Happy2BaMom
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Posts posted by Happy2BaMom
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Its happening in the US, too. Flu hospitalizations are at their highest level in 12 years, and it’s early November. Feds just declared a flu pandemic and are preparing to deploy troops and ventilators if needed. (note: RSV and Covid are part of the issue as well).
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10 hours ago, Ausmumof3 said:
I do agree with that but there’s a significant number of people who are team lab leak theory who also do all the mitigation they can. There are still a number of respected scientists that don’t believe the science is settled on this.
That’s not the case (about the people, not the scientists) in the States.
FWIW, I support continuing to in investigate the origins. But the people here who most want to “find the truth” also are (IMO) completely unwilling to acknowledge that it very well might be a case of a virus jumping from one mammal species to another mammal species. I have followed an herbalist (Stephen Harris Buhner) who said YEARS ago that coronaviruses were the most likely ones to dangerously mutate. (His book, Herbal Antivirals, has utterly fascinating chapters on the intelligence - demonstrated by their ability to constantly & rapidly mutate. His protocols have been more hit & miss for me, tho.)
The whole “origins” topic just fits the bill of so much of what I observe happening now. Humankind wants to admit ZERO responsibility for f*cking up the earth. Therefore, (fill-in-the-blank) *must* be the fault of some other (ever-&-always-smart, even if evil) human(s).
(and, in case it’s not clear, the above statements are not directed at any particular person, including you, AusMom.)
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5 hours ago, wathe said:
Yes. Link directly to CBC article. Combine high infections resp illness rates with what seems like increasing severity (cue covid induced immune suppression hypothesis) with paediatric over-the-counter med shortages (can't find liquid tylenol or advil anywhere), with some clinics and primary care practices still refusing to see patients with infectious resp illness symptoms, with severe emergency department staffing shortages (a full nursing complement in my ED is something like 15-18. My last night shift we had 11. We've had nights with as few as 7) and you have a disaster.
And paeds ICUs are full. We are having to push kids 14+ into adult ICUs. This is a huge deal.
And it's not just kids. I saw 3 back to back respiratory resuscitations (infectious resp illness) on my last night shift, and 2 of those were younger, healthy adults, with flu and covid respectively. Adult covid hospitalizations and emerge visit are climbing steeply - number of admitted covid pts in my hospital has more than doubled in the last month. (And that doesn't count flu, RSV, other infectious resp illness admits)
ED departments are severely overcrowded and understaffed. I had, at peak, 107 patients in my 40-ish bed, short-staffed dept last night. This is now normal. They are stacked in chairs and hallways. On any given day, at least 20-ish of those, and on very bad days, up to 35 or those, will be admitted patients - so at least half of my beds are blocked can't be used to move ED patients through.
Conditions are impossible.
My professional life is pretty horrid right now.
We know that schools and daycares are major drivers of spread of infectious resp illness. We know that universal masking in indoor public spaces and schools works to decrease transmission. But, nope. Masking is unpopular. So, this is fine, I guess.
I am so sorry. Things like this are what push even more caregivers to leave health care.
I'm not sure if this will comfort or further depress you, but I hear similar stories (not about peds specifically, but general hospital's insanely poor staffing levels, complete patient overwhelm, and overall shitty care (due to both of the prior issues), from the HCWs in my family/friends circle, whom are all located in different states. It's.....BAD.
I've told my family, "drive different, live different, do anything you can to reduce your risk of serious injury or illness. The LAST place you want to have to be right now is in the hospital."
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2 hours ago, Ausmumof3 said:
Raina McIntyre is an epidemiologist here in Aus and she has some things to say about lab safety improvements and regulation that need to happen. There’s a podcast interview here she did recently. Basically what I gleaned from it is that over the last few years some technologies have become much cheaper and more accessible and the risk of things being done in backyard labs is higher. Just as people can set up a meth lab in their kitchen, they can do similar for various virology labs. She’s quite concerned about the lack of knowledge law enforcement has on the topic.
Hmmm. I feel like we're talking about different subjects. I still don't understand how finding out the origins of the virus would somehow prevent it from EVER happening again, which was the claim to which I was responding.
While I have empathy for Ms McIntrye's views (haven't listened to podcast, but just based on your summary), "safety improvements" and "regulation" both assume that a future someone (or foreign government) gives a f*ck about any of those things. I get that she wants LE to have more understanding about these topics (so they can ID labs in their own districts, I'm guessing?) but I think the issue of bioterrorism goes far beyond LE.
