And it wasn't particularly easy. I waited until 3 months past my COVID infection and then discovered that there was a month's lead time on scheduling vaccines at Health Partners. Cub Pharmacy seemed to have loads of appointments, but the scheduling engine was completely broken (which I suppose is why all those appointment slots were open). I found out later that they did accept walk-ins, but you couldn't tell that from the website. 

The Walgreen's scheduling engine worked fine, but there were no appointments anywhere in less than a week and no convenient ones in less than 2 weeks. I went with convenience over urgency, and my appointment finally came up yesterday. Went relatively smoothly, except for having to fill in the check-in form again on paper because they couldn't retrieve it from the computer system. The shot itself is so tiny - I literally didn't even feel it. My arm is a little sore today, but no other side effects. I got my flu shot last week (walk-in at Cub) so I don't have the double sore arm problem. I'm glad I didn't get both shots at once, since last week's hi-dose flu shot gave me a sore arm for a week, much worse than usual. 

The guy who gave me my shot said that demand has been sky-rocketing in the past week or two as people look towards the holidays. There has been a lot of official hand-wringing over the low uptake of the new booster, but I can't help but think this is partly illusory. Perhaps the health care establishment hasn't noticed that they are providing 3 contradictory sets of advice on boosters (as well as giving the impression that boosters are trivially easy to schedule, which I did not find to be the case).

1. Get your booster NOW NOW NOW! Do not delay! This is very important!
2. Unless you've had COVID in the past 3 months (as maybe 20% of the population has) in which case you might as well hold off
3. Or unless you have travel plans in the next few months, in which case you should wait

I'm probably not the only person trying to follow recommendations 2 and 3, while underestimating the scheduling issues. 

It's exactly 2 weeks since I tested positive for COVID and I feel fine!  I thought I felt fine 3 or 4 days ago, but I feel better now. I'm actually feeling energetic, which is much better than "I no longer have trouble staying awake in late afternoon." My post-COVID sniffles and cough have seamlessly transitioned to My Normal for mid-August (hello, ragweed pollen!). I thought I was well when my appetite came back, but it came back kind of unhinged, with my body trying to gain back the 3 pounds I lost while sick. Today I'm just normally hungry and able to consider eating balanced meals instead of unlimited amounts of ice cream. So I went grocery shopping and stocked up on healthy food.

The rest of today is slated for Putting Stuff Away

I found some good deals on fresh meat (as I always seem to at Cub), but some of it is in large packages that must be broken up and labeled and frozen. I stocked up on toilet paper, which must be stashed behind the towels in the linen closet. I've removed the car seats from our vehicles, packed them back into their enormous boxes, and wrestled them down to the basement. Over the course of the past 3 days I have packed up all those bulky toddler toys I got for the grandkids' visit and now must find somewhere to put THOSE boxes. And then there's a ridiculous project involving moving many boxes of comic books so I can access a hidden outlet behind a heavy oak shelving unit. And then putting the comics back, which matches the theme for the day. 

 

It's now Day 8 for Lena (Days 4-7 for the rest of us), with Richard still evading infection. We're all feeling pretty good, with a few lingering symptoms, but we still can't go anywhere. Incidentally, Lena still tests strongly positive despite being over all her symptoms. I finished a full course of Paxlovid yesterday and now feel well, but still tested weakly positive this  morning. Amber is at Day 6 and also weakly positive. So I continue to be deeply skeptical of the CDC's horrible outdated isolation advice, which strongly implies that contagion "normally" ends at Day 5. This is absolutely not true. There is now data (which you can find on the CDC site itself if you search hard!) that specifically shows that 50% of COVID patients are still contagious at Day 5. 25% are still contagious at Day 8. It isn't until Day 10 that most people are finally non-infectious. Amber managed to change their flight home to Thursday, by which date everyone in her family should be past Day 10. It is terrifying how many people are flying these days after a completely inadequate 5-day isolation period. 

