I just got out of an interesting (and rather scary) zoom meeting with a few of my “safety” colleagues. There were 13 people in the meeting, living in various places across the USA (east coast, Washington State, Phoenix Arizona, southern states). The point being that they were from a large geographical area. Four of the attendees contracted omicron during the holidays. They all reported similar situations. They had attended family gathers where everyone was fully vaccinated, and everyone had previously tested negative. The common outcome was that everyone in attendance caught the virus. These four people at the meeting represented something like 30 (or more) people that contracted the disease during a couple of days together. This represents a “breakthrough” rate of around 33% for the people in attendance at my meeting this morning, and close to 100% breakthrough for the family members in attendance at the gatherings.

If this is an example of how contagious this variant is, it appears that either we stay completely away from everyone (effectively quarantining ourselves), or we will catch it. The folks at the meeting reported a variety of symptoms, mostly having severe cold-like symptoms along with terrible aches and pains, loss of muscle control and brain fog. One people reported that it was tolerable and didn’t require hospitalization, but that it was the worst sickness in their 70 years of life – hopefully not something to be repeated. Many odd symptoms were reported, such as not being able to write for a few hours because of lack of ability to control that hand and arm, dizziness, major “brain fog”, etc. After two weeks they were (barely) able to attend the zoom meeting. Hopefully they will all recover and not end up with “long covid.”

As far as I can determine, the vaccines are doing exactly what they have always been advertised to do – minimize the severity of the disease, thereby minimizing hospitalizations and death. There has never been a claim that vaccinations will reduce the likelihood of infection, just that they will reduce the severity once infected. A similar claim has been made about masks and distancing. Masks definitely help minimize the potential for spreading the virus, but are not very effective against becoming infected. Distancing (to the point of quarantining) is the only real way to prevent infection. Distancing, but not so much in situations where anyone in the vicinity is mask-less (or not wearing it properly). My personal guess is that “distancing” means several feet outdoors, and it means that there has been nobody in a for several hours (no matter how large). The reason for avoiding all indoor spaces is that viruses “ride” on aerosols, and aerosols very quickly fill up a room of almost any size – and stick around for hours. A person wearing a mask less effective than a properly fitted N95 will spread large quantities of aerosols. I think we are seeing the impacts of this route of transmission in the new spike in infections.

My personal “take” on all this is that it is a bit scary to consider that I probably WILL catch it rather than MIGHT catch it. (Who knows, the “cold” and achy joints that my wife and I experienced a couple of weeks ago might well have been “it”.) Apparently there are now a lot of false negatives in the testing, so even getting a “negative” test doesn’t prove much.

However, it is sort of comforting to think that when I do catch it, the symptoms will be tolerable since I am fully vaccinated and in relatively good health. I am going to continue to postpone the onset of infection as long as I can by reducing my exposure to people as much as is practical – knowing that there are still going to be some exposures in order to carry on daily living. I will continue to wear a mask in public in the hopes of reducing the peaks of infections, thus minimizing the load on the medical system (just like in the “old days” of 2021 – reduce the peak even while knowing that eventually almost everyone will get it). I am disheartened that so many people are being self-centered in their choices of actions (no vaccinations, no masks, no distancing, no common sense protections), rather than coming together as a group in an attempt to weather this pandemic as best as we can. It is a global problem that requires a global solution. I had hoped that people could realize that we are all connected and interdependent, and therefore work together against a common problem – but apparently that isn’t how people work.