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7 hours ago, popmom said:
I’m capable of finding dissenting opinions. I actually look for them all on my own! Imagine! That’s not real hard on this matter lol.
It’s interesting to me that you and so many others who are so —idk—in the know, concerned, worried, on top of all the latest, etc, …that the origins of the virus WOULDN’T be of great interest to you. I speculate that it just makes people squirm and writhe in discomfort over implied political associations. No one who claims to think scientifically about these things will want to own up to that, but it’s become glaringly obvious in our current political climate—that this muddies the waters. That’s a dam* shame. I’m extremely interested in the origins of this pandemic because I (we) don’t want this to EVER happen again. I’ve never seen the Occam’s razor argument as distorted as it has been applied to this situation. It’s maddening.
I am completely unclear as to how finding out the origins of the virus would somehow prevent it from EVER happening again. (ETA: this is not meant to imply that I don't care how it originated). Even if it could be proven to be 100% lab-produced, what exactly would you propose doing?
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15 hours ago, Heartstrings said:
Enough people across the country had this problem this year that I’ve heard a bunch of speculation online about bad seeds. Ranging from theories about seed sellers selling old seeds to conspiracy theories about it being done on purpose by Mon San To to prevent home gardens.
Not directed at you, Heartstrings, but reports like this just get my goat. People will believe anything / blame anyone/thing, rather than look at the fact that we’ve created enormous systems that are hostile to all other forms of life. The climate is doing all sorts of weird sh*t; there’s micro plastics, forever chemicals, & toxic chemicals in every single form of water that exists; massive droughts fry soil microbial life and massive floods erode soil & soil systems; irrigation waters are full of (fill in the blank) and increasingly salinated,and pollinator populations are collapsing worldwide. but, no, the reason our garden plants are struggling is because *someone else* gave us bad seeds.
Anything to avoid having to take responsibility or change our massively destructive, convenient-for-us lifestyles.
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I agree and I would say it’s even more important to mark while in the airport, which does not have the ventilation systems of an airplane and has hundreds more people packed in/passing through.
And we all got Covid after flying in July and two friends of mine got Covid after flying in October.
Air travel is a high risk activity.
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Marijuana has been legal for 10ish years in both WA and CO. I think the results have been somewhat mixed (there’s some evidence the loss of revenue has impacted the drug cartels, but large-scale mj farms are pretty environmentally destructive), there has been relief in reduction of ridiculous prosecutions (anybody remember the ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ legislation that largely just overfilled prisons with minor offenders?) but I do think more people are using who otherwise might not.
It’s hard to tie increases usage just to legalization, tho, because a compounding factor is that we’re a struggling (some might say failing) society. People are stressed, despondent, anxious. They will seek avenues of escape. How much they will seek illegal vs legal is hard to pin down, but I don’t think you can entirely pin increased usage just to legalization.
I lean toward legalization, only because the whole “War on Drugs” thing has become a f*cking joke. And now the cartels are starting to traffic abortion drugs. If there’s money to be made, they will supply it. The whole “illegal / ban” thing doesn’t work (for much of anything) when there is a well established multi-billion dollar underground network already operating in nearly every city/town in America.
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Mixing family & money is one of the most complicated things once can do. It sounds like you want to support your DD & husband. That's wonderful. I'd be cautious of my assumptions going into it....planning to sell to another seminary student assumes there will still be more demand than supply in 4 years time, and that prices will at least remain the same or go higher. Those are big assumptions. I'd try to have a plan/clarify first how the situation will be handled if the house can't be sold, or ends up with an underwater mortgage.
I am also one who'd be more likely to buy the house & rent it back to them, or give them a down payment, with that money coming out of whatever future estate we hope to have, but I just don't like the expectations that are built into a loan. And I'd make it clear to my other kids that our will will be reflecting that. As others have noted, it can/will really impact other familial relationships if more financial support is given to one child than the other(s).
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In my area (NE), carpentry fees are running $55 - $75/hour, depending on whether it's an individual or business, complexity of job, etc. So, for an 8-hour day, would be $440 - $600 in labor. So, yeah, $1200 does seem high to me for one carpenter with minimal supply expenses.
ETA: We are in the midst of a whole-house remodel, so I've received several quotes from carpenters, or services which sub out for carpentry work, so I'm up on current hourly cost.
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Deepening the Mississippi would cost billions and will not necessarily help for all the future extreme droughts that will be headed our way over the next several years/decades. The Mississippi is not too shallow, there is just not nearly the water that has been there previously to float the boats.
