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COVID is going to be with us for a long, long time.

ICU in hard-hit Minnesota.

What a surprise!  Donald Trump and the NFL are on the same page!  Remember Trump’s brilliant realization in the summer of 2020?  Seeking to assure the public that the worst of COVID was behind us, Trump told reporters on June 15, “We’re at a low mark.  If we stop testing now, we’d have fewer cases, if any.”  The “low mark” Trump was referring to was 116,000 dead on June 15, with a projected total of 201,000 by October 1.  The actual total on that date was 207,000, and by the end of the year, more than 340,000 had died.

The National Football League agreed with him yesterday.  A day after the league had to sideline more than 100 players and postpone three games, the NFL announced it was changing its COVID protocols so it could complete “the remainder of the season responsibly,” that being with the greatest number of bucks remaining in the pockets of the greatest number of zillionaire team owners.  Because less testing means less lost money, the NFL will not require vaccinated players to be tested weekly, as it has done up until now, but only if they show symptoms.

Naturally, by the time you show symptoms of COVID you’ve already spread it to everyone around you, especially on a sports team with its shared locker rooms and training facilities, not to mention playing a game where getting close enough to the other guy to grab him and throw him to the ground is the point.

You have to wonder what it’s going to take for a business like the NFL to come to its senses?  Is one of those gigantic 300-plus pound linemen going to have to drop dead right there on the field in the middle of a game?  Talk about community spread: with more than 100 players sick on Saturday, what do you think the figure will be by next weekend?  On second thought, with their new testing regimen, the number will probably go down…because they won’t be testing 95 percent of the players, the number that has been vaccinated!

Meanwhile, over in the National Hockey League, 9 teams have had to shut down completely, canceling games, practices, and other team activities.  Thirty-seven NHL games were cancelled last week, with a total of 42 games cancelled so far this season.

But let’s get off the fake grass and hockey ice and back in the real world, shall we?  CBS reported an “unprecedented spike in COVID-19 infections” in the upper-Midwest on Sunday.  "I have never seen so many people on a ventilator at one time," Dr. Joshua Huelster told CBS.  He is a critical care physician at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.  The ICU at the hospital where Huelster works is full, with most of the 66 patients on a ventilator, according to the network.  The Abbott hospital system has 328 COVID patients currently hospitalized and receiving treatment.  “The vast majority of patients that we see in the ICU are not vaccinated,” Huelster told CBS.  COVID cases in Minnesota are up 47 percent as compared to last week, with hospital admissions up 24 percent over the same period.

Only 72 percent of the U.S. population has received one shot of a COVID vaccine.  That’s one shot at a time when every expert wearing a white hospital coat is recommending that everyone get a booster shot, in addition to the two vaccine shots they’ve hopefully already received. Nationally, about 90 million people have not received any COVID vaccine at all, with most of the unvaccinated clustered in red states and within counties that voted for Trump in the last election.  The Guardian reported earlier this month that while over 91 percent of Democrats have had at least one COVID shot, only 59 percent of Republicans have.  Lack of vaccinations among Republicans is affecting the death rates in the red areas of the country, too.  According to a study done by NPR, counties that voted at least 60 percent for Trump in 2020 had 2.7 times as many deaths as counties that voted 60 percent for Biden.  By October, according to an expert quoted by the Guardian, “the reddest 10th of the country saw death rates six times higher than the bluest 10th.”

Acceptance of misinformation about COVID is also heavily skewed politically.  According to the Kaiser Family Fund, 94 percent of Republicans believe one or more false statements about COVID, and 46 percent of them believe four or more false statements might be true.  Among Democrats, only 14 percent believe four or more false statements about COVID.  According to Kaiser, the most widely believed false statement about COVID is that the government is falsifying the number of deaths, while according to many experts, the number deaths currently on record is probably much lower than the real total because many deaths are reported as from natural causes or other ailments.

Anecdotally, the most popular lie that’s being spread around the country right now is that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease.  Every time an anti-vaccine demonstrator is interviewed, that’s what you hear.  Just to put the record straight, there is no evidence whatsoever that COVID vaccines are more deadly than the disease itself.

Meanwhile, the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus reported on Friday that the Trump administration made “deliberate efforts” to undermine this country’s COVID response for political reasons involving Trump’s approval numbers in the run-up to the 2020 election.  The Trump White House “instructed CDC career scientists to destroy evidence of political interference,” and “pressured the Food and Drug Administration to authorize ineffective coronavirus treatments,” according to the House report.  The Trump White House also muzzled CDC officials and scientists and kept them from giving press interviews or making statements without White House approval.  The administration also bungled the purchase and distribution of personal protective equipment including masks during the early days of the pandemic.

All of this, and I haven’t even used the word “Omicron,” the name of the new COVID variant that is currently running amok around the country and causing new mask mandates in states like New York and Connecticut.  Meanwhile, states like Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Texas have passed anti-mask mandates even as their rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rise.

It would be nice to be able to say that we’re all in this together, but we’re not.  The 90 million of our fellow citizens who refuse to be vaccinated are helping to spread the COVID virus more and more every day, especially the highly contagious Omicron variant.  Republican governors and state legislatures have been happy to spread disinformation about the virus and provide safe places for their citizens to choose to be unsafe. 

We are entering a winter that looks almost exactly like the last one we went through.  COVID isn’t going away, it’s going up, and it’s showing signs of being around for a very, very long time, if not forever. 

We’re in this alone, folks.  It’s up to us as individuals to keep ourselves and those around us healthy and alive.