Pandemic, Week 94 (Here's To Another G*d D**n New Year)

This week an unprecedented wildfire burned through Boulder, Colorado destroying hundreds of homes. President Biden had an hour long call with Vladimir Putin, warning that the US would respond decisively to an invasion of Ukraine, while Putin warned the imposition of sanctions could result in a complete breakdown of US-Russia relations. Ghislaine Maxwell, longtime girlfriend of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial), was found guilty of trafficking girls as young as 14. Comedienne and television icon Betty White died three weeks short of her 100th birthday.

The world reached 289.7 million COVID cases and 5.5 million deaths this week, of which the US accounted for 55.9 million cases and 847,000 deaths. 244 million Americans (73 percent) have received at least one dose of the vaccine and 206 million (62 percent) are fully vaccinated. The CDC announced that people with COVID who are asymptomatic can reduce their quarantine period to just 5 days (down from 10). The CDC also announced that no one, even the vaccinated, should take a cruise.

We started the week in Iowa in the aftermath of our Christmas celebration. While Steve & Becky left Sunday morning, Dave stuck around another night, allowing us to see Spider-Man: No Way Home with him (our second Spider-Man movie with uncle Dave). While we originally planned on driving back Tuesday, the weather looked a little ominous, and so we decided to leave Iowa on Monday ahead of some freezing rain (after a brief stop to pick up John and say "hi" to the Fawcetts) and take two days to drive home. Once we got home, we quickly unloaded the car and unwrapped presents before crashing, and then awoke the next morning to our scheduled PCR tests, just to make sure we hadn't picked up COVID since our rapid tests before we left for Iowa. The expected wait time was 24-36 hours so we thought we would have results before seeing Chris, Elise and their kids the next day (nope), or before fake Christmas with Mom Mom and Grandpa Don (no again). It gave us a little pause, but everyone felt fine and we'd been so careful! So we forged ahead, certain that we would have the results before we celebrated New Year with Nancy & Danny and all of our glorious fancy pant-ary (alas, no). Still, we really thought it would be fine and so went ahead and rang in New Years with a marathon of games (though not the full repertoire Katherine had planned) with Nora emerging victorious. After some of us didn't wake up until after noon on New Years Day followed by spending hours selecting (and then re-selecting) our beach house for Christmas 2022, some puzzling and the realization by Katherine that we didn't have school or work the next day, we decide to spend one more night at Katherine and Lee's. And that's when we learned in the early hours of January 2nd (a full 96 hours after we tested and exposed ourselves to all sorts of people), that in fact, Owen and Nora tested positive for COVID.

So we are (finally) quarantining. On Monday, we have to pick up rapid tests from Nora's school since the kids can't return to school Wednesday without a negative test, after which Allen and I will probably re-test (our December 29th tests came back negative) and also have John verified. Our apologies to everyone we recklessly exposed ourselves to, and hopefully this isn't a sign of things to come in 2022.

(To see all of this week's pictures, click here.)