The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 215 (715)

I read an article this morning about the number of days of school children have been missing. The point was that even brief school disruptions can cause students to fall behind, especially boys and children from low-income families. In January, over half of American children missed at least three days of school, and 25 percent missed more than a week. Fourteen missed nine or more days. I don't want to be too dismissive here, but those days were not necessarily due to covid. There were more than three days here in my part of Virginia canceled due to snow, and I'm betting that was the case in many other places. We should not add unnecessary days off for covid, but we need to be honest that schools do not close just for covid. 

A vaccine clinic in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, at one point was seeing 900 people daily. Now, there are days on which fewer than 20 people come to be vaccinated. Only 55 percent of Missouri residents are fully vaccinated, and only 22 percent have gotten boosters. The staff is pessimistic about vaccinations picking up again. As cases decline and vaccine mandates and other restrictions are ended or loosened, as people start talking about the end of the pandemic coming soon, there is little motivation for people to get vaccinated. We got this far okay, so why get vaccinated now that things are clearing up. Those people should recognize, but they likely won't, that weekly averages for cases and for deaths are not much different than they were one year ago as vaccinations were just getting started.

Almost half of the 500 million test kits the government planned to distribute have not been claimed. On the first day, over 45 million people requested test kits; now, fewer than 100,000 do each day. Discussion is being given to allowing repeat orders. 

Finally, the Capitol Physician has lifted the Congressional mask mandate just in time for POTUS's State of the Union address tomorrow evening.

There was more covid news to find if I had had time to look. A few unexpected things popped up that I needed to do. Life ... it happens.