Norovirus!

[shoengine]

A thin wahfer

 

[Skeeter686]

View attachment 867966

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but this looks like some kind of fetish sex doll to me.

 

[Broothru]

Noro (enhanced by Covid-19) is the reason I have studiously avoided setting foot on the floating biological laboratories known as "cruise ships" even while my beloved Spousal Unit takes a 10-11 day cruise to the Caribbean every year. She goes with some subset of her sisters (she has 5) occasionally accompanied by their sole brother (imagine the hellscape he grew up in ), and some number of the collective spouses to same.

There's just no friggin' way I'm consenting to being locked up with three thousand new friends for a week and a half. I got plenty of health issues to deal with already, thanks very much! Besides, if I can't fish it, I don't want to be on it!

Cheers! (And that's that!)

Yeah, let's talk about hospitals.

Two weeks ago I got to spend two nights in one, following a scheduled surgery. By the time I left, I had contracted whatever flu variant is making the rounds these days. Two days after going home, my wife (who was taking all the CDC precautions) had an unscheduled visit to the ER. When it rains, it pours.

She spent one night in the hospital before being discharged. Guess who else developed the flu? Before entering the hospital, we were both (relatively, for me) healthy, vacacced for flu and everything else we seniors get jabbed with on an annual basis, with otherwise robust immune responses. Both of us got sick.

Don't go to hospitals. They're full of sick people.

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

I could never take one of those cruises where you're jammed into a fat ugly ship with a huge crowd and expected to swim in tiny pools that are mostly pee and boogers.

I was lucky enough to spend a lot of days on a big boat belonging to my dad, and whenever we cruised by the ships with hundreds of people hanging over railings and waving, I felt bad for them.

I highly recommend Nile cruises, though. Not expensive and very pleasant, and you get to see things like the Valley of the Kings instead of creepy Disney islands and dirty old Nassau. But maybe they're less fun when covid isn't killing the tourism industry.

 

[MaxStout]

I highly recommend Nile cruises, though. Not expensive and very pleasant, and you get to see things like the Valley of the Kings instead of creepy Disney islands and dirty old Nassau. But maybe they're less fun when covid isn't killing the tourism industry.

Got a soundtrack for that.

 

[day_trippr]

Makes me wonder if the Mighty Mighty Bosstones might have ripped off Madness' style

 

[Erik the Anglophile]

Interesting to find this thread. I've been lying on the couch all day with probably norovirus.
The rest of the family had it last week and I thought I managed to dodge it.
Oh well, luckily whenever I get a stomach flu of some kind the worst stomach problems usually just last at most the first day then I mostly have fever 2-3 days.

 

[MaxStout]

Makes me wonder if the Mighty Mighty Bosstones might have ripped off Madness' style

A lot of the third wave ska acts borrowed from the 2 tone sound. And 2 tone borrowed from Jamaican ska and punk.

 

[Snuffy]

The sickest I've ever experienced with a stomach virus was rotavirus. We attended a function with lots of toddlers about and they were telling stories of the terrible stomach flu everyone had caught the week before. There was a worktable in the garage off of the kitchen where diapers were being changed. Apparently I must have touched the surface when turning off under-cabinet lighting when the party was over. The description of rotavirus says it's most common and severe in children and that you contract it after coming in contact with infected feces. I'd rather not think about how I may have contracted it, TBH. All was fine until the next evening about 7pm. Began to feel horrible and went to bed early. I awoke at 2am and nearly turned furniture over getting to the bathroom where I then stayed for the next 8 hours. In that time, I puked 17 times in a cycle of hot sweaty nausea, puke, feeling ok for a minute and then shivering with cold, hot again etc. I drank water between each episode so there would at least be something to expel. I remember thinking that if this killed me, I would be ok with that. I got back to bed for a few hours and then it went the other direction. Totally uncontrollable contractions that had no regard for when or where you were when they hit - so again I spent hours in close proximity to the throne. I remember being thankful that the vomiting was first and not second in the sequence. When it was over, I was a trembling, twitching, hollow wreck and it took two days to recover enough to eat again. My family were nearly sliding against the walls to avoid me if they were in the same room. They stood at the door and tossed bottles of water and gatorade at me. The entire house was coated in Lysol and Clorox for weeks afterward. The best description I can come up with is "shockingly incapacitating".

 

[MaxStout]

We attended a function with lots of toddlers about and they were telling stories of the terrible stomach flu everyone had caught the week before.

That'd be the moment I'd NOPE right out of there.

 

[Clint Yeastwood]

As people say, sometimes there is little difference between what comes out of each end.

 

[mashdar]

I'm a little late to the party, but here to say:

Washing your hands is only half the battle with norovirus. It is incredibly capable of aerosolizing during an "event" (either exit), and coating ALL surfaces in a room. Faucets. Door knobs. You, if you walk in within several minutes. That paper towel that pre-unrolled.

Further, it takes extremely few (10-20?) viruses to cause an infection. Basically a single aerosol particle is an infection waiting to happen.

It's basically an unstoppable force of nature in public restrooms, especially where a**h*** architects/owners don't install paper towels and make the door swing in...

Some significant fraction of people (~20% of Northern Europeans) are FUT2 non-secretor and are mostly immune. So there's that.

 

[Erik the Anglophile]

So basically, if someone in your house gets it, and you are not immune, you are likely gonna come down with it no matter what you do?

 

[mashdar]

So basically, if someone in your house gets it, and you are not immune, you are likely gonna come down with it no matter what you do?

Yes. There are other things that look like norovirus, though, so without a lab test it may not be as contagious, or you might get it even if immune to norovirus.

The reason it blows up on cruise ships is that you get an exponential spreading phase with enough time (~ 2 days) for the first 20+ cases to explode throughout the ship. Once you have 20 people sick on one ship, the virus basically ends up everywhere. (Normally by 2 days the new cases spread way out and hopefully most of those get sick at home.)

 

[Erik the Anglophile]

Well that reassures my policy around colds etc in the family.
I don't really take any measures to avoid it since we are all in such close proximity to eachother what with small children and all it's basically a coin toss whether you will come down with something or not.

At work you can at least keep distance if you know you have something at home...

 

[Snuffy]

I think our immune systems got complacent during Covid when nobody was catching any of the normal crud in the mask-and-hand-sanitizer years. Once we got back to handshakes and open coughs it's virus party time.