The View from the Hermitage, Day 443

Stop looking for references to the UK, South Africa, Brazil, or India variants. Gone are country names; here are Greek letters. I may actually learn the proper order of all the single Greek letters I can name. Names are being given in the order in which variants are discovered. Here's the list to date.

Variants of Concern (the ones we've all heard of):

Alpha        B.1.1.7          (UK or British) 

Beta           B.1.351        (South Africa)

Gamma      P.1                (Brazil)

Delta          B.1.617.2    (India)

Variants of Interest (the ones we haven't yet heard of): Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa.

Other name sources were considered including Greek gods. The Greek letters do not replace the scientific names that contain numbers, Roman letters, and full stops. Those names convey important scientific information and will continue to be used for scientific purposes. There are only 14 more Greek letters, though, so there better not be a15th variant. I've also heard that there was a new variant discovered in Vietnam that is a combination of the UK and India variants. This raises the question of whether it should get its own distinct letter or be a combo such as Alta or Delpha. I do like the sound of Delpha.

POTUS has set a goal of having 70 percent of the population at least partially vaccinated by July 4. Will this be Independence from Covid Day? Not if you're Dr. Fauci who is cautioning against declaring victory prematurely noting, "As long as there is some degree of activity throughout the world, there's always a danger of variants emerging and diminishing somewhat the effectiveness of our vaccines ... We cannot abandon public health measures when you still have activity in the broad community in the United States." As of Friday, 59.1 percent of Americans over the age of 12 had gotten at least one vaccine dose, while 47.4 percent had been fully vaccinated. We should also keep in mind that there have been more global cases in the first five months of 2021 than there were in all of 2020 according to Johns Hopkins University.

Some state prison systems have vaccinated a higher percentage of inmates than the state has of people outside. In North Dakota, over 80 percent of inmates have been vaccinated compared with 42 percent of the population. In both California and Kansas, about 73 percent of inmates have been vaccinated. The overall rate is 56 percent in California and 47 percent in Kansas. How have they achieved this since inmates cannot be forced to be vaccinated? The answer to that is "education is key," something we've seen elsewhere. Prisons hold town-hall style meetings and answer the questions that inmates have about the vaccines. Some prisons have also used an incentive (threat?) program using the power of peer pressure as in "no one can go outside for recreation" until a certain number of inmates have been vaccinated.

Around the world, China has locked down Guangdong province to try to contain what is thought to be the first community outbreak of Delta (formerly known as the India variant) in China. After a government review, Peru has almost tripled its death toll to 180,764, giving it the highest death rate per capita in the world. Seven EU countries have started using a digital covid certificate for travel. The "digital green certificate" records whether the holder has been fully vaccinated, recovered from a case of covid, or tested negative for covid within the past 72 hours. Someone wishing to enter one of these countries needs to meet one of those three conditions. The long-term goal is for all the people in the EU to have a certificate with visitors from outside getting one on arrival. It is not clear, though, how Americans would prove they have been vaccinated when vaccination passports aren't going to happen here. 

While it's still somewhat up in the air whether there will be Olympic Games this summer, some of the potential competitors are already in Japan. Australia's national women's softball team of 20 players and 10 staff, all fully vaccinated, just arrived. They will be living and practicing in the city of Ota until they can move into the Oympic Village on July 17. In Ota, they are confined to one level of the hotel where they will eat, work out, and have meetings. They can leave the hotel only by train. 

XPot is spreading the word that he will be POTUS again by August. One of his former henchmen, Michael Flynn, now aligned with QAnon, is suggesting that a Myanmar-style coup might be a good thing here. Come on, NYC grand jury or NYS attorney general, we need indictments soon!