I know I updated a few days ago, but I thought I'd follow up to let you know what my experience was after getting my second dose. The day after, I woke up early with some discomfort. Nothing too extreme. My left arm hurt like last time, but this time around, I was sore all over. Kind of like how you might feel the day after getting a really good workout in, or after a day of heavy physical labour. I also felt chilly. I didn't get around to taking my temperature until the afternoon, but when I did, I had a slight fever. I was lethargic all day. Today, I was back to 100%. No aches, no fever, and good energy.
I bought the thermometer yesterday after getting my shot. I realized we didn't have one when I was leaving for my appointment, and thought I'd want to keep track of it. I felt really self conscious as I walked into the pharmacy. They always have those COVID questions posted up front, saying that you shouldn't enter if you have a fever. Plus, with all the emphasis on not leaving your home more often than necessary, it feels bad to go in, buy only one thing, and that one thing being a thermometer.
I'll give a bit of an update on the situation, since I'm already here.
Waterloo Region is currently the hardest-hit place for COVID in Ontario. We're worse than Toronto, Peel, and York, which is a first. Not a lot of consensus as to why. I've heard it might have been because of the anti-mask protests, although Toronto's had larger ones, and I've heard it might be because of our Mennonite population, who often live in congregate settings and don't have the highest opinion of vaccines. Apparently it's ripped though our homeless population, but again, I don't know why this would be more of an issue for Waterloo Region than Toronto.
As far as our recovery plan goes, we traded out our colour system for a step system. So now we've started with phases, moved to colours, and now we're using steps. When we swapped phases for colours, I speculated it was because phases created a "linear" impression. We hadn't experienced the waves, and when we did, it was disheartening to see us go from "Phase 3" back down to "Phase 2". Plus, if they wanted to advance things but didn't think they could go all the way to what they promised the next phase would look like, they had to awkwardly make it a fraction, like "Phase 3.5".
I don't really know why they've swapped colours for steps. Seems like the same problem of using numbers the way that that phases did. I guess they're feeling more optimistic with the vaccine rollout, and they want to give that impression of a linear route to success. If I'm being honest, the colour system was my favourite of the three, and I wish they stuck with it.
When they reveled the new step system, the step they said we were on was "Before Step 1". I don't know why you wouldn't just make the initial stage Step 1, and then continue from there. About a week ago, we moved to "Step 1" which means that some non-essential services were allowed to open. As far as I could tell, it meant you could go indoors to buy clothes. Still can't use the changing rooms, though.
Malls still aren't open, except for stores that have an external exit and entrance.
I celebrated Step 1 by going to Giant Tiger. If you're not familiar, it's a Canadian department store. I haven't gone clothes shopping since before the pandemic, and it's been a good lesson in how you don't need to shop all that often to still maintain a professional appearance, but it was time. Selection wasn't as good as I remembered, probably because they hadn't been ordering as much, and it had been worked over by people shopping using curbside pickup slowly over the last 14 months. Still got a few shirts and shorts out of it.
I know that clothing doesn't have the level of immediacy that food does, but it's felt weird that whenever restrictions are put into place, the first thing that gets taken away is clothes. Of course high fashion is frivolous, but my understanding is that at a most basic level, humans need food, shelter, and clothes. In fact, we have homeless people who are hungry, and they are allowed to live alongside us without food or shelter, but without clothes are deemed "indecent" and criminal. But now we restrict access to clothing. Weird.
We also have a new system for tracking the COVID variants. I mentioned in a previous post that while we condemned the phrases "China Virus" and "Wuhan Flu" due to being xenophobic, we were oddly okay to use national identifiers when the virus started to mutate. We had the "UK Variant", "Brazil Variant" and "South Africa Variant". This was corrected when an umbrella term was issued "Variants of Concerns", which could further be shortened to as "VOC".
But what if you did want to get specific about which strain you caught? Well, you could use the scientific terms, but to the lay person they sound like a random string of letters and numbers. The World Health Organization has put forward a catchier list of phrases for the different variants. Here they are:
COVID-19: The original strain. Believed to have originated in Wuhan Province China
Alpha Variant: Believed to originate in the UK
Beta Variant: Believed to originate in South Africa
Gamma Variant: Believed to originate in Brazil
Delta Variant: Believed to originate in India
Kind of odd that the US didn't get their own strain, since they're still leading in overall cases. The second and third countries with the highest recorded number of cases, India and Brazil, both got their own strains.
The Delta Variant is the newest of the bunch. It's sometimes referred to as a "double mutant" because it varies from the original strain in two ways, while the other variants only differ in one way. Our vaccines are built to combat the original strain, so the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma variants are a little more resistant, and the Delta is even a little bit more. But the vaccines are still effective for the most part.
No comments:
Post a Comment