The Zen Leaf

So…this was a weird week. It had good news, and a frustrating turn of events. Read on for oddities on our (possibly-pointless?) ten days of family lockdown.

Numbers: 99,142 cases, 1,440 deaths, 1,100 seven-day rolling average, 12.5% positivity rate (down 3.2%). Despite the decrease in positivity rate, everything else continues to climb sharply upward. Hospital admissions saw record numbers of daily new admissions multiple times this week, and we’re approaching the threshold of strained hospital capacity that we had this summer. One in five cases in the hospital are now covid-related. Texas as a state appears to be even worse – one day there were over 58,000 cases reported in a single day. !!! I have to think that was some kind of backlog issue, as we’ve been averaging around 13-15k, but toward the end of the week, there were a few 20k+ days, so there’s that. Things are so bad in Texas – the worst surge that any state in the country has seen – that the White House is again urging the state government to start shutting things down and taking more precautions. (So far, the request is ignored.)

School cases are also on the rise, with all school districts in San Antonio reporting a great spike in numbers since the week of Thanksgiving break. Not unexpected, but also very worrisome as the districts just blithely keep saying nothing is wrong. Our local high school reported 11 student cases and 1 staff case in the last week.

Everyone is itching for this to be over. The vaccine started to arrive in SA this week, with 6,000 doses on Monday and another 20k+ to be delivered throughout the week. (One of my friends, who works at the hospital on base, got his first-dose covid vaccine this week!) However, the city leadership is cautioning that it might be June before we have enough doses for the general population, and also that it’ll take “at least six months” before virus transmission subsides and things can start returning to normal. Unfortunately, too many people seem to be taking the news of the vaccine as a license to let down their guard. With Christmas around the corner, this is really scary.

Other random news from San Antonio this week. I mentioned recently that the city shut down a strip club that had been in violation of covid guidelines multiple times. Well, this week, the strip club sued the city, claiming that the city shouldn’t enforce covid guidelines. Really. The city in turn sued the strip club, claiming that it should be permanently closed and the building boarded up for at least a year, because over 300 calls to police have been made for drugs, prostitution, shootings, etc in the last couple years. It’s becoming an Ordeal. *eyeroll* On the more serious side of things, Metro Health is seeing another shake-up in leadership, with more people leaving or shifting positions. Everyone is burning out. Pandemics suck, especially when you have incompetent leadership that has done NOTHING to quell the cases exploding throughout the country. When the president is a science-denier…sigh.

Now to discuss our personal family lockdown, day by day, including the frustration that came toward the end:

Day 6 (Friday): Jason had his covid test in the morning, with results to come back in 3-5 business days. Morrigan feels 100% better, and if he continues to have no symptoms through the end of the weekend, he’ll come out of isolation on Monday (Day 15 since his first day of symptoms). If Jason has no symptoms and his test comes back negative, he’ll be able to come out of isolation on the 19th. So far, all of us are doing well. (Pic is of yoga – trying to exercise during isolation.)

Day 7 (S): I woke up with a sore, swollen throat this morning. This likely means nothing because: 1) I cooked a meal last night using a jarred korma sauce, not realizing that it would be super spicy, which my body CANNOT take. I got really sick afterwards – like food-poisoning sick – so the throat swelling might be related to that. 2) It was really hot/humid in the house, so I put my fan on overnight. I usually get a swollen throat the first time I use my fan after awhile with it off. 3) A wet front came through, bringing in who-knows-what allergens. It’s not unusual for people to get major allergy symptoms around this time of year here. But, you know. It’s the “is it nothing or is it covid” game. We’ll just keep on the way we’ve gone and hope it’s enough. My throat felt normal by noon.

Day 8 (S): No recurrence of yesterday’s symptoms. We all feel fine. Morrigan is still adjusting to a normal sleep patterns after working nights, plus he’s dealing with some sad news (unrelated to covid).

Day 9 (M): Morrigan came out of isolation today. He’s 15 days past his first symptoms, 14 days past his covid test, and 5 days without symptoms or even a mild fever. We’re still nervous because there’s no clear line as to when someone with covid is no longer contagious, but he should be okay, according to doctors. Since he’s out of isolation, I armed myself with masks and gloves, then Lysol-ed the heck out of the room he’s been staying in.

