The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 142 (642)

I may actually be more afraid now than I was during the spring of 2020 as the pandemic was first spreading. Vaccinated or not was not an issue then, and masks seemed commonplace. Now I'm reading that with Omicron displacing Delta as the variant supreme we could see over a million new cases per day just in the US. At least that's what some expect based on how things have progressed in Southern Africa, Britain, Denmark, and Norway among others. When I was a child, it was hard to picture one million. I knew that New York City was the biggest city, people-wise, in the US, and the population then was seven million. If a million people are getting sick each and every day, how can anyone ignore the pandemic?

As of 8:00 this morning, the case count in the US was 50,513,437, with 138,883 of those being reported yesterday. There had been 803,652 deaths, 1,141 from yesterday. If we continue averaging 1,141 deaths each day, we will hit one million deaths in early June. One million people dying is even harder to imagine than one million people falling ill. Is it any wonder that mental health professionals say that they can't keep up with the demand for their services.

According to the CDC, only a little more than half of nursing home residents have gotten boosters. I do not know how they are defining "nursing home." My mom is in an assisted living facility; would that count? She has gotten a booster, but there were other residents who did not. The staff situation is also not clear; are there some who have yet to start the vaccination process? Having POTUS's mandate halted, there may well be. I visited my mom yesterday, keeping my mask on until I was inside her apartment. When I was leaving, she accompanied me to the front desk where I had to check out. On the way there and standing in line for the terminal, it hit me that my mom was the only resident wearing a mask. I am not taking this as a good sign. Visitors and staff were masked but not residents, except for Mom.

Were we working together more easily in the early days of the pandemic? Did we have a common interest that we've since lost? Ed Yong, a science writer at The Atlantic says, "Individualism couldn't beat Delta, it won't beat Omicron, and it won't beat the rest of the Greek alphabet to come. Self-interest is self-defeating, and as long as its hosts ignore that lesson, the virus will keep teaching it." There were people who, along the way, did not want to comply with mitigation measures such as masks, capacity limits, or distancing. But the big schism to me seemed to come with vaccines. I'm not sure we'll ever be on the same page of the pandemic-ending manual.

And so it's a not-too-much-news Friday. My mind seems full of what ifs, whys, and yes buts. I've decided that I am more scared now than I have been at any point along the way to here.