First, I want to acknowledge that you are genuinely trying to have your family’s best interests at heart.
I was one of the “lucky” west coast people who got covid last year, but a pre-pandemic strain (that came to the bay area directly from China in January; the pandemic strain came to the US via Europe a bit later) from an asymptomatic person who’d just returned from China. I’d just had a tooth removed leaving a big gaping hole for covid to have easy access. By the end of May, I had no antibodies even though I had the “sequelae” of long covid, i.e., the collateral damage it did. After six solid months of being ill, I had to go to the ER as I greyed out. We figured out what I had (postural orthostatic tachycardia) and got treated for it, but it took months and months to feel better even then, and I’m still not back to where I was 19 months ago, and I probably never will be. During that time, I read more than 3,000 pages of science papers about covid (and also some about dengue, ebola, MERS, and SARS) to try to update my understanding of virology and how it had changed since I took immunology. Some of them are just horrifying, e.g., the “just put the Internet away for the rest of the day” paper about the poor guy (and not the only person!) who got autoimmune encephalitis from covid. “Autoimmune Encephalitis Presenting With Malignant Catatonia in a 40-Year-Old Male Patient With Covid-19” https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160770v1 <https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160770v1> (link is to the preprint. It was later published, however that text is not free) Personally, I’m glad for the vaccine. A vaccine, even an experimental one, is like being snuck the answers to the test before the final. Sure, there’s a chance the teacher will add a surprise question, but! You’ll still almost certainly pass the test. To put that into a chart, here’s one from Georgia: https://twitter.com/kavitapmd/status/1425265615468699652 <https://twitter.com/kavitapmd/status/1425265615468699652> The ICU and ventilators are needed for the unvaccinated, not the vaccinated, and only a few vaccinated people are in the hospital (about 11% of the total covid patients in those two hospitals; Houston’s overall fully vaccinated rate is 47.2%: https://data.citizen-times.com/covid-19-vaccine-tracker/texas/harris-county/48201/ <https://data.citizen-times.com/covid-19-vaccine-tracker/texas/harris-county/48201/> ). Make of that what you will. I would not have an unvaccinated party at this point in time, personally. If you wish to offer the best outcome for all attending, I’d suggest reviewing the calculations at https://www.microcovid.org <https://www.microcovid.org/> and model possible scenarios to fit your risk comfort level. (They do show the math; they have read many of the same papers as I have.) Also, while I’m on the topic, a friend of mine is an intensivist (ICU physician) in Guangzhou, so I got to hear about the ground preparation and all the day-to-day upheavals there. Lots of people have suspected they’re under reporting, but after the last conversation we had about it (last week), I think their numbers aren’t fudged nearly as much as many assume. Here’s why. WeChat is not only a chat app and a cash exchange app and a photos app and facebook, it also has a ton of other functions…one of which is reaching out to contacts of people who’ve tested positive for covid, *whether you know them or not*. If you stood on the same room in the same building at the same time, they’re notified. Also, all tests are reported to the user directly on WeChat. There’s a *huge* social stigma with testing positive, and therefore I think people are just super careful. My friend was being sent to help manage a small outbreak, and some of the hospital staff got wind of it and resigned rather than risk testing positive. So. Upside to authoritarianism for once? Deirdre > On Aug 11, 2021, at 07:59, Jonathan Del Arroz via Basfa > <basfa@lists.basfa.org> wrote: > > Would love to but definitely not at the expense of getting an experimental > injection. I’ll just host a party for the unvaccinated instead since studies > are showing we spread the new variants less anyway mine should be safer! Feel > free to join. > > Sent from my iPhone
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