The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 15 (515)

As the child of educators and as someone who went to school, college, and grad school for something like 19 years, I think "school year" before "calendar year." We're not having autumn weather here yet, but the back-to-school ads, the school buses learning routes, and photos posted on social media about someone's kids first day of school almost scream "Happy New Year!" to me. It's going to be an interesting one. Some areas have already switched to virtual learning at least on a temporary basis. And on Twitter this morning, I read a series of posts that made me oh so very glad that our kids are beyond K-12 or even college education. A mother in Richmond, Virginia wrote that less than two weeks into the school year, three fourth grade classes at the school one of her children attended had been sent home because three children had tested positive for covid. In the middle of the thread of tweets, it came out that a fourth child had tested positive. The parents of fourth graders were told that the children could not come back to school for 14 days. While the school was giving out computers to the children who did not have them at home, the real issue was a lack of answers from the school administration. A couple of parents wrote of phone calls not being returned or being told to call a different person who then did not return calls. It may be all downhill from here on out.

South Carolina has joined Texas and Florida in terms of a governor's saying that schools or school systems cannot issue mask mandates for the coming school year. All three governors have threatened to cut funding and/or salaries for districts that defy the order. The White House has said that it will look into whether federal funds could be used to make up any funding cut by governors. This just came as a notification to my cell phone: The Governor of Virginia has unveiled a public health order putting in place a universal mask mandate for K-12 schools. Unlike in states where the governor has banned mask mandates with some schools or school districts putting them in anyway, the order in Virginia came because some districts were acting against issuing mask mandates. 

Hawaii has joined California in requiring teachers to be vaccinated or tested regularly. The order in Hawaii applies only to public school teachers, while California's applies to both public and private school teachers. Minnesota has issued a vaccine or testing mandate for state employees. It is not clear if it applies to teachers.

The CDC uses a metric based on covid case numbers and positivity rates to classify locations in terms of the transmissibility of covid. Right now, 98 percent of US residents live in an area of high or substantial community spread, compared with 19 percent one month ago. Nationwide, the number of new cases has increased 86 percent in the last two weeks. The number of deaths is up 75 percent over the same time period. More than once in the last couple of days, in conversation with Son #1 or The Professor, I have repeated my early mantra, "we're fucked." I have trouble right now envisioning any way this is all going to end that isn't badly.

One in five US hospitals with ICUs, some 583 total hospitals, have ICUs that are at least 95 percent full. Over 10,000 covid patients have been admitted to Texas hospitals this week. At least 53 hospitals in the state have full ICUs. The President and Chief Executive Officer of Harris Health System in Houston says, "If this continues, and I have no reason to believe that it will not, there is no way my hospital is going to be able to handle this. I am one of those people that always sees the glass half-full, I always see the silver lining. But I am frightened by what is coming." There were 240 children hospitalized at Children's Hospital of San Antonio, an increasing number admitted with severe symptoms. There are even infants as young as two months on supplemental oxygen. Many children arrive with unrelated illnesses but then test positive for covid. 

Preliminary, not yet peer-reviewed findings from the Mayo Clinic suggest that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are preventing significantly fewer infections than before Delta become dominant. Pfizer itself says that its vaccine loses about six percentage points of efficacy every two months, a result consistent with research coming out of Israel and the UK.

Many police are refusing to be vaccinated. The Fraternal Order of Police estimates that over 500 officers have died from covid since the start of the pandemic. It is not known if they caught it on the job. The FOP recommends vaccination. It's a sticky issue because mandates might be a violation of collective bargaining agreements in effect in some place.

Coming up, the FDA is expected to announce that a third dose of vaccine be given to immunocompromised people, and the intel group looking into the origins of the virus is nearing its 90-day point. A draft report is supposedly under preliminary review.