Amber and I resurrected an ancient iPad version 1 (from 2011?) and managed to find a few toddler apps on the app store that still work. This has kept Harris and Leo happy except for when they are fighting over which one gets to execute Humpty Dumpty or chop the tails off the Three Blind Mice (a particularly grotesque nursery rhyme game is a favorite). 

Meanwhile, Olin and Lena went out for a drive (in the rain, because they were getting desperate for something to do) and ventured out of the car at a deserted sculpture park long enough to get a beautiful iteration of the standard Minneapolis Tourist Photo. 

Harris, the toddler that was really sick yesterday, is better today. He's still a little droopy but his fever is down to 100.4, he is asking for food and liquids, and even cooperating when his parents want to take his temperature. Leo clearly has it too, but it doesn't seem to be bothering him much. His temperature this morning was 101 (still in the "low-grade" category) and he has a little cough. 

And I tested positive this morning. I felt it coming on last night, and this morning I felt like I was definitely getting a cold. Slightly running nose, more of a cough than I usually have, slight sore throat, and a weird faintly dizzy feeling sometimes when I turn my head. The pink line on the antigen test lit up almost instantly, brighter than the comparison line. 

I immediately set my plan in motion to get Paxlovid. First step is to schedule a PCR test at Health Partners. Okay, easy enough to do that online. Except... something was wrong with the website this morning and it kept timing out with random error messages. It took me about 15 minutes of constant retrying to force my way through, but I got an appointment for 12:30 in St Louis Park. Presumably, the results will be forwarded to HP's COVID Response Team which will immediately get back to me with treatment options. I figure there is maybe a 50% chance of that actually happening? 

Have any of you successfully gotten a Paxlovid prescription, or known anyone that has? I know 3 people who did and they all say that they felt better within hours of starting it. So I hope this works. 

Good news: the grandkids are here!!
Bad news: Lena has COVID.

It's now 5 days past my most likely Minicon COVID exposure (the final party at our house) and I'm not feeling great. No specific symptoms except exactly what you would expect when the spring tree pollen count is peaking (which it is). But I am still so tired no matter how much I sleep. And there's a game party at our house tonight, so why not be careful? 

Test was negative. I'm fine, just tired out. 

I haven't heard of any Minicon-related COVID infections. Has anybody else?  Anybody else testing? 

Fact: There is some evidence for the efficacy of a 2nd COVID booster, but the data is sparse. Mostly two preprint studies from Israel, one of which suggests that 4th shots in the midst of a massive Omicron spike significantly reduces mortality/hospitalizations in the elderly. The other one showed minimal efficacy for middle-aged health care workers (average age 50), arguably because they were young and healthy enough to have reached peak vaccination-fueled immunity already and had little to gain from another boost. But in neither case was there any sign of harm. There is, as far as I know, no data to show that another booster does anything to reduce transmission of the current viral variants - we're just talking about preventing catastrophic outcomes for the people that are infected. So whether or not to get that 2nd booster right now is a matter of personal risk management, not public health. 

One interpretation of all this is "Get the booster if you are eligible. It might help and it almost certainly won't hurt. And it's free, so why not?" Okay, that makes sense. Richard is going with that philosophy, and just got his 2nd booster today. 

My viewpoint is slightly different. It seems pretty clear that the effect of an mRNA booster shot is a large but transitory surge in coronavirus antibodies. Originally everybody hoped that the first booster shot would result in greatly improved long term immunity. That was revised downward to 8 months, then 6 months, and now the advice is to get another booster after 4 months. Immunity doesn't drop suddenly like falling off a cliff - it drifts downhill. If the current thinking is that the booster has pretty much worn out by 4 months, that suggests that it gives you at most 2 or 3 months of robust additional immunity. 

It seems to me that the time to get a booster that will only protect you for 2 or 3 months is at the BEGINNING of a COVID surge, not at the end. So my plan is to wait until the roller coaster starts up the next hill for that booster, not to waste my two months of turbo-charged immunity in a flat period. 

