Sixty weeks in means things are getting better in some places and going to hell in a handbasket in others. I'm a bit more optimistic than I was a while back. We may not be totally fucked, but I don't think we'll ever get back to the pre-pandemic normal. For example, to mask or not to mask? That is a question. The CDC now says that fully vaccinated people do not need to wear a mask outdoors. But how do I know if the person who just passed me on the street while sneezing was even partially vaccinated? No, we will not be wearing badges or pins or some external notice of our vaccination statuses. Masks are strongly connected to one's political affiliation. Democrats are twice as likely to say they always wear masks when the leave their house than are Republicans. In mid-April, 74 percent of fully vaccinated respondents said that they always wear masks outside their homes; this is now down to 63 percent.
I haven't done serious martial arts since my first shoulder repair in 2014 but have recently started going to an informal karate and kendo outdoor workout in a local park. The people there whose vaccination status I know are all fully vaccinated yet almost all wear masks. The one person who puts on a mask only when a 13-year-old participant is there is an emergency room nurse. Perhaps wearing a mask all day every workday makes her want to not wear one whenever she can. I would think, though, that she of all people would take even more care with such a basic mitigation measure. Fully vaccinated or not, I would not want to be doing some kind of workout, even outside, unmasked. I wonder how long it might take that feeling to pass.
Some states are declining the vaccine doses the federal government has allotted for them. Nationally, covid immunizations are down by 20 percent from the previous week. Even Dr. Fauci has abandoned what he calls "this mystical level of herd immunity." Wisconsin wanted only eight percent of their vaccine allotment for the coming week. Kansas and Illinois wanted only nine percent of theirs. One fourth of the adults in Wyoming will "definitely not" or "probably not" get vaccinated. Twenty percent of adults in Montana, North Dakota, Kentucky, and Ohio said the same thing. States are getting creative in how they persuade people to get vaccinated. West Virginia has been offering $100 savings bonds to people between 16 and 35. I do like Detroit's inducement, something I'm calling the bounty hunter model. People get $50 for every city resident they sign up and then deliver for a shot. I can see all sorts of things happening with this. One friend signs up another, and they split the $50. Of course, if one of those people would not otherwise have gotten vaccinated, they the system works.
India accounted for nearly half of global infections and one fourth of global deaths reported in the last week. Dr. Fauci is calling on vaccine manufacturers to scale up production to get more doses to India. I do not expect that vaccine hesitancy will be a problem there.
This has not been a long post, but it is, after all, Mother's Day. As I've been writing this, I've been answering assorted questions from The Professor as he works on the cake he insisted on making as dessert for the chicken dish he put together yesterday and will cook tonight, in about an hour. Son #1 will join us for dinner. We may regale each other with tales from motherhood as I have lived it. Being asked by one of Son #2's high school teachers what I did to him. Driving the same Son from Wyoming to here through what the Weather Channel called Winter Storm Q when I was, hands down, the biggest driving-in-snow weenie in the family. I got the 2013 Mother of the Year Award for that one, given to me on Mother's Day 2014. There was also the year The Sons made me the possum gun.
Being a mother, at least to those two knuckleheads, has been one hell of a trip.
