Cold

 Maren started having cold symptoms on Friday afternoon, and now Linden has it too. This is the first time we have dealt with anyone in our household being sick since covid started, and we are mentally scrambling a little bit to figure out what we are supposed to do. They both have a runny nose and are intermittently tired, but no fever and no other symptoms so there is very low likelihood that it is covid. The rates of rhinovirus, which this looks like, are way way higher than the rates of covid. Still, it is a bit of a shock and a scare to have them get sick at all. 

The covid numbers are rapidly rising here, and almost all of the new cases are variants of concern, mostly the UK variant. Our government has been terrible, pandering to politics rather than focusing on public health. There are now new public health orders in place, but they came way way too late. It is extremely frustrating and also a little scary.

School is closed for two weeks, and we are just going to camp out at home and not go out for the next couple of weeks. We are supposed to get both Maren and Linden tested for Covid, but public health has made the (idiotic) move to make all testing happen at one drive through testing location. No appointments, first come first served. And right now the wait times are between two hours and four hours, so you drive up in your car and wait in your car that entire time. That would be torture for all of us if we took them to get tested, so we aren’t going to do it. The chances it is Covid are very low and we would rather isolate unnecessarily than go through that awfulness. It feels safer to isolate at home right now anyway. I am going to be calling and/or writing to Public Health to tell them that their policies are leading to people like us choosing not to test.

But today we had lovely weather, and even though they weren’t feeling well they had a great time playing outside :-)