2020-12-24

Covid update

The bad news is that everyone in the family got it; the good news is that surprisingly only one of the six carers working with Grandma tested positive.1 Alas the carer who did get it ended up giving it to her spouse and four kids, too.

So that gives us a total of ten patients in "our" outbreak. Only one person (Grandma) had to be hospitalized. The rest of our family had "mild" symptoms; the carer and her kids are in a similar boat, but her husband seems to have gotten hit a bit harder (though not badly enough to need admitting). Still that's nine out of ten recovering without heavy intervention. 2

Grandma had a harder time. After about nine days in the hospital she developed a pneumonia and had to be transfered to the ICU and intubated. Eight days later they were able to extubate her and this evening she was transfered out of the ICU. She's still pretty foggy and, of course, is deeply deconditioned. She's looking at weeks of rehab before we can have her back. In the mean time we get a few minutes a day of video chat as the hospital is fully locked down: no visitors for any reason.


1 Part of our last upgrade of procedured was asking the carers to wear masks full time on shift (and we provided KN-95s for those who wanted them); my wife and I also wore them whenever we went downstairs (that is into the space shared with Grandma and the carers). However, neither Grandma nor the toddler could be convinced to keep them on. None-the-less the policy seems to have made a difference.

2 Recovery is not a simple thing, however. I've been "over" this for two weeks now and I'm still suffering unusual mental and physical fatigue. Just six or seven hours of work (i.e. programming and reports) is leaving me inattentive and slow for the rest of the day. Just walking two-and-a-half miles on an improved trail in forty-five minutes leaves me feeling like the day included a marathon martial arts workout. My wife has similar complaints.

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