We're going to look back at this moment and ask ourselves WTF were we thinking?

The utterly unbelievable completely maddening mess about mandates

A heath official in Nevada today best captured where we are with COVID on July 22, 2021: “It feels like we’re back at the beginning of the pandemic,” he told MSNBC this morning.

It’s not just Nevada, it’s the whole country.  The New York Times reported today that a month after the country “bottomed out” at 11,000 new cases of the disease a day, “we’re up to 26,000 new cases a day, and hospitalizations are on the rise.”  So-called “hot spots” have sprung up in states like Nevada, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana and other states.  Hospitals in three of those states are now “strained,” according to the Times.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, announced today that we are “not out of the woods yet,” and the United States is at “another pivotal point in this pandemic.”  With less than half of the country fully vaccinated, the Delta variant of the disease accounts for 83 percent of the new COVID cases, according to the CDC.

“This will definitely be a surge,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota told the Times. “It won’t be as big as what happened in January. But we still have 100 million people in the United States who are susceptible to Covid-19.”

It is by now well established that (with the exception of Nevada) the states with the highest rates of new COVID infection are all “red” states that voted for Trump in the last presidential election.  Vaccination rates are low in those states.  In Georgia, West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, less than 40 percent of citizens are fully vaccinated.  In Mississippi and Alabama, the rate is only 34 percent, with Arkansas just ahead at 35 percent.  The Delta variant is sweeping through those states like a wildfire.

Here’s what’s happening with the virus.  It is mutating.  The Delta variant is not the only new COVID variant spreading in this country.  The Lambda variant, identified last month by the World Health Organization as a “variant of interest,” has now been found in patients in Texas and South Carolina.  Although the Lambda variant has been identified in only 700 cases so far, this country sequences only a tiny number of samples of the virus, so that number does not accurately reflect the possible spread of the variant.  Dr. Stuart Ray, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in infectious diseases, told NPR today that the Lambda variant “might cause greater severity per infection, although that's still a developing story.”  The WHO meanwhile says the Lambda variant “carries a number of mutations with suspected implications, such as potential increased transmissibility or possible increased resistance to neutralizing antibodies,” according to NPR, but it “needs more study” before the impact of the mutations can be fully understood.

I’m not an infectious disease specialist, but I’ll tell you what I know from watching this pandemic closely for the last 16 months:  we are not learning everything that these experts know about the virus.  They are scientists, and scientists announce findings when they are absolutely sure of them, which means they wait until they’ve tested their hypotheses multiple times and compared their findings with those of other scientists around the world.  Do you remember how all the “experts” argued amongst themselves about the “efficacy” of masks in protection from the virus before they finally got together and decided that putting a fucking mask on your face will likely protect you from a disease that is spread through the air you breathe?  Tens of thousands died and we lost months of protection from the virus by masking while these people were arguing with each other about a piece of cloth or layers of paper fabric which anyone who has ever sanded a piece of wood can tell you protects your lungs from airborne particles. 

Here’s what I think is going on from my observation of the way the virus has spread before, and the way it’s spreading since it has mutated:  the virus is learning how better to reproduce itself, which is what all living things do.  The way the virus reproduces is by infecting hosts, which are necessary for the virus to stay alive.  If particles of the virus are breathed into the air by an infected person and are not inhaled by another person, the virus falls to the ground along with all of the other tiny particles of moisture from the breath of the infected person, and it dies.

When the virus, on the other hand, lands in the mouth and lungs of an uninfected person, it looks for a way to attach itself and infect the new host so it can begin reproducing.  When the virus lands in the mouth and lungs of a person who has been vaccinated, it looks for a way around the body’s defenses that have been enhanced by the vaccine.  Right this minute, the virus is finding a way to get around the T-cells and other defenses of vaccinated people.  It’s only a matter of time before the Delta variant, or some other new variant, finds a way reproduce within the vaccinated host. 

That’s why they’re starting to talk about booster shots – third doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines – for people who are already vaccinated.  You want to know who’s doing most of the talking?  Pfizer and Moderna.  You want to know why?  Because they developed the vaccines and they know what they’re talking about, and because they are not part of enormous governmental bureaucracies that don’t want to be seen as making the “mistake” of recommending even more shots of vaccines to a population with a large percentage of people who are resistant to receiving the first rounds of the vaccine.

You want to know why I think this?  Because I remember when shut-downs were so controversial that the Trump administration was hesitant to recommend them and governors were hesitant to order them.  And I remember after the shut-downs went into effect how the rates of infections went down, hospitalizations went down, those emergency beds they set up in the Javits Center in New York City went unused, and it all happened because the shut-downs worked. And I remember how we all thought, what were they thinking, that keeping people away from each other in restaurants and theaters and concerts and church choirs wouldn’t work?

I remember the same thing about the mask mandates.  The “experts” pissed around with each other until finally the mandates went into place, and everywhere they were ordered, they worked.  And we put on our masks and we got used to it, and far fewer of us came down with the virus, and finally the vaccines started to be given, and our lives began to change. 

All the stuff they didn’t want to order and we didn’t want worked. So are the vaccines.

That’s why I’m saying there will come a day when getting vaccinated will be mandated in some way, as has just happened in France, and we’re going to be looking back and wondering what the fuck were we thinking?  It’s a goddamned global pandemic.  It’s 6:30 p.m. on July 22, 2021, and as of this moment, the U.S. has had 34.2 million COVID cases, and 610,000 death.  Since yesterday, 60,838 new cases have been reported, and 397 people have died of the disease.  Globally, 192 million people have come down with COVID, and 4.1 million people have died.

What the fuck is it going to take?  How many hospitals are going to have to fill up again?  How many people are going to have to die?  I’m serious.  Ninety-seven people died in the collapse of the condo in Surfside Florida, and the state has ordered inspections of similar structures all over south Florida. Do you think people in those buildings are standing outside and blocking entrance to inspectors saying, wait a minute, you’re not going to make us get inspected!  Get your jack-booted inspectors out of here!  Freedom!

With 610,000 already dead from COVID and counting, how many are going to have to die before we come to our senses and configure some kind of vaccine mandate?  Maybe it will involve banning the unvaccinated from travel by air or train or bus or even taxi and Uber.  Maybe, as in France, you won’t be allowed to go into restaurants or theaters or concert venues without a vaccination.  Already some colleges are mandating vaccinations to return to school in the fall.  Springsteen has mandated vaccinations to attend his show on Broadway. 

The virus is mutating.  Delta is only the latest nasty variant. Are we going to let these people who refuse to get vaccinated dictate the way we live our lives? How many of our fellow citizens are going to have to die before we make life-saving vaccines mandatory?  700,000?  800,000? 900,000?

Will a million of us die before we come to our senses and mandate vaccines the same way we mandated life-saving social distancing and shut-downs and masking?