New Omicron Covid-19 Outbreak

Amid reports that COVID-19 cases are spiking, both in seasonal terms and due to the rise of the highly contagious Omicron variant, I'm getting two diametrically opposed narratives from the media.  One is that hospitals are filling up and we're entering another period of sickness and death through mass infection, with the voluntarily unvaccinated suffering the worst effects of the disease...just as it happened this past summer with the Delta variant.  The other narrative states that we're over Covid and are returning to our pre-pandemic lifestyles.  And then there is the third narrative: yes, here comes a new sweep of the virus through our population, both vaccinated and unvaccinated...but that this will bring about the "herd immunity" that had been the distant dream of just about everyone.  Not being an expert in the field, I have to react to all this noise by staying current on my Covid-19 vaccines (the first two Pfizer shots and the later booster) and avoid mass assemblies.  My mask usage had gone down, but with this flu season and the Covid resurgence I intend to go back to earlier adherence.  The reason is not to protect myself...I have the flu shot as well...but to protect those around me who for whatever rational or irrational reason have refused the Covid-19 vaccination, in spite of the fact that it's free, safe, effective, and convenient.  I wonder whether we'll start seeing shutdowns and event cancellations if the Omicron outbreak is as strong early in 2022 as some suggest.  I suppose the most bizarre thing I take from the media is how pandemic denial and the anti-vaccination movement has become a conservative political cause, with former president Trump even being criticized by his own fans for supporting vaccination...are you kidding me?

Omicron Covid Variant Reported

Surfing around the TV this morning I hit upon CNN...the big news story there is the Omicron Strain...no it's not a Michael Crichton novel or movie, but the latest mutant Covid-19 variant, apparently arising out of South Africa, where the vaccination rate is low because it's not widely available, unlike here where millions upon millions of people willfully perpetuate the virus by refusing it although the vaccine is convenient, free, safe and effective.  Omicron is definitely more contagious then the other Covid strains and has already spread throughout Europe and is expected to hit the U.S. soon.  But as it is newly discovered, not enough is yet known as to whether it is more virulent than its horrid predecessor, the  Delta variant.  Neither is there yet sufficient information about how effective the current vaccinations are against it: the major companies are engaged in testing as I write this and we should know in a couple of weeks.  In any event it's clear to me that Covid-19 is here to stay, both because of the worldwide vaccine production, distribution and inoculation logistics and because so many of us seem to have decided that they kind of like having this scourge around, as perverse as that may sound... 

Nearby Starbucks (Again) Reopens Indoor Seating

This past Thursday I went to my favorite Starbucks in northern Gainesville, only to discover that they had reopened the indoor seating...awesome.  I went up to the counter, picked up my decaf iced caffè americano that I had ordered online...and then proceeded outdoors to sit.  Although I've had both Covid Pfizer vaccines earlier in the year and my booster shot a week ago (along with my annual flu vaccine), I'm still a little uncomfortable in cramped public spaces... but I think it'll get better in time.  I'm still confounded by the widespread refusal of millions to get vaccinated and greatly dismayed by supposed role models Kyrie Irving and Eric Clapton for steadfastly opposing it in a public way...I'm not surprised that Ted Nugent is also on the wrong side of the issue. It looks like, though, that the coronavirus's Delta variant has run most of its course through the unvaccinated "community", killing and debilitating so, so many: what a tragic, COMPLETELY AVOIDABLE waste! Well, humanity is never short of foolish beliefs and behavior...what kind of idiocy will we see next? I don't imagine the wait will be long...

Marking Time by Age or Calendar Year

Normally, I don't mark time by my age and birthdays...but yesterday's was a big deal because I turned 65, which seems to be a major dividing line in how my society separates people, depending on what side of that magic number they're on.  Aside from all the questions about signing up for the various Medicare plans, there has recently been a major distinction regarding vaccinations between those below or beyond the 65 year threshold.  Even before the Covid vaccine first came out several months ago, there was a special, fortified flu vaccine designed to protect the elderly...starting with those age 65 or above.  Now the booster shots for Covid are currently unavailable to the general population age 64 and below...a group to which I belonged just two days ago.  I plan to get both of these shots in the next few days, although I don't enjoy being stuck with a needle anymore than anyone else.  As for my opening comment about marking time, after I began elementary school I was primarily noting the passage of years by either my grade or the calendar year, not so much my age...although attaining 18 was significant as I was then eligible to vote.  As for the military draft, I miraculously managed to fall within the exact time period of President Nixon abolishing it and Jimmy Carter reinstituting registration...so my age didn't mean as much with that as it would were I just a few years older and concerned about being drafted for Vietnam. I now wonder whether I'm going to start thinking more of my physical age as a year marker now that I've passed the 65-year hurdle...

