The virus is not political

But I am, and sometimes I act like an idiot.

The idiot comes to his senses.

I hate the phrase, “my bad,” so badly I’m not going to use it, but I will tell you that sometimes my political prejudices get in the way of, shall we say, reason and common sense, and I act like an idiot.

I was ready to write a column today about Republicans called, “One of our political parties is suicidal,” when Tracy sent me a story from The Texas Tribune titled, “Five Texas House Democrats who traveled to Washington, D.C., have tested positive for the coronavirus.”  See, I was going to rip into the Republicans again for their resistance to getting vaccinated and point out that they’re taking out their own base, and then this story pops up.  I read the headline and I thought, ooops.  Democrats are acting stupid, too.

But it turns out that all five Texas Democrats were vaccinated.  The story takes pains to note how badly Texas is doing with the COVID virus. Only 42 percent of Texans have been vaccinated. The seven-day average of new cases last week was up by more than 1,300 from the week before.  There were 1,815 new cases reported in Texas yesterday, and 286 probable cases.  The Delta variant of the disease is responsible for many of the new cases and is spreading like a wildfire among the unvaccinated.

But as the five Democrats from the Texas House show, the vaccine is not a bulletproof protection from COVID.  It’s not known when the Texas representatives caught the disease.  They traveled from Texas to Washington last week by plane, but all were required to wear masks while on the plane and in the airports in both Texas and Washington, so it looks like they were probably infected before they left the state.  According to the CDC, fully vaccinated people don’t have to get tested or self-quarantine before or after travel if they are traveling within the United States.  That rule would apply to all five of them.

Also according to the CDC, fully vaccinated people don’t have to quarantine if they come in contact with a person who has tested positive for COVID if they are showing no symptoms.  All five of the Texas Democrats had to have been in close contact with someone who was positive, and even though they were fully vaccinated, they still caught the virus.  They obviously now have to follow the CDC guideline that if you contract the disease, you must quarantine.

There appears to me to be a gap in the CDC guidelines, and through that gap is walking the Delta variant. As we see from the COVID statistics in Texas and other states, it’s infecting a whole bunch of people.  Now we know that among those the virus is infecting are people who have been fully vaccinated.

The story seems to be the virulence of the Delta variant.  This version of COVID, if you will, doesn’t care whether you’re vaccinated or not.  It’s going to get you. 

I am out on Long Island in a region of the country that is not suffering a big uptick in COVID infections, and I’m writing stories about all of the red state loons that aren’t getting vaccinated, and how they’re coming down with the disease in numbers that appear to indicate the beginnings of a surge. 

And I’ve been in a couple of stores recently not wearing my mask.

See what I mean about acting like an idiot?  The message we should get from the five fully-vaccinated Texas Democrats, is that with the Delta variant around, my Pfizer vaccine is not going to completely protect me.  Among the Texas Democrats, only one has very mild symptoms, and the others are asymptomatic, so the disease appears not to hit vaccinated people very badly.  The CDC and other experts say that getting vaccinated will protect you from getting the disease badly enough to need hospitalization, and only a very, very small percentage of those who have been vaccinated and have come down with the disease have died.

But what about the so-called “brain fog” that sometimes follows having the disease?  According to the Cedars-Sinai Blog, there is “a constellation of symptoms such as short-term memory loss, poor attention span and fatigue that plagues up to 20% of COVID-19 patients weeks after they have recovered from typical COVID-19 symptoms. Researchers think these cognitive effects are a byproduct of inflammatory processes within the brain that occur microscopically.”

Dr. Rachel Zabner, an infectious disease specialist and co-director of the Cedars-Sinai COVID Recovery Program, says that the symptoms being seen from Covid are similar to those they have seen from SARS and H1N1.  "With COVID-19, there's an activation of the immune system that persists for months, which can affect neural connections in the brain," Dr. Zabner says. "The stress of navigating COVID-19—constantly being in 'fight mode'—can affect brain function, too."

It's become quite obvious that I’m suffering from enough brain fog as it is that I shouldn’t be subjecting myself to the crap from COVID that can include reduced attention span, memory loss, and mental fatigue.

Gotcha.  I’m going to take a pass on walking around like Pfizer has turned me into some kind of superman and put my goddamned mask on again.  I’ll get back to the idiots in the red states that are skipping the vaccine altogether and the Republicans who are exploiting the virus as a political issue, but right now, this idiot is masking-up.