The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 54 (554)

My first day working early voting. I served as precinct chief which meant picking the proper form out of a folder a couple of times and depositing the completed form into the proper envelope. I did a bit of note-taking for this post and a bit of reading. I also traded phone calls with the quilt guild's newsletter editor. Four hours passed fairly quickly. Now on to the coronavirus front.

Same old same old. Nationwide, 80 percent of ICU beds are in use, 30 percent of them by covid patients. We averaged 1,926 covid deaths per day over the past week, the highest such average since early March. The US death rates, adjusted for population, are over twice as high as those in Britain, over seven times as high as those in Canada, and over ten times as high as those in Germany. Almost one in four US adults has yet to get vaccinated. The unvaccinated are disproportionally people without college degrees and Republicans. 

Here's a statistic to add to those above. If Mississippi were a country, it would be the second worst-hit in the world, after Peru. Mississippi's death rate is 306 per 100,000 or one in every 362 people. Peru's rate is 612 per 100,000 people. The Mississippi death rates are, of course, tied to low vaccination rates. The governor has called POTUS's vaccine mandate an "attack on hardworking Americans." He continued, "This is an attack by the president on hardworking Americans and Mississippians who he wants to choose between getting a jab in their arm and their ability to feed their families." Don't ask me what the choice really is there, because I'm not seeing it

The US is relaxing travel restrictions for fully vaccinated international passengers from a number of countries including the UK, the EU, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Ireland, and Iran. It will not apply to land crossings between the US and Canada or Mexico.

Short and could be sweeter. I won't fall back on a simple "we're fucked," but I'm not yet convinced we aren't.