san diego: dialed in: CoViD-19: Omicron: We Only Know What We Know | Courts Toe Party Lines On Vax Mandates | Another School Shooting | Court Upholds Ban On Large Capacity Magazines |

Baby Giraffe Approx 2 Hours After Birth (Taken 11.29.21)

I was so excited about the giraffe birth yesterday that I didn't even mention that we had this zippy situation where Darren picked me up from the San Diego Zoo, we rushed home, we dressed up (and I put on makeup for the maybe the 4th time in two years) so we could get Nova to derby and us to the Casbah staff photo shoot, all while I was trying to get my giraffe photos and videos to my pal at NBC, which didn't actually work, but I tried.

But I have to talk about the Casbah photo shoot because it felt so nice to be among almost every coworker. I know I've been absent. I know I've been avoidant. But when there are no customers in the bar and I know we're all vaccinated and the fans are on and we're all chill, I could be a semblance of old me among old friends and happy and not worrying about masks or ventilation or drinking before the kid is asleep...another major thing I've avoided all pandemic even though one beer and one shot is certainly not gonna spin me into a bad step-mom vibe.

Compare that to today, where I was simply enjoying an afternoon trip back at the Zoo with Darren when his cousin called frazzled that she'd missed yet another flight. This is the cousin whose job it was to fly to San Diego as an escort for Nova on Saturday but who decided to purposely create a six hour layover so they could explore Phoenix after they'd already missed their first flight which had a scheduled layover in Chicago. It hurts my brain thinking about it. So she was at the airport with 5 hours to kill and was asking advice on places to go IN TIJUANA. WHAT?! Who thinks you can just casually cross into Mexico and back and go sight-seeing or shopping or whatever and get back with enough check-in time to catch a flight?

So yeah, we got sucked into the hurricane, picked her up, treated her to dinner (not quite sure how that worked out), walked around Old Town to kill time, and dropped her off in time for a reasonable person to check in. I was pretty much a day behind in work, but I'm just gonna backdate this post by a couple hours so this post doesn't get mixed up with Wednesday's data dump.

Now that I'm wrapping up, I'll say that about 70% of my email today was asking for money. Super annoying. I'll also say that omicron is stealing all the headlines, so I've included a lot of links below, but the long story short is we don't know what we don't know, and we only know what we know. But what is getting annoying is people, including Dr Walensky and Jeff Zients, repeatedly saying the virus is "unpredictable." It really isn't. We follow mitigations as best we can and in regions of high compliance the virus stays at bay and where people fight mitigations and deny the virus is airborne and that the virus and subsequent variants are hoaxes and that vaccines aren't necessary/effective/whatever we see consistent resurgences of the virus and continued high hospitalizations and deaths. The waves, at least now, are actually entirely predictable. In my opinion, vaccine mandate deadlines can't come soon enough.

Stay safe out there.

COVID-19:

The First Year of COVID: A College Degree Was ‘an Insurance Policy’ Against Death. A new Voice of San Diego examination of death certificates from the first year of the pandemic reveals the extent to which the virus disproportionately killed San Diegans with lower levels of education and income. - Voice of San Diego (11.30.21)
Fact Sheet: Omicron Variant - CDPH (11.28.21)
Dr. Eric Topol expects Covid vaccines will protect against severe disease from omicron infection - CNBC (11.30.21) -- note: Jim Cramer is garbage but Dr. Eric Topol has been one of the best voices during the pandemic.
What Doctors Need to Know About Omicron — Picture to become clearer in 2 weeks, but here's what we know now MedPage Today (11.29.21)
Doctors hope Omicron causes milder cases of Covid — but it’s still too early to say - STAT News (11.30.21)
Odds of Testing Positive for SARS-CoV-2 Following Receipt of 3 vs 2 Doses of the BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine - JAMA (11.30.21)

The findings of this study suggest that the waning of vaccine-induced protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection seems to be counteracted in the short-term by a third dose and further monitoring is needed to determine the duration of immunity following the booster.

FDA Panel Narrowly Backs Merck's COVID Pill — Questions about efficacy, safety were chief among concerns, regardless of how members voted - MedPage Today (11.30.21)