by Nemoide Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:56 pm
I had a scare last week: after I got out of work on Wednesday I got a call from my mom telling me that my brother's girlfriend (who I saw on Christmas a few days earlier) had tested positive for covid.
I was already off for the rest of the week, using up the last of my vacation time, but I isolated myself and started preparing for sickness. I cancelled plans with my girlfriend (who was potentially exposed herself) and tried to get myself tested. I found myself with a mild fever (101.0 F) and a very slight cough, so I was convinced that I had it. I quickly found that all the local testing facilities were booked solid and couldn't provide me with any help in getting an appointment. Eventually I managed to schedule a test on New Year's Eve at a CVS about an hour's drive away.
I got my test back on Monday: NEGATIVE! So I guess I either got a random cold, had a psychosomatic illness, or had such a mild case that it didn't show up. I felt fine by Tuesday so I went back to work.
Most of my coworkers have been extremely concerned about covid, we're having patrons coming into the library talking about how their spouse has it, others who came in earlier in the week are calling us and telling us to cancel any hold requests because they're sick with it now, and even the library director has been sick with it. Meanwhile, not wanting to get into a potential clash with the director or library board, we're not taking any new precautions about people spreading covid here. In the past we've done things like having a time of exclusively offering curbside service, put returned books into a quarantine room for a week before checking in, shifted our schedules so we could have different teams of employees alternating weeks, or limiting how many and how long people can be in the library. Since we're not doing anything like that, I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before the library closes because we're all sick.
My county was giving away at-home test kits yesterday. The turnout was insane and I waited in traffic for 30 minutes before giving up before I even turned down the road where the test kid giveaway was actually happening - I didn't have time to wait in traffic for another 45-60 minutes since I had work that afternoon. But I did get lucky and was able to order a kit online.
I'm really not a fan of how we seem to collectively be giving up on mitigating covid here in the US.