The larger predicament is that modern industrial society (of which I am a part/rely on just as much as everyone else) is entirely dependent on consistently high functioning and dependable weather & climate patterns, abundant natural resources and intact ecosystems. Unfortunately, all of those are increasingly unstable and/or less-available to non-existent (thanks to modern industrial society). How we get down from this point is anyone's guess (other than it won't be pretty) but, I think it would help to adopt the attitude recently expressed by President Macron of France:, "the era of abundance is over".
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Hmmm...."Moral obligation to society to do the greatest good one is capable of vs. personal fulfillment"....this strikes me as both a false dichotomy as well as an excellent example of reductionist thinking. The very way the statement is phrased sets up these two things as being automatically oppositional.
Not to mention that someone trying for the "greatest good" (defined by whom, exactly?) can (& often has) lead to fanaticism.
Not trying to pick on you, BlessedMama, just pointing out that there are a lot of assumptions baked into the way the issue is framed, and those assumptions aren't necessarily true.
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1 hour ago, madteaparty said:
This Board is overwhelmingly vaccine-positive, FYI. I haven’t researched fertility (and won’t vaccinate my young daughter in any event) but there are many cases of menstrual cycle disruptions due to vaccine, and not minor ones like mentioned upthread. Like months and months of no period. It doesn’t really serve the cause to be dismissive of real things that are happening to people.’usually if there’s no “evidence” of something it’s because it wasn’t in anyone’s interest to pay for the research.
i wish novavax had been available when my family took our vaccines…This Board is overwhelming hard-nosed about providing data (that can be independently accessed, if not actually verified) to back up the sweeping claims (usually based on nothing more than anecdotes & SM posts) that people like to toss around like popcorn on hot-topic issues.
The NIH awarded grants to begin research on this topic back in August of 2021, not even six months after the vaccines *began* to be offered to the general public, so stop with the claim that anyone was "dismissive of real things that are happening to real people". That was the entire point of the research, conducted by five different institutions, over many months, collecting data on tens of thousands of women.
A lack of evidence is also often just a lack of evidence. The fact that the studies didn't find the conclusion you believe they should have does not invalidate the research that was done.
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I don't have any research links to add here, but I think it's fair/appropriate for your husband/you to ask the doctor for the studies/research s/he is relying on to make such a substantial claim.
And those studies should be ones you can access and view yourselves. Otherwise, they're not valid. No 'snapshots'/screenshots/'so-and-so-found'/anecdotal stories/etc. Studies *you* can access and read.
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Ugh.
Just today met a young woman (31) at a neighborhood event.
She contracted Covid in August, 2021. She never was sick enough to be in the hospital and never had any serious breathing problems. However, she did have six MONTHS of nearly non-stop fevers, along with a host of rising/disappearing bizarre debilitating systems, including a not-infrequent resting heart rate of 95+, and other things that landed her several times in the ER.
While she is better now, she still has some debilitating symptoms, and has difficulty keeping a job, despite wanting to work (she's also a single mom to a 7-yo daughter, and was previously a FT PE teacher & coach).
And people like her are completely ignored by the "oh, it's just the flu" crowd.
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My ds has the full IB Diploma & graduated last year. Our experience has been that it was *extremely* helpful for getting admissions and scholarship opportunities at the top schools (w/i top 50-60), altho ds also had top grades in all the IB classes, so I'm sure that helped.
Was it worth it to him other than that? Yes and no. He's very bright, so he enjoyed the deeper dives in IB. However, I don't think I'd recommend the full IB if your child isn't shooting for the top schools. It's a LOT of work the junior year (ds was putting in ~60 hours/week on schoolwork.....& school comes easy for him.) It did burn ds out and we went through some rough times his senior year between the pandemic & the IB program.
Individual IB classes can be worth it, though, esp in topics that interest your son.
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Hubby had both bivalent & flu at same time on Sunday. Felt sick at work for a few hours yesterday, to the point of having to lay down in his office (he's a real Type-A, so.......) for about 45 minutes.
And then he was fine. And was completely back to normal today.
DD and I will have bivalent boosters in a few weeks.
BTW, Dr. Jetelina's blog post today (about the effectiveness of the vaccines, and who is dying now from Covid....BTW, we're still losing ~400 people/day to Covid). Worth a read.
