The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 20 (520)

It looks as if they'll be recommending booster shots eight months after the second Pfizer or Moderna shots or the only Johnson & Johnson shot. It seems that the vaccines will need full approval for this to happen. Assuming it does, my booster would be in mid-December. All I want for Christmas is my covid booster? I'll try not to think of how little those boosters will lessen Re.

The Delta variant continues to be most troublesome. One in five US ICUs is full to 95 percent capacity. This means there better not be a bad vehicular accident, purposeful or accidental shooting, or anything else that might require intensive care. There may not be a bed at the inn, er, in intensive care. Even regular-care beds are filling up. One Miami hospital that had 70 covid patients around the first of July now has over 300. Texas has asked the federal government to send five mortuary trucks. Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all still rising. Texas officials say that the trucks have been requested as a "precaution" to which I say, "Yeah, right." In Mississippi, a 30- to 50-bed field hospital is being set up in a parking garage. Health officials say that a "failure of the hospital system in Mississippi" is imminent.

A former assistant secretary for health under XPot (if you're new here, XPot is the ex-POTUS), a pediatrician, says that the US could soon reach a true number of about 500,000 new cases daily, which would mean 50 to 100 thousand Americans will get long covid. Child cases have increased steadily since the beginning of July. During the August 5 to 12 week, there were 121,427 child cases.

New Zealand has discovered its first locally transmitted covid case since February, resulting in a three-day nationwide lockdown. Auckland and an area the infected person recently visited will be locked down for seven days. There is a definite plus side to being an island nation, especially a relatively small one.

On the mandate front, 69 percent of adults polled support school mask mandates. Breaking that down by political preference, 92 percent of Democrats, 67 percent of Independents, and 44 percent of Republicans support the mandates. In terms of state prohibition of local mask mandates, 57 percent of Republicans support the bans while 16 percent of Democrats don't.

The mandate situation is proving to be a hot issue for higher education as well as K-12. While over 500 universities nationwide have vaccine mandates, many more do not. The Penn State faculty senate passed a resolution expressing "no confidence" in the university's plan to bring students back without a vaccine mandate. According to the university president, the decision was based or blamed on "political realities." Of the 71 percent of students who responded to a recent survey, 83 percent said they'd been vaccinated. You can do the math on that one.

At least Penn State has a mask mandate which is better than Clemson University in South Carolina. Yes, South Carolina, a state prohibiting both mask and vaccine mandates. Some Clemson faculty say that the university administration should push back and tell the state that as a university, Clemson needs to "follow the science." Clemson faculty will protest on the first day of classes calling for at least a mask mandate. Last spring's mask mandate was not carried over to this fall. It seems that Clemson has asked students to protect themselves from Delta by wearing masks, but few masks were to be seen at freshman convocation. For the transfer student convocation, masks were placed on every seat, and most were worn. 

Mississippi State faculty are concerned that only 52 percent of the student body there reports having been vaccinated. Some professors have requested remote learning until at least the Delta variant is brought under control. The Professor has not reported hearing of concerns from fellow faculty members at the local university. Said university does have a vaccine mandate, and close to 95 percent of students report having been vaccinated along with 93 percent of the faculty and staff. The mask mandate will be re-evaluated on September 6 and dropped or renewed as the situation requires. 

It seems that in many cases, we're still making it all up as we go along. Or maybe it's that the Road keeps turning unexpectedly as it goes on and on. I wonder how many people would claim to have been bored by the past year and a half.