(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

[cw: illness, (arguably) venting]


is the feeling of impending doom because of the sore throat (because they are both being caused by the same medical condition), or is the feeling of impending doom because of the sore throat (because the last time I had this precise flavour of sore throat† it turned out to be COVID, and I have learned an association)

†not the same as the sore throat of the past couple of days!

Comments

[brin_bellway]

>>(god, remember when the government supplied rapid tests? I can't believe they stopped)

I mean, to be fair they're a lot less useful after a couple years of heavy selective pressure towards strains with high false-negative rates, especially for Jess Q. Public who is just following the instructions on the card and not swabbing their throat or coughing on the swab or anything. (Indeed, my brother's first (and, for weeks, only) test was negative, and I learned too late that not only he but my *parents* were placing way too much stock in that.)

I tested my case of COVID purely to see if I could get the psychological closure of knowing for certain (I could: it was positive), but if it had been negative I would *still* have given better than 50/50 odds that it was COVID-19. I did not test-to-release, though for a couple weeks after leaving quarantine I refrained from drinking any water at work so as not to break the seal on my anti-egress P100, in case I was more ill than I seemed.

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That all said, last I checked (around December or so), my local pharmacy still had some boxes of government rapid tests left: the stock hadn't been *refreshed*, but they weren't *unusably* old.

I saw recently that you can get them (possibly only by the case, 138 5pks?† it's a bit ambiguous) from the Canadian government-surplus online store: I wonder if that's open to random individuals, and how much the shipping costs.

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†Pull together two dozen friends and get 5 - 6 boxes each?

[jan_me]

Yeah, sadly much less effective.

I didn't know about the surplus thing though- I'll definitely be looking into that.