Quote of the Week...from Charles Barkley

Yes, I'm vaccinated. Everybody should be vaccinated.  The only people who are not vaccinated are just [expletive].  Can you imagine if one of these guys that is not vaccinated, if they get one of these players' kids, wives, girlfriends, moms and dads sick and they die over some unnecessary conspiracy bullsh**t?  I think that would be just tragic.                                  ---Charles Barkley

There's not much I can add to the great Phoenix Suns' player and National Basketball Association Hall of Famer...I disagree with him sometimes but not here: he hit the bulls-eye with this comment he recently made during a CNBC interview.  We would not be in this upsurge in Covid-19 right now were it not for those millions upon millions of fellow Americans who have refused to be vaccinated.  The vaccines are free and widespread: no waiting in line or appointments necessary.  The irony is that in much of the rest of the world the population is desperate for vaccines.  The anti-vaxxers here tend to coincide with the anti-maskers: can't these fools realize that wearing masks cuts down on the disease transmission rate and that their refusal to get vaccinated directly leads to new outbreaks and a return to mask mandates?  

About the CDC's Thursday Announcement Concerning the Fully Vaccinated

Thursday the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with a welcome announcement that it was safe for those who have been fully vaccinated for the COVID-19 virus to resume their old lives without masks or social distancing. That does not mean, though, that the restrictions I see around me will suddenly end.  After all, according to the data I'm getting only about 36% of the U.S. population is at yet fully vaccinated although about 47% have received at least one shot. At my workplace the mask rule is still in place as far as I can tell, although nothing is done to enforce it...or ever was, for that matter, even during the heights of the outbreak late last year before the vaccines were ready and so many people were coming down sick. Stores generally still require masks indoors and I still can't sit inside my Starbucks...fortunately I also enjoy sitting outside at the one in Magnolia Parke in northern Gainesville.  So where do we go from here with the restrictions? I have the adult population divided into the following categories:

--Fully vaccinated

--Partially vaccinated

--Not yet vaccinated (but want it)

--Refuse to be vaccinated (but wear masks)

--Refuse to be vaccinated (or ever wear masks)

--Had COVID already and recovered

--Died of COVID 

Unless the government forces people to be vaccinated against COVID...and that's not gonna happen...we'll always have a sizeable number of people among us who may keep wearing those masks or, more likely, never believed the pandemic was real or just didn't care about protecting the welfare of others by either masking up or getting vaccinated.  As for me, I have always tried to abide by the COVID guidelines by masking when requested or mandated and have been fully vaccinated now for more than a month.  I have a great deal of difficulty understanding the reasoning of people who are frightened of getting a vaccine with negligible risk and would rather chance getting a disease that has killed more than 580,000 Americans in only the last 14 months: this irrationality is beyond bizarre.  I'm curious to see about how Starbucks, Publix, Walmart, my local public library, my workplace, church, and other locations adjust to the new recommendations.  Since my governor has forbidden establishments from using vaccination proof as a criterion for business, it will be interesting to see how it all works out.  So many places judge their own success by how tightly they can pack people in, but I've never liked crowds, long before this pandemic ever made itself known.  I expect during the upcoming transition period to get a few dirty looks when I'm not wearing a mask in public from others who may have more difficulty shedding their own.  But these vaccines have been a game changer and it's getting near time to starting living that out: either you believe your vaccine works or you don't...

Puzzled by the FDA's Pause of Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccinations

I was watching the Food and Drug Administration give their recommendation Tuesday morning in favor of pausing the administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine against COVID-19, based on the documented occurrence of six cases, one fatal and one in critical condition, of women age 18-48 suffering blood clotting out of over 7 million vaccinations of the product overall.  As Jim Sciutto on CNN pointed out, what kind of math are these people doing in this regard?  There are already more than 31 million documented cases of COVID in America in a little more than a year, during the same time in which 564,000 people DIED from it...so far.  And another wave with a virulent strain has hit the country, focusing on the Midwest with hospitals in some localities filling up.  How many deaths will result, I wonder, from this "pause" where vaccine shortages will keep people from getting the protection they would have otherwise received?  Having witnessed something similar recently in Europe with their interruption of that region's predominant AstraZeneca vaccine in the midst of a serious upsurge in infections, it completely escapes me as to why the authorities would take such a step, other than just to cover themselves in the event of a future backlash of hindsight criticism.  They say it's to review the clotting cases and formulate an improved policy of administering the J & J vaccine only to those groups less susceptible to the clotting side effect, but really, how much time do they need to take to figure this out and why stop the process at all?  Problems and emergencies arise in life and there are snags...I get it...but the consequences of delay can be catastrophic: what if the folks at NASA had displayed the same attitude around this time 51 years ago during the Apollo 13 mission when an onboard explosion threatened the lives of its crew?  Well, "we just need to 'pause' it all and conduct a review" would have been rightly considered absurd under the circumstances back then! If you say that one woman's death is one too many (and I agree that any death is tragic), then I return again to the math: how does that make the deaths of many more less important if the vaccine is withheld? The FDA claims that there will be enough Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to fill the gap left by the absence of expected Johnson & Johnson vaccines, but to me it seems there is a logistical problem here, especially when you consider that J & J was strategically being used to reach places where the other two, with their more stringent refrigeration requirements, were less feasible and accessible.  Of course in Europe with AstraZeneca they had no backup vaccine brands to fall back on, making their earlier decision to hold up vaccinations even that much worse in effect on the suffering population.  All I've been hearing on the news is how we're in a dire race against time to to get to "herd immunity" before this pandemic can sprout variations against which the vaccines won't work.  But now suddenly...at least in this case...that doesn't seem to matter, go figure.  At last report Dr. Fauci says the pause will last days, not months...but it's still a real-time problem with the clock ticking and people's lives at stake, with the mathematics going against that decision to pause.  Do your review if you think it's necessary...but don't disrupt the vaccination efforts with big public fanfare while empowering the anti-vaxxers. When Johnson & Johnson is resumed and they get their production back in order, how many will pass on it because of this decision when they would have otherwise been vaccinated...

About Where We're Going with COVID

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that, after all this time of lockdown, social distancing and mask mandates regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, people who are fully vaccinated...along with those who have contracted it in the past and recovered...cannot finally return to some semblance of normal life and shake off the distancing and masks: I'd also like to be able to browse the shelves of my local public library again some day, thank you...if it ever opens to the general public again.  The other day Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) was arguing with disease expert Anthony Fauci over the need for those recovered or vaccinated to continue wearing masks, Paul taunting those already vaccinated for even wearing double masks just for show...I'd been wondering the same thing myself.  Fauci's response was, to me, chilling: it's the variants of this coronavirus out there across the world that is the reason for continuing this, and that "herd immunity", which seems to be the standard for completely reopening the society, will always be questioned as long as there is any place on Earth where the disease is still active...because of these new variants they keep discovering, you see.  Of course, in Texas they've already completely done away with any government-mandated masks or restrictions even though we're still in the thick of the fight to prevent COVID's spread: that's way too early!  But there will have to be a point...maybe sometime this summer...when everyone in the U.S. wanting vaccines has had access to them and that booster shots for variants are in full swing: can we then please go back to sitting inside Starbucks and participate in running races, concerts and assemblies, or has a sea change occurred in our society and we're now and forever going to be germophobes with hand sanitizer dispensers around every corner and doing Detective Monk imitations while feeling we're constantly on the verge of new restrictions?  Sean Hannity, someone I generally loathe, recently tweeted...with the lead-in comment "HERE WE GO"... a link to another disease expert who was extolling the idea of social distancing and mask-wearing every flu season from now on.  I received my first Pfizer vaccine three days ago and will get my second one early next month. I will continue to respect the mask and distancing guidelines while they are in place as I already have, going on a full year, because I take this terrible scourge seriously.  But at some time in the not-too-distant future, this country will have a reckoning as to which direction we're going with this all...it doesn't make me feel any better to find myself even only in partial agreement with both (ugh) Rand Paul and (mega-ugh) Sean Hannity, the latter whom I regard as an anti-American fascist because of his past support for overthrowing the free and fair 2020 presidential election in favor of his cult idol: dictator-wannabee and pandemic-denier Donald Trump...

Got COVID Vaccine First Dose Yesterday Morning

Very quickly after Florida's Governor DeSantis lowered the eligibility age for the COVID-19 vaccine from 65 to 60, effective March 15th, my local Alachua County Health Department messaged me to make an appointment...I just received my first Pfizer dose yesterday morning at the nearby Trinity United Methodist Church.  After seeing the initial problems on TV in various places across the state and country with elderly people waiting outside for hours, I was hoping that they had the bugs all worked out...and they did!  My appointment was for 9:30, I got there a few minutes early...and by my appointed time I was already in my post-vaccination 15 minute waiting period.  My second dose is scheduled in the same place three weeks from now...