Day 10 (T): Jason’s test results came back late in the afternoon – negative!! Yay! We suspected this would be the case since he’s had no symptoms at all. Now, the plan was to keep him in isolation until Saturday, but we had a little discovery in the evening. Long (VERY long) story short, Morrigan showed us a screenshot of his test results. Which, as it turned out, weren’t for an active covid test. They were for an antibody test, which only detects a past infection. To complicate matters further, while the results (from Quest Diagnostics) clearly said they were antibody results, all current antibody tests are done by blood – but Morrigan says that his test was a cheek swab. He also could only show us a screenshot of the results, saying that that’s all the health clinic emailed him and that he no longer had the email. Um…hmm. Okay. So everything we knew was suddenly called into question. He may have had an active covid infection, or he may have had an infection at some time in the past, or this may be something else entirely. Given the conflicting information, we aren’t sure about anything anymore – which, I admit, is frustrating beyond what I can put into words. Either way, we decided it was probably safe for Jason to come out of isolation (given his negative test and lack of symptoms) as long as we don’t share food, kiss, etc. The whole thing is a complicated, very-long-story mess, so I guess all I can really say is that I’m glad we played it safe regardless. No matter what the situation actually was, everyone is healthy now. I’m going to leave it at that.

PS – At the time of publishing this post, Jason is on his Day 14 and still has no symptoms whatsoever. Just in case anyone was worried about him coming out of isolation on Day 11.

We’re nearly a week into full-on household lockdown now. I’m going to do a day-by-day on this below, after more general news.

This week’s numbers: 91,394 cases, 1,412 deaths, 1,063 seven-day rolling average (up 268), 15.7 positivity rate (up 6.5%!!!). These are the jumps we’ve been expecting, and the numbers from Thanksgiving are only barely beginning to seep in. Hospital numbers are seeing jumps too, and we’ve been told the only reason they aren’t worse is that most of the new covid cases are from the age 20-29 group and potentially require less severe treatment like hospitalizations. The schools are struggling, too. Our school district gave a final tally for November: 132 student and 98 staff cases, while the first week of December reports 85 student and 39 staff cases – more major increases. Our local high school reported 15 students and 1 teacher with covid this week.

Speaking of schools, the situation has gotten so bad in San Antonio that the city marked the school risk level as high/red and also put out an amended health directive for schools this week. They recommend that in-person learning be suspended altogether for all but the most vulnerable groups (special ed students, kids without access to internet at home, etc), and that vulnerable groups be kept in pods of no more than six people. They also say that if in-person classes continue in any capacity, covid testing should be proactively provided to at least 25% of in-person staff every week. Of course, they don’t have the authority to enforce this directive – it’s just their recommendation based on current danger. But the school districts have already responded. Nah, their campuses are perfectly safe, thankyouverymuch, anyone who wants to come in can keep doing so! Ugh.

More SA news. Somehow, in the midst of all these rising rates, the Spurs have decided they will start letting fans attend games again in January. Tell me how that makes sense?? // Arguments have broken out about who should get the vaccine after healthcare workers and first responders. People in vulnerable neighborhoods? Teachers? Divided by age? It’s not like we’re going to have any say, in the end… // The very few bars that were recently allowed to open – the ones that don’t sell food – were forced to close again as of yesterday. Honestly, if 2500 of the 3000 bars in SA just got a food license so they could be reclassified as restaurants this summer, and only a couple dozen of the remaining actually reopened a month ago, I’m not sure why we’re bothering to close them. They’re a tiny portion and probably not related to the surge in cases. If bars are a problem – and they have been, I know – it seems they all need to shut down, not just the few who were shut for months only to reopen for a measly few weeks. I feel for those business owners. (PS – I’m sure the city leaders would close all bars if they could, but the TABC sets the rules for the state.)

On the home front: Other than our personal lockdown, Jason’s sister had a covid relapse and couldn’t breathe, prompting her to go to the hospital by ambulance on Friday morning. She was put on fluids and oxygen, and began to feel better. Saturday saw her fever spike in the morning, but after that, she’s been fine. They finally let her leave the hospital yesterday.

Now, for our own lockdown story…

Note: For any who may have missed it last week, Morrigan’s university said he couldn’t stay in the dorms with a positive diagnosis despite the fact that none of his roommates were on campus any longer and isolating in his room would have been far better than traveling across the country while contagious. Grr.

Pre-Lockdown Days (Friday, most of Saturday): Jason left early Friday to head to KS, picked up Morrigan on Saturday morning, and drove back down to TX, arriving around 8pm. While they were traveling, I moved all of our doctor’s appointments from the next two weeks to either before or after our lockdown. Friday evening, my friend Natalie and her husband Chris drove over with a giant box of covid supplies. Her family all managed to somehow survive covid this summer despite their many pre-existing conditions (including asthma and cancer!), and she knew all the things we might need. We’d done our own shopping, but she came with four times as much as I thought we needed and said to trust her. I also did some last minute grocery pickups and the boys wanted to go to Dunkin one last time before we couldn’t for two weeks (above). To complicate matters, our dishwasher broke (wouldn’t drain) for the second time since we got it in August. This means not only will we need to wash everything by hand – meaning that the covid-handled dishes won’t be nearly as sanitized – but we can’t get a workman out for several weeks due to having covid in the house. UGH.

