The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 19 (519)

I don't get many comments on this blog, but I enjoy reading the ones I do get. I appreciate that people take the time to tell me something of their own experience, agree with something I wrote, even disagree; I learn from what readers share with me. There are days when I skip over long, informative reports and don't include them. in this blog. My blog, my rules. I put in what about the pandemic speaks to me. Every now and again I find myself wondering if I'd be reading this blog daily if I weren't writing it. Maybe. I really don't know. To those who do read this regularly or not and comment on it or not, thanks. 

Covid continues to surge in 40 states. The NIH director says we could have 200,000 new cases a day in a matter of weeks. The reasons include vaccine hesitancy, not following mitigation measures, and simple complacency. Many people are tired of the pandemic and want to go back to where they were in 2019, so that's what they try to do. News flash: It will never be 2019 again. Hopefully, it will never be 2020 again either. 

New York City plans to require visitors and staff members at museums and other cultural institutions to be vaccinated. The plan was negotiated with the Cultural Institutions Group composed of the 33 museums and art groups operating in city-owned buildings or on city-owned land. Vaccination can be proven with a photo or hard copy of an official vaccination card, a New York City vaccination app, or an "official vaccine record for cleared vaccines." I'm not really sure what that final one is, but that's how it was on the list.

Police and prison guards in California are less vaccinated than the California public. In one prison, only 16 percent of officers are fully vaccinated; six other prisons have rates at or below 30 percent. As of Friday, 64 percent of California's eligible public was fully vaccinated. The Los Angeles Police Department was 51.8 percent fully vaccinated as of June 8. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department had a 26 percent vaccination rate but was only counting officers who were vaccinated at department clinics. San Francisco is setting a wonderful example with 79 percent of the sheriff's office and 80 percent of the police department at least partially vaccinated. 

Can breakthrough infections lead to long covid is a question that has not yet been studied in any detail. Ten to 30 percent of adult covid cases result in symptoms lasting over weeks or months. Most of the data collected on long covid has come from people who had not been vaccinated when they were infected. One study of breakthrough infections, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and conducted prior to the emergence of the Delta variant, looked at a group of 1,497 vaccinated health care workers, 39 of whom got breakthrough infections. Seven of the 39 were still exhibiting persistent symptoms six weeks after coming down with covid. The authors caution that the sample size was small and the study was not designed to look at long covid. It was designed to study antibody levels in infected people. 

Internationally, Hong Kong has added 15 more countries including France, Spain, and the US to its list of high-risk countries. This would mean a 21-day quarantine for people entering from those countries. Monday was the worst day so far in New South Wales, with seven deaths and 478 new cases. Sydney is now in its eighth week of lockdown. There is growing concern over getting vaccines to Aboriginal Australians. Only 15 percent of indigenous Australians have been fully vaccinated compared with 26 percent of all Australians. The Tokyo Paralympics will follow the footsteps of the Olympics and go on without spectators. Ninety-seven percent of the Olympics, including all the venues in Tokyo, had no  spectators. Finally, a Canadian study suggests that babies and toddlers are less likely to bring covid home than are teenagers, but once infected are more likely to spread the virus to others. Think twice about hugging that infant.

My brother commented in an email yesterday that he thinks of time as "before the pandemic" or "since the pandemic." He's not sure there will ever be an "after the pandemic." I do like that distinction. I was looking at a tour catalog yesterday, reading of a great adventure The Professor and I would like to take to Georgia (the country, not the state) and Armenia. There was a May 2022 departure date that would work for us. But wait. We're more than halfway through 2021 on the way to 2022. May is only what, nine months away. There's no way I'll be willing to get on a plane by then or go to a country whose covid status might be on the uncertain side. That's how I'm thinking now, since the pandemic.