Every city around here has its own publicity and enforcement schemes for Covid-19 safety, though the criteria and general requirements are mostly decided at the county or state level. I haven’t gotten out to El Segundo much since the pandemic hit, so I hadn’t seen their “Wearing is Caring” slogan until this weekend.
A Manchester (UK) man boarded a bus wearing a snake wrapped around his neck and mouth.
Officials’ comments on what constitutes a suitable face covering: “While there is a small degree of interpretation that can be applied to this, we do not believe it extends to the use of snakeskin – especially when still attached to the snake.”
Bizarre story (how could it not be?) in the LA Times on Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh’s experience with Covid-19 and the delusions he experienced at the height of the illness during two weeks in the ICU.
Among other things, he became convinced he’d written an entire new Devo album and hallucinated the band performing it live on the streets of Hollywood using augmented reality.
Months later, he’s still recovering physically.
Infections are still high, but the LA/CA case-fatality rate has dropped since spring. Partly we’re spotting more of the mild cases, and younger people are a bigger percentage of cases now.
But also we’ve learned more about how to treat it:
(Note that a certain high-profile Twitter user’s favorite covid drug treatment isn’t on that list because it doesn’t actually work on covid.)
As usual, the people who yell the loudest about hypothetical jack-booted government thugs are perfectly happy with actual jack-booted government thugs as long as they’re aimed at someone else.
Note also that the small-government, local-is-always-better anti-Fed/states’ rights crowd is totally happy with the feds overriding the state and city government in Portland, even while they complain about state-level mandates in Sacramento.
Throw some other guy into an unmarked van? Fine! Tell me to follow health guidelines? TYRRANY!
A couple of days ago I developed a cough and measured a fever. The cough has been very intermittent, and the fever went away after a couple of hours.
Still, I went for a Covid-19 test after measuring the fever, and we all went into lockdown mode just in case. No errands or walks. Just picking up the mail. Extra hand washing. Keeping physical distance at home. It could easily be a false alarm, but with cases surging, it seemed like a good idea to be certain.
All the drive-through centers in the area seem to be closed and I had to go to an urgent care. Instead of letting people in the waiting room, they were checking us in at the door, taking a phone number, and having us wait in our cars. An hour and a half later, they called me in. After checking vitals and symptoms, they actually had me swab my own nostrils with a q-tip and put it in a sample vial.
I got the results two days later through the network’s online portal: negative!
So with the cough and fever gone, and the coronavirus test negative, we can at least return to…well, whatever this is. It’s certainly not “normal.”
(This year has brought it home that “normal” doesn’t really exist – the world is in a constant state of flux, and what we consider “normal” are just local circumstances in time and space.)
But I can go back to daily walks (masked), drive-through and curbside pickup for errands (masked), and only having to keep my distance outside the house.
Some wishful thinking on the part of auto-complete, here.