Of course, the next surge may well be in the offing. Minnesota releases its weekly infection numbers on Monday. Last Monday, the decline had essentially plateaued. Today the new numbers came out, and it's up 9%. Still under 10 cases/100K, but moving the wrong direction. The wastewater surveys the last couple of weeks have also reported increases. So I'm biding my time, but watchful. 

This is confusing because I always have a runny nose, and it's been particularly bad this winter. But it's been worse the last 2 or 3 days, with lots of sneezing. Am I sick? I did go grocery shopping on Monday (in an N-95 mask, but still...). Other than that, haven't seen anybody outside my household for a week and that was just one fully vaccinated person. So technically I COULD have COVID but it doesn't seem very likely.

Usually the way I tell the difference between allergies and a cold is that with a cold my first symptom is invariably a sore throat. No sore throat. In fact, I feel just fine except that my nose won't stop running. It seems to get better when I leave the first floor, so maybe there's something down there that I'm allergic to. 2 months ago it was the Christmas tree, but that's been gone for 6 weeks now. I made Richard vacuum under the radiators and behind the furniture just in case there was still Christmas tree dust under there. Then my nose felt worse. But I guess that's what would happen if somebody moved all the furniture and stirred up the allergenic dust, right? Now I'm up in the computer room and breathing easier. 

If I don't feel better tomorrow I guess I'll use up one of our precious home COVID tests. I'm not sure what to do if it's positive, though. Call a doctor, I guess, and see if I'm eligible for one of those courses of Paxlovid that are apparently just sitting and gathering dust on pharmacy shelves right now because doctors aren't sure when to prescribe them and nobody knows which pharmacies have them. 

ETA: just to see how hard it was to schedule a PCR test with Health Partners I logged in and started the process. One of the first questions is a list of symptoms that you might or might not have. Runny nose / congestion is not even listed, despite the fact that it is the NUMBER ONE SYMPTOM of an early Omicron infection. However, the fact that I do not have a single one of their out-of-date list of symptoms did not stop them from offering me a test slot at a drive-in Bloomington clinic tomorrow morning. Which I did not take - I just wanted to see what was possible. Actually as I type this my nose feels much better. I may have to just stay out of the living room. Could there be a cat hiding down there somewhere? 

About 3 weeks ago the Poop Patrol in Minnesota reported that the traces of coronavirus in Minnesota wastewater were dropping precipitately, but you couldn't see the peak on the COVID arrival graph until Jan 25 (peaking out at 16,578 new cases). This is reportedly because the staff who enter the data for Minnesota Dept of Health were either overwhelmed or out sick, and it took them a while to catch up. Jan 25 looks like they pulled an all-nighter and got the data stream back on track. Good work, guys! 

Anyway, it's been falling like a stone ever since. I'm still finding articles online from as recently as a week ago listing Minnesota as one of the states where the rate is still increasing, but a week ago is like a year ago these days. We're plummeting downwards, even with some outstate areas trailing the metro and holding the average back a little. Now the question is... will it go back to where it was before the Delta wave hit in late summer, or will Delta somehow resurface and continue its course? I like to believe that Omicron wiped out what was left of Delta, which might take us back to ground zero (which is not actually zero, of course, but 89 sure looks like zero compared to 16,000). 

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Has anybody gotten those free COVID tests that we all ordered from the government on Jan 18? We haven't. Haven't needed them, though, because we haven't gone anywhere except grocery shopping since Christmas. I haven't had so much as a cold since November 2019, when I last passed unmasked through an airport. 

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So how do you decide when it's safe to take a few more risks? For me, that would be visiting an indoor restaurant or gym, both things I would like very much to do. For Richard that would be hosting a game party. Since we are planning a trip to Oregon in mid-March, I guess we'll keep a low profile until then. We have a vacation house rented in Depoe Bay for a couple of days of whale-watching, and I don't want to have to cancel that. Barring another big COVID surprise, we'll probably start opening up after that.