Two weeks to go to the one-year mark! Champagne may be in order then. We do have a bottle left over from the election and impeachment. I'm getting more confident daily that I will not be hitting the two-year mark, though I have been wrong about various things as I've stumbled through the pandemic. I do hope I'm not wrong on this one.
I read a report this morning that generated a huge "Du-uh." (The two syllables are intentional.) People are less likely to adhere to lockdown rules after they have been vaccinated. Given how many don't adhere to such rules before they are vaccinated, is it really surprising that another sizable group of people don't after a vaccination? I plan to wait at least the suggested two weeks after the final dose (or only if I happen to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine) and then give careful thought to anything I change about the way I've been living the past now 50 weeks. I have a couple of close friends who have already gotten both shots, and I could see having a still somewhat distanced coffee or lunch with them one by one.
Nine percent of Americans have been fully vaccinated, which seems to me to be a very good start. In 2019, the WHO ranked vaccine hesitancy as one of the leading global health threats. I'm not counting on herd immunity until we get there, if we do. Unfortunately, I can see all too well a large enough number of people not getting vaccinated to perhaps get us to the edge of herd immunity but not over the top.
Looking for a book for The Professor, I came across something I had actually forgotten I had. We lived in the Netherlands from August 1989 to August 1990, while The Professor was one sabbatical at a nuclear physics lab in Amsterdam. I found the journal in which I jotted down quotes I found, wrote the odd quote of my own, and taped various articles I'd found, most of which came from The International Herald Tribune. The volume is dated 1990, and the quotes and articles are, for the most part, dated 1990. There are some dated 1989, though I obviously had saved those when they first appeared. My comment on January 4, 1990, seems oddly pertinent to being on day 350 of this pandemic blog:
It's not hard to write something every day if your standards are low enough.
Time to fix Mongolian beef, something I would not have made were it not for the pandemic.