Saturday evening: I discovered real quick that Natalie was right as I went through far more gloves and wipes in an hour than I expected. Jason and Morrigan got settled into their rooms. We started working out logistics, especially for things like dealing with our sick kitty who is quarantined in Jason’s room. Morrigan is almost back to 100% healthy. Nausea is gone (as evidenced by his bacon cheeseburger for dinner on the way home), he’s not really coughing, and he has no fever. He’s still in the contagious period (day 7 from when symptoms first appeared) but I’m REALLY hoping he’s less contagious than before. I’m very worried about Jason, being in the same car together for 13-14 hours.

Day 1 (Sunday): For the first time ever, I’m thankful for mild weather returning so I can shut off the heater and open the windows during the day. The more outside air and less recirculating air, the better! // Realized I read the quarantine rules wrong. We need 14 days after the last date of exposure, so assuming no one else gets sick and Morrigan continue to improve, our last day of exposure will be Tuesday. That’ll put us in quarantine until around the 22nd. If anyone else gets sick, it’ll go even longer, and will likely cancel Christmas altogether. Sigh. Though I did talk to my sister (who works at a high school), and she said that if Morrigan has been in his room full time, it’s unlikely there’ll be enough exposure to us to count. (Needs to be 15 mins at 6 ft apart.) We’re still going to treat it as if it does, but at least it feels less worrisome now, except for Jason of course. // Morrigan had a fever in the evening for the first time since he got home. // Jason fixed the dishwasher. We all had to stay out of the room, then afterwards I scrubbed everything with lysol. Heh. But thank goodness we can fully sanitize dishes!

Day 2 (M): Morrigan is in his relapse period that tends to happen with covid. No fever in the morning and still eating normally (very hungry, which is a good sign!), but he feels like crap and his cough has returned. He slept all day. (Meaning he went down at 10am only a few hours after waking, and didn’t get up until we woke him at 5pm when we went to check if he was okay.)

Day 3 (T): Still no symptoms/fever for Jason. Morrigan is feeling a lot better this morning and has no fever. He said he was tired and a little sore, but not feeling feverish. He’s still sleeping a lot night and day, which I think will help him recover. A bit of a fever in the evening but really low-grade (99). (Pic: Nimi misses her dad. This has been hard on the cats, unable to greet their humans when they leave the rooms to use the bathroom, or hang out with them in their bedrooms.)

Day 4 (W): Pretty much a repeat of Tuesday. Jason scheduled a covid test for Friday morning. Morrigan says he’s not feeling sick at all anymore, though he’s still sleeping a lot and having slight shifts from normal temps to low-grade fever – still no more than 99.4.

Day 5 (Th): Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications when we were prepping for this quarantine, we missed a large chunk of necessary groceries, including basics like pasta/rice as well as any vegetables at all. If we were good on veggies, I could do curbside pickup, but vegetables are difficult to pick out remotely because 1) you don’t know what will be there week to week, and 2) you don’t know the quality – Texas is difficult that way. So today I armed myself with every precaution and rushed through a visit to HEB. I feel quite bad doing this, despite my sister telling me that technically I haven’t had any exposure to covid because I haven’t been around either Morrigan or Jason for more than 30 seconds at a time. Sorry, HEB folks! Notably, I did make sure to go early in the morning when almost no one was around, so hopefully I kept any potential exposure to a minimum. Still, I’m asking for forgiveness here. We were woefully underprepared when we thought we were good.

So that was our first few days of lockdown. Jason is scheduled for a covid test this morning, to give us an idea of what we may or may not be dealing with. Morrigan is pretty much fully recovered now but we’re still keeping him isolated for awhile longer. So far none of the rest of us have symptoms, and I hope to have more good news next week!

It was a bad week. On Wednesday evening, my oldest son called to tell us he was positive for covid. Morrigan had been sick for a few days, but it took that long for the test results to come in. He had a lot of the classic symptoms – fever, nausea, cough – but as of that night, no difficulty breathing. To complicate matters, he was supposed to move from the dorms into a room rental on Airbnb (that he’d already paid for, someone else living in the main house) on the 10th, which clearly can’t happen now. So a flurry of phone calls followed on Thursday to housing, Airbnb, the health department, etc. Student housing suddenly decided that we needed to pick him up immediately – that day, they said, though we stressed that we live 800 miles away and simply can’t do that!

