New York City's new mayor will be sworn in at midnight January 1. One of his first major decisions will be whether public schools re-open on January 3. He does not support large-scale shutdowns, saying, "We can't close down the city anytime a new variant comes up." He is not alone on the school-closing front. Some 300 schools in Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and New York have already said they will remain closed. New Jersey has told schools to do the first two weeks of school remotely. It is not an easy decision. One public health expert says that the only reason to close schools would be severe staffing shortages. Apart from schools, the number of children hospitalized with covid has been rising. Pediatric hospitalizations in New York have quadrupled. It does not help that just 16 percent of children between the ages of five and 11 have been vaccinated compared with 71 percent of children between the ages of 12 and 17.
Flights continue to be canceled or delayed. The main reason given is medical, though weather has played into some of the decisions. Dr. Fauci weighed in an air travel: "When you make vaccination a requirement, that's another incentive to get more people vaccinated. If you want to do that with domestic flights, I think that's something that seriously should be considered." That's an interesting idea, but would there be exceptions for emergency cases in which someone not fully vaccinated needs to get to the other coast because an immediate family member is seriously ill or dying? Would vaccine passports be used? Some states have essentially outlawed those. With only 62 percent of Americans fully vaccinated, the number of people asking for an exemption would likely not be small.
The national record for average daily cases is 251,232 set in January 2021. I expect to see a new record in the early days of 2022 if not before 2022 arrives. Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Puerto Rico have seen more cases in the past week than in any other seven-day period.
Continuing with domestic covid news, five of the 42 post-season college football bowl games have been cancelled due to at least one of the teams not having enough players given covid issues. The local university is one of those teams, backing out of the bowl game that would have been the farewell game for a coach leaving not because he was fired or because he was taking a job at another school. He's trying to figure out what to do with his life other than coach football. There are four teams in the running to be national champion. The two semi-final games and the final game will be counted as forfeitures if one team cannot play due to covid. With one semi-final and the final cancelled we could crown the last team standing as national champs, not something I want to see happen. Finally, at least four large cruise ships have had to cut their voyages short due to covid outbreaks. It will be interesting to see how many keep on cruising.
A lab in Sydney, Australia mistakenly told 400 people that they had tested negative when, in fact, they had tested positive. Another 995 people were told they'd tested negative when their results were not yet known. Testing centers are overloaded. International travel requires a negative test but so does visiting Queensland and Tasmania. Forget the cause of the mishap and deal with it. How many people have the initial 400 people been in contact with? Unless they are as much of a hermit as I have been, there are probably a lot more people out there who will be testing positive in the near future. I would much rather be told I tested positive when I had not than the opposite. I would feel a nontrivial amount of guilt at potentially exposing other people.
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