The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 34 (534)

I actually struggled today to find new news items concerning the no-longer-novel coronavirus. A couple of items made to look new were a couple days old. Have we really gotten to the same-old same-old stage? No news is good news really doesn't hack it here. It took me longer than usual to find what I did, which was okay since I don't really have the energy to do much other than sit after not having slept well for a couple nights in a row. 

The Washington Post includes a quickie covid tabulation every weekday morning listing cases, deaths, and vaccination doses given as of 8:00 pm the day before. According to the Post, we had 260,673 new cases, 2,114 deaths, and 693,177 vaccinations given yesterday. Looking at the numbers daily, they're headed in the wrong direction. 

Around 70 percent of adults in the EU have been fully vaccinated. Adding in children and teenagers, takes the percentage down to 55 percent. For comparison, the US's percentage is 52, Israel's is 61, and Britain's is 64. Unfortunately, the overall percent masks the reality that things are going so differently from country to country. Each country administers its own vaccination program. Belgium, Denmark, and Portugal are over 80 percent fully vaccinated; Spain and the Netherlands are over 75 percent. On the other end lie Latvia at 45 percent, Romania at 31 percent, and Bulgaria at only 20 percent.

The new variant discovered in South Africa in May that I mentioned yesterday has not yet fulfilled WHO criteria to be considered a variant of concern or even a variant of interest. Its prevalence is low enough that it might just die out. I guess that means there's no need to panic ... yet.

A survey this summer by the Pubic Religion Research Institute found that 79 percent of white Catholics and 56 percent of white Evangelical Protestants identified as vaccine acceptors, meaning that they'd gotten at least one dose of vaccine or planned to soon. Right in the middle? Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a.k.a. Mormons, at 65 percent. Although the Church leadership encourages vaccination and mask-wearing, within the membership, vaccine and masking attitudes track along political lines. Interestingly, the LDS was one of the first faiths to respond at the outset of the pandemic. They stopped all church gatherings and closed their temples in March 2020. 

As for political lines, every Republican governor has been vaccinated and urges others to do so as well. With the exception of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, however, they will not mandate vaccinations or masking. Hogan just required hospital and nursing home employees to be vaccinated. Of the 10 states with the most cases per capita, nine voted Republican in 2020, and nine have Republican governors. In Republican Florida, the majority of people oppose a mask requirement even for health care workers. You can probably guess my reaction to having read that.

A New Jersey woman has been charged with having sold about 250 forged vaccination cards. She and another woman also fraudulently entered at least 10 people into the state's immunization database, which would allow them to get an Excelsior Pass, the state's digital vaccination certificate. Thirteen people who bought fake cards--some of them hospital and nursing home staff--have each been charged with a felony. How much did a fake vaccination card cost? That would be $200, with an extra $250 required for entry into the state database. Those people could have saved from $200 to $450 and avoided potential jail time by just getting the free vaccine.