Got up this morning, and my first look at the news yielded some charts showing the rise of covid in Europe and also in the US. Cases are up eight percent over last week in the EU., not including home tests. Then there was this from the White House Response Coordinator: "Our next message is very simple: Don't wait. Get vaccinated. Go get vaccinated now, get it before Halloween so you are ready before Thanksgiving and Christmas and the holidays." He noted that getting the bivalent booster was the "most important" thing someone could do for their health today. Good thing I ordered my at-home tests yesterday because the US government doesn't have an "adequate" number of tests for winter due to a lack of funding from Congress.
The Commonwealth Fund warns that if the current low rate of bivalent vaccination continues, thousands of people could die in fall and winter. If 80 percent of those eligible got boosted, it would prevent around 90,000 deaths and over 936,000 hospitalizations plus avoid $56 billion in medical costs. Those sound like pretty good reasons to me.
Soon-to-retire Dr. Fauci says, "We rank very poorly in our acceptance of vaccines. Somehow we've got to get down to the root cause of that, and I know it's going to be very complicated because a lot of it is because of political divisiveness." Apart from political issues, many people are experiencing vaccine fatigue and confusion over the types of vaccine. Should they get the third booster if they did not have the first two? Or just the first? I can see how it could be confusing to someone who does not follow the day-to-day or even week-to-week course of the pandemic. Missing something--such as what a bivalent booster is and why we should get one--can have consequences down the line.
A short post, but early voting calls, and I have a couple of things to do before I go to work. Given all those rising lines I woke up to, I need to make sure my mask and a couple spares are in my bag with the election handbook.
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