COVID and a suggestion for people in the US

[brainwane]

If you are in the United States, and you have health insurance, and you have been delaying your preventive care visits (doctor, dentist, etc.) because you're worried about COVID risk, I have a suggestion for you:

Consider that if you don't go soon, you may not be able to go till, like, March.

After Thanksgiving and Christmas, it might be like it was a year ago. A bunch of people will travel and gather indoors and transmit COVID to each other, and then bring COVID back to their workplaces/schools/etc. So the case numbers will go up, and won't come back down for months.

This might not be what happens. It depends on vaccination rates, and Delta or other COVID variants, and whether the supply chain crisis affects our abilities to find asymptomatic cases through testing, and so on. But it might happen. If you're seeing a dip in COVID cases in your area, if it's safer to be in indoor spaces with strangers now than it was two months ago, then that relative advantage may dissolve soon.

You can use ZocDoc to find health practitioners near you who take your insurance and book appointments online. The next few weeks are a really good time to do that.

Feel free to link to this publicly and share it.

Comments

[the_siobhan]

That's good advice even in not-the-States. We seem to have come through our Thanksgiving without a major bump in local numbers, so I'm tentatively optimistic about Xmas. But I think Thanksgiving isn't as big a deal here as it is in the USA so that's not necessarily a good sample.

outside the US

[brainwane]

Good to know! Best wishes in getting your preventive care and helping others get theirs.

I figured I would limit my advice to people in the US because

* I know the major holidays here, and not so much elsewhere
* I feel like I have a grasp of COVID case/large-scale behavior dynamics in the US, speaking broadly, and not elsewhere
* I don't know whether ZocDoc works elseswhere!

[cahn]

Oh dang, you're right. I had been delaying -- though not because of covid, more my usual procrastination mixed with our insurance changing at the end of the year. But thanks for the reminder I should get it taken care of now, I just made my dentist appointment and I'm gonna do the others, so thank you!

[rachelmanija]

I totally agree.

[momijizukamori]

Oh, thank you for that link, that is a helpful resource to have.

(I have been putting stuff off not for COVID reasons but because they require me making phonecalls ahaha)