So Jason left this morning and will stay in a hotel tonight, then checking Morrigan out of his dorm tomorrow morning. They should be back by tomorrow evening. Then we’ll all be in quarantine in different parts of the house for the next few weeks. It means a lot of changes in plans – Morrigan can’t return to his job (they put him on a leave of absence), Jason and I had to cancel our anniversary weekend trip (supposed to be next weekend), I’ve handed off the hikes I was scheduled to host, etc. We did a big grocery run yesterday to make sure we’re stocked for the next few weeks, and we’ll manage as best as possible. It does seem really f–ed up that the housing department wants him to travel while he’s still contagious rather than let us pick him up in a week when he should be safer for everyone. It’s not like he has any roommates at the moment – he’s completely isolated in his dorm room! And his housing contract says he’s paid through the 10th. But it is what it is. Sigh.

(J and newborn M, Oct 2000)

Anyway. In the meantime, we got a care package to Morrigan on Wednesday night (ordered locally for delivery so it could get there right away): medicine, easy to eat foods, comfort items, etc. And when I talked to him yesterday, he was feeling a bit better. Not all the way better of course – and not happy about coming home – but improving. Hopefully he’ll be 100% better soon, and the rest of us can stay safe and covid-free. At least Morrigan will be able to return to his job at some point, and he got a full refund from Airbnb!

So many people I know are falling to covid now. I have multiple friends whose families were suddenly felled this week. My sister-in-law is still not doing well, having one of those late relapses into coughing. My brother-in-law and his wife got sick at the beginning of the week, but thankfully their tests came back negative yesterday. Morrigan’s roommate, who left for San Antonio a week before Morrigan got symptoms, had to be tested along with his whole family, and thankfully their tests came back negative, too. Everyone always gets sick around this time of year, and that’s obviously going to be worse during a pandemic. We’re all playing the “is it covid or is it something else” game. Things are getting really scary right now. It feels almost claustrophobic. Especially with my family going on full lockdown – can’t even leave for exercise after tomorrow evening – for the next two weeks.

(SA trends over the last couple weeks)

San Antonio’s numbers this week: 83,885 cases, 1,372 deaths, 795 seven-day rolling average, 9.2% positivity rate (down 0.8%). A few notes on these. First, the seven-day average includes several days of very low numbers because city-run testing sites were closed for holiday weekend. We’ve had some days with 1500 cases, so it’s likely that average will go way up next week. Second, the positivity rate did go down this week – however, city health leaders say this is likely because there were an exponentially high number of people (without symptoms or exposure) getting tested before Thanksgiving (trying to give themselves a “safe” marker for family gatherings). The rate will likely also increase next week. Hospital rates are still generally going up, but not nearly as exponentially as we saw with our spike this summer. This is attributed to people getting tested and treated earlier in the disease, as well as some better treatments we have now vs June/July.

Meanwhile, people are starting to protest again. There was a petition to impeach the mayor because of his (extremely minor) Thanksgiving weekend curfew. Then a group of men with Prump 2020 flags (give it up, it’s a lost cause, guys) went to the Alamo an hour after curfew and started yelling, “Fine me!” Okay, dudes. They had the audacity to declare this protest as equal to the Black Lives Matter protests. Rolling my eyes so hard here. The city didn’t respond to either of these things. I have to guess that the city leaders were privately rolling their eyes, too. After the holiday weekend, Metro Health put out a directive that strongly recommends not dining in (at all) or gathering indoors with people outside your household. Furthermore, they say to avoid any indoor activities that involve yelling, singing, or exercising with people not in your household. None of this is enforceable, but they strongly recommend it. The governor won’t let us enforce anything really – despite the fact that cases have gotten so bad in Texas (over 17,000 cases daily for the last two days!) that even the White House is urging aggressive testing and stronger mitigation efforts here! You know it’s bad if the Prumpster’s administration is actually saying something!

Metro health has also said that if you got together with people over Thanksgiving, you should assume you’re positive and get tested. We had a tiny (mom, stepdad, sister) gathering in our garage (above), each household away from each other, garage door open, masks on except when eating. (You can’t tell from this pic, but it was pouring outside, hence not being on our deck.) We took all the precautions, and aren’t going to worry about getting tested at this point (except perhaps my sister, who traveled here and home via plane). In other home news, the local high school had 9 students and 2 teachers test positive just in the first four days back from break. The school district’s response to the uptick in the area? Kids are no longer allowed to use neck gaiters as masks. I mean, we’ve only known they are worse than wearing no masks for months now…

Last bit of news is actually a story of this week’s total covid-a$$hole: As Jason was leaving the grocery store on yesterday, a man approached the store. This man was wearing a confederate flag bandana around his neck (always a danger sign!). He spotted a hispanic woman with a baby, walked over to them, and fake-coughed loudly on them. Then he pulled his bandana over his mouth (but not his nose, of course!) and walked into the store. UGH. I’m not normally an advocate for violence, but frankly, I wish the woman had given that man a good knee to the privates. And then called the cops on him for assault. That man’s behavior was absolutely unacceptable!!