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On 9/11/2022 at 1:44 AM, Mom_to3 said:
Yes. We have very little idea what the post-covid future holds in store for us and, more importantly, for our children. People must be discounting the future quite a lot to drop basic precautions like masks and vaccines right now. I will be surprised if we don't end up finding substantial amount of damage that we can simply not visualize and measure right now, but that population wide long term studies will reveal.
You mean like discovering that up to 25% of those infected with Covid end up with long term brain injury? Or that even mild cases of Covid can cause brain tissue damage, including brain shrinkage (significant enough to be seen on comparative MRIs) that is equivalent to one year of aging?
And that's only what we know now....we really don't know the long-term impacts of this virus, especially with repeated infections (is that 'one year of aging' *per* infection???....we don't know).
You'll never convince the nay-sayers, but, in our household, we vaccinate and avoid crowds (still - especially indoor ones) and mask where we feel it's necessary. We can't entirely avoid Covid, but reducing our risk will help to ensure we maintain our health - and our brains - through all of this.
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I *love* Dropps laundry pods. If sweaty stink is a problem, their Active Wash pods work really well. For extra stink or dirt, I use their Oxi Booster pods.
I also use their dishwashing detergent pods and have been happy with them.
I like the fact that they don't use plastic bottles (or any plastic, other than the dissolvable pod wrap).
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1 hour ago, TexasProud said:
Well, I looked up the flu deaths in Texas for 2018. There were 9,470 deaths. I divided it by 365 and got 25.94 a day that died in Texas from flu. Every day.
I'd just point out that 2018 was an unusually severe flu season. The flu death #s for Texas for other years are much lower (2016 - 5,215; 2017 - 7,459; 2019 - 2,650). I didn't include 2020 & 2021 due to the pandemic & how that might have skewed things (I think flu deaths were much lower overall).
I guess I'm also confused as to how this relates....I know from your other posts that you seem to be a caring, sincere person, but it kind of comes across that you don't regard these Covid deaths as worth much fuss since a similar average died daily during a really bad flu season?
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13 hours ago, Ann.without.an.e said:
Idk y’all, I think it would be great if we lived in a world where abusers were helped up and that dominoed into them finding motivation to do better. Theidea that you can’t do better because your situation is so bleak is hard for me because of personal experience. My aunt is strung out and she’s been helped so many times. She drained my grandmother financially multiple times over trying to help her. She will take and take and take and disappear when she has what she wants and show back when she needs food, shelter, clothing, and money. She’s been offered a roof over her head, a good job, clothes, food, etc multiples times by so many of us. Nothing matters to her but her next hit. She will throw it all away in a hot second for that. Do we hate on these people? No. I have a lot of compassion for them, I hate that they are enslaved to a substance that controls them. But I’ve truly seen that you can help and give and give and it do nothing because the substance always wins, well 99% of the time anyway. She always cried about her “bad luck” but would never admit it was her bad decisions again and again.
I'm not sure if my post was part of what was intended in your response, but (in case it was), I wanted to clarify that Dr. Mate' does not advocate for blindly giving addicts things. His focus is more on the true root causes of addiction, which are just. not. understood. in this society, and trying to address those root causes (many of which are emotional). I'll also add that none of those causes IMHO are really being addressed in our society, and so we will continue to proliferate addicts, and everything that goes along with them.
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2 hours ago, livetoread said:
I have a relative who does substance abuse therapy and they have a lot to say about the harm they think has been done by the main substance abuse theories. They see usage as often trauma based numbing and the goal might be safer, less frequent usage rather than abstinence. They also see it as often a response to lack of community and connection which ends up a vicious circle because it is hard to build connection to someone who is using frequently.
Dr. Gabor Mate's book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, details these very things (as do his YT talks. A very worthwhile read.
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1 hour ago, Joker2 said:
Except those who thought he was some sort of white knight.
41 minutes ago, Jean in Newcastle said:I don’t understand why Twitter is going to sue him for walking away or try to force him to accept the deal?
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What's interesting is I don't remember it (it = massive amounts of fireworks over numerous nights) ever being an issue up until the last.....few-to-several years(?)....or has that just been where I have lived (meaning, has it always been a problem for decades & I've just been lucky)?
Like, what is up with people needing to do this?
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wuhan - coronavirus
in The Chat Board
Posted · Edited by Happy2BaMom
Hugs. Many of the HCWs in my circle are having actual panic attacks or other signs of severe mental stress around (or even at) work, too. There are just Not. Enough. Resources. (mostly of workers & beds, but also supplies & even some medicines), and they have to shoulder on the very real consequences of all that every day.