Just showing how overrun Test and Trace is in NYC, I tested on Sunday and they JUST called me today.
She was pretty clear about 10 days. I asked her about the DOE saying 5 plus masking if no symptoms and as soon as I said DOE she knew what I was going to ask. She said “All I can say is they cannot discipline you for taking the full time and as far as we know they cannot require you to prove that you are still symptomatic.” I said “I’m gonna guess you’ve been getting asked about this a lot?” and she said “Yep. And the line to file complaintsabout being punished for taking the time is even busier than we are.”
I have been seeing this graphic circulating for a few days now and have been doubtful about it.
While the hierarchy of safest to less safe makes total sense to me, I have to question infection transmission times.
How does one define a “cloth” mask? Single layer? Mesh? Nylon? or maybe Three Layers with one of them being a Filter? Each of these types of cloth masks are very different and will have varying levels of protection.
To be honest, I have to wear a mask in the office that is supplied by work. We aren’t supposed to wear our own.
The masks provided are either a standard, disposable, surgical mask or a two layer cloth mask.
Our family uses Starks masks and they are three layers with the middle layer being a filter.
The three layer mask is definitely more substantial than the two layer cloth masks from work, but after wearing the surgical and three layers, …I think the three layers feel more substantial (and far more comfortable) than the surgicals as well.
A friend sent me a screenshot of that graphic and it had a footnote that data was from Spring 2021 (before Delta or Omicron). Footnote specifically said it wouldn’t necessarily apply now, or something to that effect.
This here looks like a screenshot that omits the footnote (by the person who posted it on Twitter there).
Currently in NYC, 400 out of every 100K people are testing positive for Covid each day. (I’m including Orange County, FL in the chart for comparison purposes and also cause … Disney). Positive test rate is over 30%, which is the highest it’s been there since April 2020.
Assuming that people are sick for 7 days on average, that means 2.8% (400/100,000*7) of NYC residents will be infected at a given time based on tests alone if case rates continue at this pace. But since we know tests only capture ~1 out of every 4 infections during good times, and 1/10 during flare-ups, the actual number infected is likely over 10% and maybe as high as 30%!
This is all super napkin-y, so take with a grain of salt. But I’ve heard experts claim that as many as 30% of us will get omicron by the end of January, which seems plausible with these kinds of numbers, if not even more.
The good news is that hospitalizations are decoupled. I read that about half of NYC’s “with Covid” hospitalizations are incidental (hospitalized for another reason), so even these hospitalization numbers may be overstated. (A reminder though that hospitalizations in previous waves weren’t as impacted by the “with” vs. “for” dilemma.)
Did you have an appointment? Just asking because my kids are getting their boosters in a week at Target CVS. I was able to schedule appointments for them.
This is absolutely true, people are not being hospitalized at the same rate as previous waves. And the data continues to show that Omicron is less severe than Delta. (I’m still waiting for someone to give a comparison of Omicron to the original variant.)
But remember that hospitalizations lag cases by about 2-3 weeks.
Here is NYC hospitalization data. The gray area to the right is “recent data may be incomplete”. So let’s use 12/28, the most recent date outside the gray area.
Even if half of that increase in hospitalizations that’s already happened is just incidental positives in people that would have been hospitalized anyway and it doesn’t lengthen or complicate their hospitalization stay, this situation has a decent likelihood of deteriorating rapidly.
Yes, that is important context, and I’d also add that the two locations I cited are relatively high vaccination rates for the U.S. It will be less decoupled in some areas.
Well they have this on their website, so that doesn’t make sense. And if you put that on your website and allow people to schedule, you should honor it. I’m going to leave my kids appointments at CVS since it’s a week from now.
I am happy that he was able to get it!! I am still very bitter that we drove a half hour away to be denied. I guess we will try again on Sunday at a different location.
I guess we will try again on Sunday at a different location.