The View from the Hermitage, Day 476

I can see 500 days of this blog on the horizon. That number will be passed while The Professor and I are spending a week or so away from wifi and a couple other modern conveniences that often make things less convenient. We will be at the same cabin we visited last summer while our hardwood floors were being refinished. Cell reception will come and go; last year, we were able to check email on our phones a couple times each day. I kept up with writing a daily blog post and posted all the days when we got back to civilization. The plan for this year is much the same.

It is Independence Day here in the US. Cooking out and watching fireworks are a couple of traditional activities we typically don't do. The White House is having a July 4 party at which neither masks nor vaccination will be required. It's on the honor system. Vaccinated people do not need to wear masks; unvaccinated people do. There will be some sort of testing and screening at the door. It all sounds a bit too close to what XPot used to do. I hope it does not become a spreader event and especially not a super one.

Delta continues to be a major topic in the media. The variant has now been identified in at least 98 countries. The director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute at Oxford notes, "Once Delta gets going, it will overwhelm healthcare systems very rapidly unless vaccination improves. Overwhelming health systems will lead to a disproportionate rise in deaths as oxygen runs out, healthcare professionals are knocked out, and other care halted. More thought needs to be given to whether vaccinating young children in the rich world is as important and ethically justified as vaccinating key workers and the most vulnerable in developing countries." The italics are mine; I think this question might merit discussion. I can see both sides of the issue and am glad the decision is not mine to make.

The WHO director general would like to see at least 10 percent of people in all countries vaccinated by the end of September and at least 70 percent of people in every country vaccinated by July 2022. I;m afraid I don't see that happening. The group leader of the RNA virus replication laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute observes, "We need everyone vaccinated now. We are not all protected until the whole world is protected. It can come across as idealism, but it's not--there's a cold-hearted, self-interested motivation behind all of it." In other words, none of us is safe until all of us are safe.

Six emergency workers at the Surfside condo collapse in Florida have tested positive for covid. Thanks to contact tracing, 424 members of other teams have been tested. New cases in Florida have risen by 55 percent in the past two weeks. Across the state, 56 percent of people are fully vaccinated, 

Indian police are investigating whether thousands of people in Mumbai were injected with salt water rather than vaccine. The scam involved medical personnel and went on at nearly a dozen vaccination sites over the last two months. Whoa! The scam came to light when some people who thought they'd been vaccinated could not find themselves listed in a national vaccination database. Can you imagine how they likely felt when they realized that they might not have been vaccinated? Unlike the free vaccinations here, the vaccinations there had a monetary cost that I don't imagine will be recovered and refunded to those people who now must get vaccinated with vaccine not saline. 

Remember all the states starting lotteries to entice people to get vaccinated? Ohio, the first state to start such a program, has ended theirs. There was an early jump in the number of vaccinations but it soon evaporated. Arkansas is also ending their program saying that it is "no longer getting the results that we want." There are still some state programs operating. In Massachusetts, the 73 percent of adults who are fully vaccinated can enroll to win one of five $1 million prizes. Residents between the ages of 12 and 17 have a chance at one of five $300,000 scholarships after they are fully vaccinated. Over 60 percent have gotten their first shot. Residents in Michigan only need to be partially vaccinated to enter for cash prizes for adults and scholarships for the younger set. Maine will award a prize of $1.00 for every person vaccinated by July 4; the prize will be in the neighborhood of $900,000. There are also prizes and incentives other than cash being offered. In Alabama, Talladega Superspeedway offered a chance to drive your own car or truck on the track. Delaware offered free tolls within the state. Indiana gave out Girl Scout cookies. New Jersey has offered dinner at the governor's mansion. Companies are also offering prizes. How about free travel around the world for a year on United Airlines, or $1 million and free groceries for a year from Kroger?

It would be nice if all those programs worked as intended. Right now, about 1,000 US counties, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest, have vaccination coverage of less than 30 percent. It has become clear that full vaccination offers maximal protection against the Delta variant. The longer that variant--any variant, actually--continues to infect people, the more chance there will be that new variants will be formed. Some of those variants will be relatively harmless in terms of any gain in function, but it would only take one that can bypass vaccine- or case-generated immunity. Only one.

Ringo Starr turns 81 on Wednesday, July 7. All he wants for his birthday is for everyone at noon to say, post, think, or otherwise express "peace and love." If only saying it would make it happen.