Archive for January 10, 2022

Report from Louisiana: Why is Covid testing still so difficult to find?

Posted: January 10, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By: Pat Austin

SHREVEPORT – One of the benefits of retiring from the classroom is that I no longer pay attention to the hysterical headlines about Covid, whether there will be another national shutdown, how high the case count is, and what the spread rate among school children may be.

I don’t pay attention to any of it. I don’t read it.

So, that being said, I may be a bit behind the curve on what’s what in Covidland.

What I do know is this: my and my spouse both had Covid in January last year. It wasn’t fun. But hey! Natural immunity!

And call us sheep if you must, be we both opted to be vaxxed and boosted, but that’s our own personal choice and I think that’s how it should be. Personal choice, like a flu shot.

There’s been a Covid outbreak at our church in the past couple of weeks; that is, several people have tested positive. Everyone is doing fine, nothing to worry about, but today my husband thought maybe he should get tested. He’d been directly exposed and has been feeling a bit under the weather for a couple of days.

We went to Ochsner Quick Care so he could get tested. This is where we both went last year in January and at that time we were in and out quickly. Today, it was going to be a two hour wait for a test.

Seriously?!

We went across the street to a Velocity Care and it was a three hour wait there.

He said never mind, came home, and decided to just self-monitor and self-isolate if necessary. He felt well enough to get out and do his daily three mile walk so I guess all is well.

But my question is why in the world at this point in this pandemic are we having to wait two and three hours for a nasal swab?!  I’ve seen people posting do-it-yourself swab tests but there are none to be found around here and even if you could they’re at least $30.

Something is just upside down it seems to me. 

I can’t bear these polarized discussions about Covid; that’s not my point here. I know people who have died from Covid, some with comorbidities and some not.  (Those with comorbidities, by the way, were living just fine with diabetes or COPD until Covid got them). The politicizing of the pandemic has been absurd, if you ask me, and caused much more harm that ever should have been the case.

Anyway, not to tread those waters, but I would be interested in knowing why it’s so damn hard to get a test now, two years into this pandemic and when this is supposedly basically a harmless variant.

I was happier in my oblivion.

The Macra Terror Challenge

Posted: January 10, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Repeated line: THERE ARE NO MACRA!

Doctor Who the Macra Terror 1967

There are two things I do regularly while I work:

I pray my rosaries and divine mercy chaplets

I listen to Doctor Who audios

In terms of the Rosary it’s the same on a daily basis. I pray 3 20 decade rosaries for specific intentions for each decade and for variable intentions for two of the three Rosaries. (If you’ve ever asked me to pray for something and I’ve told you I’ll do so till you tell me to stop, odds are I’m still praying for your specific intention daily).

But the Doctor Who audios are different. I listen to them in order and once I finish Capaldi I go back to the 1st Doctor and start again with the 1st Doctor. It takes about nine months to listen to them all.

Right now I’m on the 2nd doctor. The currents companions are Jamie and Victoria and the current story is The Great Space Elevator. But it was just last week that I was listening to the Macra Terror with Jamie, Polly and Ben traveling with Patrick Troughten’s 2nd Doctor.

It’s’ the story of a society that’s being lied to and manipulated by it’s leadership (which has been taken over by the Macra for their own ends). There were a lot of such stories in the 2nd-5th Doctor era at a time when the people who wrote such stores preached skepticism toward government power.

I could not help but think of our current situation as I listened to it.

So I would like to offer a challenge to people in general and to Doctor Who fans who tend to lean left in particular.

I challenge those who have either the audio of the episode, Britbox, or the animated version of said lost episode to watch it and I challenge those who have neither to read this transcript of the episode.

Then ask yourselves if those pushing the vaccines and punishing those who refuse them remind you of anyone in the episode.