The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 223 (723)

Today is International Women's Day, a day I did not know existed until 2009 when we arrived in Vietnam just in time for it. I had no idea why random people were handing me flowers. Perhaps at that point it had yet to touch on American culture. The US, sadly but not surprisingly, ranks 20th on The Economist's list of the Best Places to Be a Working Woman. The UK ranks 17th, while Canada comes in at 10th. Again not surprisingly, four of the top five countries are Norse. Sweden leads the list followed by Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Portugal.

Since I led with rankings, I might as well follow up with some covid rankings. California leads the 50 states in the number of covid deaths, 82,026; Vermont brings up the bottom with 546. Recognizing that the population of California versus that of Vermont makes those numbers somewhat irrelevant, deaths per 100,000 people is a better scale. Mississippi leads that list with 391; Vermont again brings up the bottom with 87. From states to countries, Peru leads the list of deaths per 100,000 people with 641.71: New Zealand rests at the bottom with 1.08. The US sits at 17th with 282.85. Vaccinations by country? We could certainly do better there. The world average is 54 percent fully vaccinated. Portugal is the most vaccinated with 91.46 percent fully vaccinated. The US ranks 21st with 65.59 percent. I don't think we'd be competitive if it were a competition. 

The risk of covid to kids is now about the same as the risk of influenza. We have no problem telling parents to get their children flu shots; why can't we treat covid the same way? Florida is on the verge of recommending that healthy children not be vaccinated against covid. The new state surgeon general has "expressed skepticism about the vaccines' effectiveness." What should I expect in a state in which the governor hosts a 90-minute discussion on "The Curtain Close on Covid Theater"? Hawaii is now the only state not lifting a statewide indoor mask mandate. Only a third of US school districts still require masks. 

A professor of preventive medicine and health policy at Vanderbilt University notes five distinct peaks in the US beginning with April 2020 as the pandemic began to take hold. A second peak occurred in August 2020 with a third in January 2021 after the winter holidays. There was a Delta peak in September 2021 followed by an Omicron one in January 2022. The professor notes that the on again-off again nature of the pandemic "has led to a lot of the confusion and grumpiness." You gotta love someone mentioning grumpiness in that way. I'm still pondering whether the introvert I am would be more or less grumpy had the pandemic not given me a perfect excuse to cocoon for an extended period of time.