It's been a year since our society went off on a major freak-out lockdown panic over this pandemic...unfortunately, the way I see it the lockdown part in hindsight was a bit overly draconian while I distinctly remember our nation's Surgeon General strongly urging folks NOT to wear masks at the time...he did a fast turnaround on that issue the following month, but the damage was already done.  Along with our then-President's cavalier, mocking attitude toward both the coronavirus and masks, tens of millions of Americans denied the severity of the outbreak, which to date is responsible for over half a million deaths over just a year's span in this country alone.  It is a modern miracle of partnership between science, technology, business, government and academia that a number of effective vaccines have been developed and produced on such a mass scale in such a short time span against a novel contagion like COVID-19.  The U.S., lagging behind the world with its lack of compliance and safety measures among the general population, is nevertheless leading it...along with the United Kingdom...in vaccinating its population.  But as our disease experts point out, the world's population needs vaccination as well because it is here where vaccine-resistant variants of the disease are arising.  I'm resigned to getting booster shots in the future if need be...just set up my appointment time and place.  I've also had my eyes opened wide as to the callousness and utter disregard for my health and that of my loved ones from those people around me who have refused to do a simple thing as wearing a mask in my presence while smiling in my face...

More About the COVID-19 Vaccination Process

Back in my New Years Day article I expressed some of my frustrations about COVID-19 and the early vaccination process.  I'm 64 and "just" too young to make the cutoff for seniors getting priority, and my state's governor is refusing to honor the federal guidelines giving "essential" workers the next round...postal workers are included in that classification which Ron Desantis has decided to deemphasize.  So I've basically fallen through the cracks and will need to wait.  That may be just as well seeing how disorganized the vaccine distribution and administration process has been during the last several days...hopefully by the time my "turn" comes up they'll have worked out the snags and we'll be flooded with available vaccines.  In the meantime I will have to work around many who absolutely refuse to wear masks or socially distance, putting my health and safety...as well as that of my wife...at greater risk.  There's a misguided proposal to delay needed second doses of the vaccine...very bad idea, which I've been told will only give the virus much more opportunity to mutate and resist further attempts to control it down the line.  I'm not judging people if they choose not to vaccinate for the coronavirus, but they can at least wear masks and socially distance...to me any refusal to do that is an open act of aggression and should be treated as an assault on others...

Quote of the Week...from Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris

 I trust the public health experts on this, and I urge everyone to do the same.     

                            Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris is referring above to the COVID-19 vaccine, which she publicly took Wednesday...hers was the Moderna version.  I'm with her on this, but it's starting to get a little old watching the procession of politicians and celebrities performing this public ritual, which naturally brings them the "incidental" benefit of immunization from a deadly disease while casting themselves as public benefactors in the process.  Not that I'm against the President and Vice-President, both present and future...as well as aging celebrities and politicians, active or retired...getting the vaccine.  But there's no telling how long it will take...probably months, before I, a 64-year old active postal worker (supposedly essential) will be allowed to partake of the vaccination process, yet I'm getting barraged in the media by high-talking folks shaming me in advance if I don't get it.  The other day they showed elderly Americans who were allowed the vaccines...there was an outside line of them that stretched endlessly down the street.  And what's to say when it is finally my turn that they try to foist a less effective version of the vaccine than Pfizer or Moderna...I simply won't accept anything but one of those two.  I am already heavily disheartened by the cavalier attitude of a large portion of my colleagues...from the top down...who reject wearing masks or social distancing.  Even after all this is over, I will never forget those who were so selfish and hateful that they refused to wear a mask around me, even when it was offered for free.  I work in an environment of pandemic denial that cuts across demographics, with so many deliberately choosing not to give a damn about the safety of coworkers and their susceptible families...

I made a point of referring to Kamala Harris as Vice President-Elect because incredibly there is still a move afoot to deny her and her running mate President-Elect Joe Biden their duly-won election victory with a proposed scam involving current Vice President Mike Pence's handling of the Electoral College results next week...to his credit he has refused to play along.  Can you imagine what would have happened among the very people advocating this had the shoe been on the other foot and the Democrats were trying to overthrow a presidential election with more than 50 lawsuits and attempts to sway state governors and legislatures while impeding the transition and repeatedly claiming extensive voter fraud...and finally trying to manipulate the Vice-President himself?  Truly abysmal.  As I recall, it was election night 2016 when Hillary Clinton conceded that equally-close election to Trump, and President Obama promptly invited him over to the White House as the new President-Elect with the transition process expedited.  No lawsuits or interference with state governments.  What's going on now isn't "payback", it's treason...