Thanks, and yeah...testing. I walked into an urgent care to get tested last month, took the swab, then stared at the PA as she told me I'll have my results in...wait for it...up to 10 days. Why did I even get tested? Should have just quarantined and called it a (14) day. I guess that's what you get when you are this many months into a global pandemic with not only no coordinated federal response, a federal response that actually attacks the governors they abdicated to for addressing it.
And a president stoking anti-public health behavior. How sad is it that the #1 way Trump has fucked us is a toss up? Sorry to hear about your mother-in-law. I haven't had it infect anyone close to me yet. My parents still go to church, and my best friend is a pilot, so I feel like it's only a matter of time. P.S. I usually rock some Founders Brewing cheapo promo sunglasses 'cuz my wife used to work at a pub. Any of you guys up there drink Founders? They do distribute here, but only to a few of the higher end bars in town, I think. Not sure I've ever drank anything from them.
I’m in the Detroit metro area. Had some Founder’s Breakfast Oatmeal Stout with a friend Saturday night. Founder’s has some great beer. Where are you located? I don’t drink a ton of beer, but Founder’s is top of my list. Either that, or anything Bell’s Brewery is great. Do they charge an arm and a leg for it by you? Ounce for ounce both those breweries, to me, are reliably the best value around and readily available.
I'm wayyyy down in TX. I've had Bell's "Oberon"! It was one of my favorite commonly-on-tap beers in Tennessee for the couple of times I went there. That's crazy, it must mean that Appalachia doesn't have many intermediately sized breweries. I didn't know Bell Brewing was also from your neck of the woods. We have sooooo many breweries, of varying sizes, here. To this day, I can still get beer from some of the smaller ones, so that's cool. I know that at one point, we had some state-level laws that were very unfavorable to allowing smaller breweries to increase their distribution, but I think those have been lifted. InBev's doing (Anheuser-Busch rebranded), no doubt. And yeah, if Trump got sick at the Rose Garden event on September 26th, that was (..........) only ten days ago. I can almost 100% assure you, it was Trump who concocted the narrative that he "beat" covid. It's quite possible that his overexertion, masked to his own perception by some damn good 'roids, will weaken his body to the point of perhaps involuntary sedation and intubation later this week. My heart goes out to every covid victim and their families, friends, coworkers, everybody affected. I wish we had a president capable of expressing empathy. The nation needs to begin a collective healing that is only being prolonged as we sink further into disruption injected by POTUS. Ugh.
On topic, I have a colleague whose 71 year-old Mom went in to a local hospital to treat a UTI about 3 weeks ago. Her Mom caught COVID in the hospital. Mom is struggling on a vent right now and barely responsive. Doesn’t look good for her. Fortunately, my colleague has not tested positive, or had symptoms two weeks after exposure.
LOL testing. So check it. Let's say you work in Hollywood and you can get over the fact that your protocols were partially co-written by the assistant that fucks up your burrito order on the reg but whatever. What we're going to be doing is testing testing whole lotta testing. As in, ride a bus? 14 day quarantine with a test. Ride a plane? 14 day quarantine with a test. Coming to the lot for the first time? Take a test. Test positive? Quarantine then take another test. So you need a clean COVID test before you can go to the lot to answer their questions so you can get on the lot so you can go get a COVID test (this is where I ass out: COVID left me with a cough, which means I cannot truthfully answer that I have no "COVID symptoms" such as... a cough which means they won't let me on the lot at all and if I decide to say "actually this cough isn't a cough" they ban me from the lot FOR LIFE so I've been doing a lot of not working). But that clean COVID test so you can go take a COVID test is on you, and you'd best have the results before you need to report to the lot, which means if you get called up for work, oh, four days before you need to get tested, you're fucked. Because testing in LA was running 14-18 days with an appointment. You could get an appointment up to 48 hours in advance if you were willing to drive to Lake Elsinore, which is only three hours out of town. Unfortunately everyone else who reads Facebook is also in Lake Elsinore so... yeah. But wait there's more. Let's suppose that you've actually had the necessary three weeks notice before you need to show up for testing. Chances are good they're running on a 4-5 day turnaround and you probably came in Friday so you could work Monday (for those keeping track at home, you have now had to make two stops three weeks out in order to do your job). So now you can't do that job anyway because their lab is running behind which means the whole job pushes and now every time COVID testing doesn't go like clockwork, everything stops And by the way, if you're actually working with talent on set who aren't wearing a mask because they're actually trying to shoot a damn TV show you are getting nasopharangyal swabs every single day. And their turnaround is "oh yeah so you had COVID four days ago" too. And the lots are paying like $200 per test. And the tests not on the lot? If it's a non-union production? Yeah you're paying $200 per test, too.
From what I've heard, tons of college kids have been getting fake Covid test documents online. This is what happens when you require an 18-22 to present paper on semi short notice or get flunked out of yet still pay for a semester of school when a test takes as long as 15 days. Fake documents cost something like $20. I've known people who purchased fake vaccine documentation when they couldn't get a hold of their originals and didn't want to have to retake them but fake COVID tests is a new ball game.
Yeah COVID uncertainty and COVID absolutism has unleashed a torrent of grift, Sophie's Choices and rampant opportunism. The Chuds have been lashing out at all the unemployment fraud in WA state without acknowledging that maybe the Nigerians are targeting WA because their unemployment payouts are nearly double every other state? My favorite example of punishment/prevention mismatch was Italy, where breaking curfew was a misdemeanor but breaking curfew with a previous positive COVID test was MUTHERFUCKING INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER at which point you go "you know, I might have to buy bread and eggs at some point, probably better to not know for sure what this cough is." Back when I couldn't get COVID tested? We had COVID tests and a Quest account. They grab stuff out of the box a couple times a day and the kits for PCR are the same as for other stuff. So I coulda just had my wife run it. But Quest was charging $15k for that test and if my primary care provider hadn't authorized it, my insurance wouldn't pay a dime (and my PCP wasn't authorizing shit). And if it had come back positive we would have had to shut down the clinic, putting five people out of work, and forcing them to figure out how to get the same COVID test I couldn't get (or pay the same price, or maybe we pay the price?) while also dumping at least fifteen expectant mothers on the tender mercies of the very COVID ward profiled by Frontline a month later, that had previously put our name at the top of the list of "places to have a baby other than this hospital." Meanwhile I'm 100% sure I got COVID from my wife, who had it in Alaska, who caught it from our daughter, who had it at school along with half her class. One of our midwives had symptoms in early January. So we were pretty sure I was the end-point, not the start-point. But there was absolutely no physical way to verify that, and we were looking at an easy $75k in tests just to verify that yeah, nobody at the clinic is carrying anything at the moment. Who knows about last week, who knows about next week. "get tested" pretty much means "get fucked." That's something none of these high-minded eloi isolating with their PostMates has any real conception of. The perception and reality of the testing environment are not aligned, and their variance is as fickle as the weather.
Why aren't you a 'Tuber yet, anyway? Because you love ranting, but don't like appearing on video? Same. You should get over it. Start a channel. Would subscribe.