Wednesday, November 18th, 2020
Today marked day three of four spend in on average four-hour MS Teams meetings each of which starts at 7:00. Am getting a little bit of meeting fatigue as evidenced by me confusing days of the week. As a result, the last week has been less productive, but enlightening at least. Tomorrow is the last of the four days and a little lighter than the previous days as the Teams meeting is “only” three rather than five hours.
Today like yesterday featured an icy wind and I ventured out only to make my lane at the pool. They let us swim early so I got a whooping 38 minutes of pool time, which put me in a happy space. Also, my brilliant friend is back in communication territory, he sent a thank you note to my HBD wishes. Maybe we shall meet in 2021 and continue our conversations.
All in all a good, but uneventful day, which makes for a nice change after the emotionally stressful weekend. Two days ago EM and I made the dough for our famous Christmas cookies. I think we did badly with the honey sugar mix. The dough tastes very nice, but I believe cannot be molded. It has the consistency of toffee. I am afraid we will have to remake it.
Speaking of, the teen left to do some shopping and has not been seen for the past five hours. Though I note she has rearranged her room.
While we prepare to hunker down, the virus spreads. 255k people have died of Corona since February. It looked like new infections were coming down the past two days, they are back up with 166k new cases reported yesterday bringing the grand total for the USA to 11.8 million out of globally 55.6 million reported cases.
At least there is significant breakthrough on the testing site. The first at home COVID test has been approved by the FDA. Unlike other at home tests this does not need to be send to a laboratory for analysis and can be completed start to finish at home and yields results within 30 minutes. It does however require a doctors order and results must be reported to the GP who inturn reports said results to the health authorities. Developed by Lucira health, the test has proven to be 94-98% accurate. This could be a real game changer. Testing kits, where results need to be send in, can be ordered and tests done at home: and results will be returned within 24-48 hours. I think I will look into that as part of our travel preparation strateg as the visit to the LAb for the rapid test was positively daunting. By the time this is done I will have spend hundreds if not thousands of USD on tests.
A new study finds that immunity could last months if not years. This seems contradictory to what I have read before on for instance reinfections, but maybe these are just outliers as so far, they do not appear to be wide spread. If immunity lasted, it would be great news and might prompt me to have another antibody test.
I came across an article with very good advice to keep safe when traveling for the holidays. Everything needs to be carefully planned. Starting with thinking through quarantines as well as testing strategies. Something tells me my plot to test tomorrow, then December 6th isolating between December 6th and our date of travel followed by another five days of isolation before testing again is sound. Only risk is spending time with the bubble family for thanksgiving, but then they also will al test before we meet and stay insulated between test and Thanksgiving.