Coronavirus: Miles away from ordinary.

What did you pair with the cornbread?

 

Last time I had cornbread, I grilled it in a panini press, drizzled it with Mike’s Hot Honey and used it as a platform for braised short ribs. I jizzed so hard I passed out. When I came to, the dishes were put away and the kitchen was cleaned. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

@AFHokie that's a pretty good overview.

The only thing I'd point out is that her point of view as a nurse is very valid in that vaccines are not completely preventing transmission - although they are shortening the duration of the illness and reducing symptoms, which are both contributors towards transmission, so they absolutely are reducing transmission.

But on an individual level, anyone who is wondering about getting vaccines and boosters would do well to listen to that; the presentation is aligned with the most current published studies. You can set it to 1.5x speed and it's still perfectly coherent.

The number of areas of the body which are affected by this virus are pretty scary, and anything you can do to limit the severity of the illness will significantly reduce your chances of having long term effects on your heart, lungs, pancreas, kidneys, brain, etc. Studies are indicating lots of long term effects on the heart and lungs, including vastly higher risks for heart disease, in patients who have contracted COVID-19, and they seem to be linked to the severity of the damage suffered as COVID runs its course.

Yes, the vaccine is annoyingly prone to leaving you feeling like shit for about a day. But you aren't just playing with your short-term health here. Even if you're totally fine with getting wrecked by the virus for a week or more, you're gambling on not contracting long COVID, risks for heart disease, diabetes, mental effects, etc.

Also... @Kubla Kahn there's a reason people say that anecdotes are not data. I'm glad your personal social circle is experiencing good outcomes, but there are significant risks here. I'm just not seeing why 24 hours of feeling lousy is worth playing with your long term health.

 

So…

3am Friday morning I woke up having extreme difficulty breathing. Called the ambulance, and they were there within 6 mins.

Put on Oxygen and carted to the ambulance, 10 mins later I’m in Emergency.

The O2 helped a lot, and things were stable by then, and waited for 3 hrs for a bed to become available. The EMT waited with me to be sure I didn’t degrade before being moved to Emerg. I was severe enough that I was triaged a 2… second highest priority, short of someone coming it with a knife in their chest or something similar.

Ended up getting a bed in about 3 hours, and was hooked up to a bunch of heart monitors, blood saturation sensors, etc, and evaluation began.

Over the next 14 hours in Emerg, Covid came back negative, I had some swelling in the legs so they gave me a huge diuretic to reduce it, an x-ray and 3 different nuclear imaging scans of the lungs showed no damage or clots, ultrasound of the heart showed no big problems.

“You’re a mystery”, says the ER chief doc. Joy. “I’m handing you off to Cardiac”.

8 hours later I was admitted and in a private room in the cardiac ward, and the real testing/eval began.

Long story short, turns out that I have sleep apnea, and it was triggering an afib heartbeat (both too fast and too slow), which was causing some fluid leakage that resulted in fluid retention around my heart and lungs. Combine that with all the water I’ve been drinking while trying to get rid of a chest cold, and I was literally drowning myself from the inside. They figure they pulled 7 liters of fluid out of me, and once it’s gone, I was feeling better than I have in months, maybe years.

They’re now focusing in on handling the root cause with some medication, so I’m still here for a day or three longer as they try various meds and monitor, but all in all, I’m doing great now.

What was really interesting is how they are dealing with COVID. Lots of PPE, but in the emerg ward, in my “pod”, there were 12 beds. Across from me was a smoker with emphizema who didn’t believe in vaccines, and beside me was a 83 year old old age home resident deep in the throes of COVID. It was crazy that the only thing between me and the COVID patient was a cloth shower curtain like thing, my mask, and her mask.

Regardless, I didn’t get COVID, so it must be working.

 

The pulse ox on a lot of smart watches is actually really good if you already have a good smart watch and are more likely to use it than a dedicated device.

edit: I should not be trusted on the above statement.

 

Hm. I may have to eat crow on my previous statement, I swear I had read an article on a few different watches being pretty accurate but trying to dig up that article so I could send it to you is showing a lot of, "smartwatches aren't very accurate on pulse ox" tests.

So... please ignore me until I find some better data.

 

There has been some recent medical testing showing that while not medical grade, the Ultra is damn good, plenty good enough for home use.

 

Here's an Apple Watch Series 6 test which has some variation in the objective numbers but is very well correlated with the pattern over time.

Another Apple Watch test, showing that the watch has more variability but that the medical grade device also has some decent sized error bars.