The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 417 (917)

Guess what! The pandemic is over! Yeah, right. I must disagree with POTUS on this one. I did not watch 60 Minutes last night, so I missed yelling at the screen when he said, "We still have a problem with covid. We're still doing a lotta work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing." With around 400 people in the US dying each day, the US government still has covid listed as a Public Health Emergency. WHO lists it as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. So one reason the pandemic is over is that people are not wearing masks? Not everyone is, but some of us are and would even if we weren't still testing positive for covid. The 400 deaths combined with around 70,000 new cases each day suggests that the pandemic hasn't gone away just yet, at least not from where I sit at the dining room table.

Vaccine hesitancy is quite high for children under the ago of five. Only six percent have gotten a single dose of vaccine. For children between five and 11, the rate is 38 percent. Finally, it goes up to 70 percent for those between the ages of 12 and 17. An infectious disease specialist from Baylor explains, "We haven't done a good job explaining tje long-term consequences of long covid for younger children. And future coronavirus variants are a very likely possibility."  I would think that parents of children in day care or preschool, around other children of a similar age, would want those children vaccinated as a layer of protection around them. 

Meanwhile, in China, zero covid is alive and well. In Beijing, 21 million people are required to take PCR tests every three days if they want to access public buildings or even neighborhood shops. A bus taking people to a quarantine center overturned, killing 20 people. Hey--they didn't die of covid but because of covid. In the wake of reporting the first death from monkeypox, China has ordered people not to touch foreigners or other Chinese who may have had contact with foreigners. The death apparently happened to someone who had returned from travel outside the country. Zero covid ... zero monkeypox?