Vaccine and mask mandate stories abound. United Air will require all 67,000 US employees to get vaccinated. The governor of New Jersey will announce a mask mandate for public K-12 schools; the governor of Illinois has already said that all school districts must impose mask mandates. Four large school districts in Florida say that they will defy their governor's ban on mask mandates. A similar situation is unfolding in Arizona. And the president of the US's most powerful teachers' union has signaled her openness to vaccine mandates for teachers.
While the Pfizer vaccine may have full FDA approval by September, it is not yet clear when some vaccine will be cleared for kids under the age of 12. Says an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, "You can't control how they interact and touch each other. If there's a virus, kids will take it home." If your kids are grown, remember all the fall colds they would bring home from school? Yeah, that's a coronavirus, too.
A vaccine mandate for the US Armed Forces likely will not fly until at least one vaccine has full FDA approval. Things did not go well some 20 years ago when troops were required to be vaccinated with an anthrax vaccine that had not yet gotten full approval. The rationale behind requiring troops to be vaccinated is that accommodating unvaccinated troops would limit who can be selected for deployment. A former Air Force staff sergeant who is now a radiology tech in an Emergency Room explains, "We have to have healthy people in the military to carry out missions, and if the covid-19 vaccine achieves that, that's a very positive thing." The biggest challenge should vaccines be mandated will be scheduling shots around training.
France will join Germany in administering booster shots to older and more vulnerable people as no consensus exists among scientists on the need for such boosters. The WHO director remains against such shots saying that the world can't "accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it." The German health ministry responds, "We want to provide the vulnerable groups in Germany with a preventive third vaccination and at the same time support the vaccination of as many people in the world as possible." Germany will thus donate at least 30 million doses to countries where vaccination campaigns are lagging.
The US seven-day average for hospitalizations is up over 40 percent from a week before. Seven states that represent less than a fourth of the US population account for half of new infections and hospitalizations: Florida, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Mississippi had only eight ICU beds available yesterday and over 1,147 people hospitalized with covid. Here's hoping this reverses as more people get vaccinated. There were more shots given in a single day since July3, 864,000 doses. Of these, 585,000 were first shots. Tennessee has seen a 90 percent increase in first shots over the past two weeks. Oklahoma has seen an 82 percent increase, while Georgia has seen an increase of 66 percent. Demand for shots in Louisiana has nearly quadrupled in recent weeks. Slowly but surely, are we getting there? I hope so, but the pandemic has taught me not to count my chickens too early, get my hopes up too high, or otherwise count on something possible while a negative looms off-stage.
Going back to work remains in limbo for many if not most people. There are also parents who would like to go back to work who say that they can't given the uncertainty about children returning safely to school full-time or child care.
I read one article today that described four areas in which our understanding of covid has changed. The first is how covid spreads. In the early days, the main advice was to wash hands and disinfect surfaces that might be touched. Fomite transmission turned out to pale against the aerosol transmission now known to be the principal means of covid spread. Second is, what else, masks. While they were not recommended early on, once the aerosol spread became clear and the medical people had all the masks they needed, masks began to be seen as essential to just us folks. Third is the nature of the disease itself. Early on, covid-19 was seen as a respiratory infection. Now, we have seen its involvement in blood clots, brain inflammation, delirium, stroke, heart abnormalities, and liver and kidney damage. Finally, it was not originally known--or suspected--that there could be so many asymptomatic cases. Now, we accept that one in three covid patients is asymptomatic and can still transmit the disease. This may well be what scares me most about covid--its spread by asymptomatic carriers. How many Typhoid Marys have we had out there?
And to make most of the readers of this blog feel better, thank your lucky stars or the gods and goddesses that you don't live in Grand Prairie, Texas. Someone's pet venomous West African banded cobra got out of its enclosure and has been on the loose since Tuesday. Authorities advise not trying to catch it should you come across it. I can't believe they even think most people would try to catch it, but I know that there are people who would. Me? I might well be on my way out of town until it's located.
2 comments:
You can't control other people's actions, only your own. Today is the day of my son's second jab, brought forward three weeks presumably because take up has fallen below predictions. As a household we've done all we can do. If the rest of his age band want to gamble on their health (and for the majority, it's a trivial illness and they'll be fine) then that's up to them. From the 16th one advantage of being fully vaccinated is that you will no longer have to isolate if you've been in contact with someone who has covid. I'd like to get through this without ever having to isolate and there's a chance I might pull that off.
Of course someone(s) will try to catch that cobra! The attempt will be preceded with the request, "Hold my beer."
Bird 'Pie
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