And my 8AM meeting was canceled, but the 7:30 one is still on… I think there will only be like 3 of us there this week, LOL.

Like everywhere else, our damn Covid cases are still going through the roof. Our county 7 day average is 1259 cases a day right now, vs 707 at our last peak in January. It’s just mind boggling, and probably higher than that given the difficulty in getting tested, plus the fact that Virginia does not appear to have a mechanism for reporting home testing. Nextdoor has been filled with folks asking how to get PCR tests. (With shockingly helpful replies, which is nice.)

I keep looking at the numbers and current public health policy and trying to make sense of it – and I can’t. We literally let an airline dictate isolation policy – and a shitty airline at that.

How do you look at what is happening and just keep everything open and your only messaging is “get vaccinated”? We need a little more help this time around, you can’t just put it on individuals.

And testing… FFS, we’re back where we were in the spring of 2020. And I keep seeing folks say, “If you test positive at home, go get a PCR test so you can get official documentation of being positive” – I mean shit, if I test positive at home, I’m just taking a damn picture of the test to document it and not going into a 6 hour line for a test. How fucked up is our medical system that folks think they won’t get proper care if all they can say is, “I tested positive on a home test.”

And I’ve had the Virginia Covidwise app up and running on my phone since it was released last August, and haven’t had a single exposure notification. And I have my phone with my constantly. Is it broken? Is no one using it? Have I just been really lucky?

I don’t have any good answers, but please, mask up, get takeout, and skip that New Year’s party. I want you to make it to another New Year.