actually.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

CNN had a headline this morning that there might be as many as 300 million surplus doses in the US by July, so, yes, hopefully it won't be long.

Lots of travel in our RV; we're supposed to go to Cape Cod in June and spend time with my in-laws who we haven't seen in well over a year, and from there we plan to stay gone until we have to come home so DH can go back to work in August. My oldest applied for some research things for summer but didn't get any; bummer for him, but we're very much looking on the bright side and appreciating that we'll have him with us for the whole trip--might be the last time that happens. Everyone will be vaccinated who can be vaccinated; my two youngest won't be, so we're still looking at a definite focus on outside stuff. But that's why I get out of the southeast in summer and go where there's a better chance of nice weather for being outside.

I've seen lots of people pointing out that birth control pills have a much higher rate of blood clots. Smoking, too. And, you know, covid.

My husband's district gave every student a device and (I believe) had hot spots available for people who needed them pre pandemic. And we've had both statewide and county virtual options for quite awhile now.

I'm generally a Nate Silver apologist, but I haven't been a fan of some of his covid takes.

It wasn't rhetorical, but it wasn't something I expected you in particular to answer 🙂 More like, "yes, I agree that this thing you've identified is a problem. Now what do we collectively as a society do about it?" And....I don't know either.

Yes, and....then what? I see a certain contingent on Twitter (Nate Silver, et. al.) who think the vaccines are being seriously undersold, and we need to tell people get vaccinated, and you can do whatever you want. And along with that there's an attitude that your personal responsibility is to get yourself vaccinated, and then, once everyone who wants a vaccine has had a chance to get one, they're on their own if they choose not to. But there are some big problems with that--kids can't get vaccinated yet, for one thing. And maybe the bigger issue is that the more covid keeps circulating, the bigger chance for mutations that evade our current vaccines. So, yeah, I personally will behave differently because I'm vaccinated, and I'm super grateful that the vaccines are as good as they are, but even if I want to write off the vaccine hesitant as not my problem (which I don't, especially)....I don't think it's that simple. And I don't think we've done much yet to deal with the problem of vaccine resistance (which makes sense; the focus has been on getting the vaccine to everyone who DOES want it...but we're going to have to do it soon)

I looked into this yesterday after reading about it here, and Snopes has deep dived into the Biden ear mystery and concluded that, yeah, probably some plastic surgery going on there (which Biden has neither confirmed nor denied, I believe): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/earlobes-biden-body-double/

Is blogspot still a thing? Blogspot will make everything very easy for you. I use wordpress (.org) and it's fine and you can customize more, but there are costs involved, and it can be a pain if you need to do anything technical and don't really know how (that's me).

oh, it says median age is 33 for pregnant women, and that the average rate is 20% for women who are 35. So it doesn't seem like we can conclude that it's higher based on the information they give.

Does it? I'm coming up with 18.8% and then they have this footnote about the rate in the population as a whole: "The frequency of clinically recognized early pregnancy loss for women aged 20–30 years is 9–17%, and this rate increases sharply from 20% at age 35 years to 40% at age 40 years and 80% at age 45 years. Reference: ACOG Practice Bulletin No. 200: Early Pregnancy Loss. Obstet Gynecol. 2018132(5):e197-e207." So as I'm reading it, we would have to know what the ages were for the women studied to know if it was higher or not. (maybe that's in there; I looked at it fairly quickly)

(and x-posted with like 3 other posts of course)

I hope she's kidding and wouldn't really lie about it since, of course, that would be taking someone else's ability to make informed decisions about their health away from them. And this is one area where I think there really aren't any easy answers about how we all just need to respect each other's decisions. That's easy enough to say on a message board, but in real life someone's vaccine status might well impact how/whether you choose to interact with them. I can see that someone would feel defensive and maybe further entrenched in their position if a friend says they don't want to hang out together if they're not vaccinated, but that's a totally legitimate position. The current recommendations about getting together in person are very different depending on who's vaccinated and who's not. So, sure, she doesn't owe anyone an explanation, but I could also see that attempting to her convince her might be the only alternative her friend saw to just not seeing her anymore. As more people get vaccinated and feel comfortable getting together with other vaccinated people, this will be an issue more and more. And there's no bad guy in the situation; everyone has a right to choose whether to get vaccinated, but everyone also has a right to choose to follow guidelines and not include unvaccinated people in gatherings. But everyone having a right to do it doesn't mean it won't lead to an awful lot of anger and hurt feelings all around.

If the usual pattern holds, it will happen right AFTER my husband's spring break, and the rule is that he can't take any personal days immediately before or after a holiday. I have been fretting about this preemptively since 2017. But we'll figure it out somehow! I just told him to e-mail the school board and put in his request for spring break to be the second week of April instead that year. Maybe I can get the whole county on board.

Oh, I'll be there! I was not at all prepared for how amazing the eclipse was in 2017, and I was SO GLAD we made the effort to drive a couple of hours to get to totality. I felt a sort of religious zeal afterwards to impress upon people how important totality is. I was this close to selling everything to become a full time eclipse chaser 😂

Weird that it's understood that employees have to be given reasonable accommodations if they don't want to be vaccinated but not if they don't want to....get covid. Although it remains to be seen whether there will be a ton of lawsuits about that in the future, I guess. I read about one where a family whose father had died of covid was suing Publix because they wouldn't ALLOW him to wear a mask at work (back in spring 2020). And there are plenty of school systems that dismissed everyone or almost everyone's requests to work remotely while refusing to follow any CDC guidelines about masking, distancing, etc.

Sigh. I took the kids for cleanings in the fall, to the dentist we've gone to and loved for well over a decade...and two of the hygienists had their masks under their noses while working with patients. I was stunned. Then I went on their facebook page and saw multiple pictures of the whole staff out to eat together at indoor restaurants. So I guess we're not on the same page about either the pandemic or, you know, basic hygiene--since wearing a mask while you're inches away from someone's open, germy mouth for 20 minutes should pretty much be a no-brainer pandemic or not. So now I have to find a new dentist. Umm, so I did go and did not have a good experience. But I would absolutely go if I needed something other than routine cleaning; I just wouldn't take it for granted that they would be taking precautions and I'd make sure to ask (and likely ask around in facebook groups or whatever to make sure they weren't just saying all the right things).

I suspect we'll be dealing with the costs (both economic and otherwise) of long term covid complications for a very long time.

First off, I messed up my math on the millions more deaths. It's true...I think the Dakotas might be the best places to look because they had pretty much no restrictions over the fall/winter and huge surges and tons of deaths--and later in the pandemic when everyone knew much more about what we were dealing with. So they're at around .25 and .2% mortality for the whole state at this point. I've seen estimates that close to half of their populations likely had covid, so that would indeed put the mortality rate at .4-.5% But, yeah, of course no one actually knows. If we took vaccines out of the picture, we could tell a lot based on whether the Dakotas get another wave or not (I mean, if they DO, we can still tell a lot based on that--but if they don't it could be that they would have were it not for vaccines). But last I checked they were actually doing a pretty job vaccinating. I've always thought that the mortality rate would end up under 1%, but I've become less and less sure about that over time, as more places that got hit hard early have been hit hard a second time. ETA: I double checked the Dakotas, and it's .197% for North and .219% for South.

ha--oops! I was bound to screw up my decimals sooner or later. ah, so in that case I think it's even more clear that .2% is way off for the US (and not only back in the spring--already higher than that for lots of states that had their surges in late fall/early winter)