The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 41 (541)

It had to happen, right? Someone at my mom's assisted living facility popped a positive on a covid test. No word on whether it was a resident or a staff member. They've locked down for 48 hours. Residents can't leave their rooms; meals will be brought to them. They're going to test everyone. Unfortunately, they only have the rapid tests, which are not as reliable as the PCR ones. They say that's all they have right now. There was evidently a case at the facility's other branch recently. The person who tested positive there was a fully vaccinated employee who had no contact with residents, so they had no lockdown. Back into waiting mode.

Update to the previous paragraph. My mom was told her test was negative. The staff member doing the testing said that all the results would be sent to the state health department, and the facility would do whatever the health department recommended. And guess what. There were two positive staff members, one in Dining and one in Wellness. Both were ... drum roll ... unvaccinated.

The US has passed 40 million known coronavirus tests, with four million of those reported in the last four weeks alone. Cases in the US make up almost one-fifth of known cases internationally. Those 400 million cases were those officially reported; the actual number is likely to be much higher. Looking just at the Labor Day weekend we just finished, the average weekly number of covid cases now is roughly 300 percent higher than the same time last year. Last year cases surged in 31 states and the percent positivity went up in 25 states in the two weeks after Labor Day. Cases right now are 12 times what they were at the start of the summer. Mind-numbing numbers.

I have more notes from which I could summarize and probably even opine, but thanks to several things I'm running behind to the point that if I were to do that summarizing and opining, dinner would be late enough that I would stuff my face with whatever I could get to the fastest, and those items would not be at all healthy. I think tossed salad is a good place to start.