I'm posting part of a press release from Cameron County Eric Garza's office. Formatting issues in converting the document from PDF to JPEG and then to Google Blogger forced me to simply type it out.
Please don't consider this posting as taking sides in the Cameron County Commissioner Court's lawsuit against Sheriff Garza. I simply don't know enough.
I've read what Juan Montoya has written in his El Rrun Rrun blog, but understand that he's likely paid to write from a certain point of view.
Simply consider that I'm putting something into the blogosphere that Sheriff Eric Garza wants out there.
Make a personal decision as to why he wants this in the public domain:
CAMERON COUNTY SHERIFF ERIC GARZA
PRESS RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 14, 2021
CAMERON COUNTY CHIEF COUNSEL DISQUALIFIED FROM PARTICIPATION IN LITIGATION
On Friday, September 10, 2021 the 445th Cameroon County District Court disqualified Juan A. Gonzalez, Chief Legal Counsel for the Cameron County Commissioner Court's Legal Division, from continuing to serve as attorney for Cameron County in its lawsuit.
The ruling validates our position that Mr. Juan A. Gonzalez was conflicted from participating in the litigation as he is a material witness.
The Cameron County Sheriff's Office will continue to defend itself against frivolous claims and will defend the laws of the Great State of Texas.
It started with the sniffles.
ReplyDeleteOminously, I hadn't had a runny nose since before the pandemic. I half-hoped that it was related to the wildfire smoke that had drifted to the San Francisco Bay Area from the Caldor and Dixie wildfires near Lake Tahoe.
It got worse. The next morning I woke up stuffy, almost completely unable to breathe through my nose. And a sore throat accompanied. That's when the panic set in.
This went beyond wildfire smoke symptoms or seasonal allergies. As the day continued, my sore throat worsened. I had sneezing fits, a headache, mild cough, and just an overall feeling of being sick. Even though I'd been vaccinated, I feared I had somehow contracted a breakthrough case.
I started obsessively googling breakthrough Covid symptoms. Alarmingly, according to the Zoe Covid study, headache, runny nose, sneezing, sore throat, and loss of smell, are the top five symptoms fully vaccinated people report when infected. I was four for five. My husband started to feel stuffy too, so he joined me in making an appointment to get a COVID-19 test the next day.
Nearly 24 hours later, our results were in: we were negative. Evidently, it was just a cold.
In an interview, Dr. Amesh Adalja said when it comes to deciphering between seasonal allergies, a cold and a COVID-19 infection despite vaccination, the easiest to rule out are seasonal allergies.
I was grateful, in more ways than one. Because I work from home, I easily avoided exposing anyone to the virus (besides, unfortunately, my immediate family). But the experience did spur a thought: mid-pandemic, the symptoms of a normal cold can be something more ominous.
ReplyDeleteIn part, that's because the recommendations for quarantining due to even a mild case of COVID-19 — as most breakthrough cases are — are much more severe than for a normal cold. Those with symptoms like mine (which could have just as easily been COVID-19 are supposed to self-isolate until they've received their test results. If a fully vaccinated person tests positive, they have to self-isolate for at least 10 days. In other words, getting a cold post-pandemic is quite different from getting a cold in 2019.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that, with the delta variant (which is the dominant strain in the U.S.), fully vaccinated people can still spread the virus to others — though, notably, they do appear to spread the virus for a shorter time.
My experience is not unique: millions of vaccinated Americans have or will experience similar symptoms, and fear the worst. I was lucky to easily be able to find and schedule a COVID-19 test, though not everyone is so lucky. In this situation, how are the fully-vaccinated supposed to know if their common cold symptoms signify COVID-19, allergies or just a plain old cold? And what challenges will we face this winter, when cold season starts in earnest?
"People with allergies usually have some history of seasonal allergies, so it's not usually something that comes on out of the blue," Adalja said. "It's something that has triggers, based on certain pollen or certain times of the year, or certain exposures like cats or dogs or whatever it might be, so allergies usually have some history that helps to distinguish them from something that's not analogy that's an infection."