Color me vaccinated!
Well, I’ve had both of my shots, anyways, so about ten days from now I’ll be vaccinated … though it’s hard to tell in our world right now exactly what that really means…
My “COVID morale” over the last week or so has definitely taken a few hits on account of the following:
- Florida’s Governor overriding every local government and suspending all COVID-related orders across the state.
- Many counties following suit and admitting that they can’t enforce their own ordinances anymore. (my own county did this at the beginning of April)
- Word on the street that theme parks are loosening their own restrictions.
- A promise already that schools this fall will be in person and without masks.
- …despite a not-zero number of kids who have caught this thing.
Seriously, almost 4 MILLION kids have gotten COVID?! And over 250 of them have died!
I get that we’re talking about BIG NUMBERS here and the averages are still quite low, but when so much of the rhetoric – especially from our governor – has been that, “COVID doesn’t affect kids at all – it’s a crime not to have these schools fully open!”
I think my big fear right now is that now that we’ve gotten a good number vaccinated (31% fully as of now, 40% has at least one dose), we’re going to see the counts stabilize just long enough to “get back to normal” and drop the rest of our restrictions, and then this summer we’ll see another wave because everyone who was going to get vaccinated will have done so, but not necessarily enough for us to truly achieve herd immunity.
The truth of the matter is that the lower stats lately are really only good as compared to the previous peaks – averaging 50,000 new cases every single day, particularly when 20+% of them are apparently kids, isn’t exactly anything to cheer about…
One thing I will admit is that I’m starting to agree that COVID probably isn’t something that we’re ever going to truly be rid of – it’ll get down to a more manageable level and we’ll probably see it wrapped in with our flu shots – but it will never go away. The question is, to what level will the stats fall before we declare that “victory” and try to move on with our lives, particularly considering that some want us to have done so already???
I get that in the grand scheme of things, tens of thousands of people are both born and pass away every single day. Hell, even with all of that death, 220,000 new people were born today alone!
But I think it’s easy to discount life when you only look at death from such a high level overview. Were the 14,000 deaths from COVID today around the world not worth the rest of us taking precautions for because 26,000 people died of cancer or nearly 50,000 died of heart disease? I’ve seen a lot of people get into these weird arguments about personal responsibility and probability and not living their lives in fear, but mostly I think it comes down to whether you’re able to be compassionate for other people or you’re just seeing COVID as something standing in the way of you having a good time.
Also, while cancer and heart disease aren’t communicable diseases, how much COVID spreads is directly determined by what we do as a society, so I’ll be “curious” to see how the graphs change into the summer months across states and countries with varying vaccination rates.
Maybe I’ll be wrong and it’ll turn out that Michiganders should’ve been able to go fishing all along, but I doubt it.
P.S. I had originally meant to write this blog post about my reaction to my second shot, but then I kind of got off on another angle there! Regardless, my arm ached a bit, then I had some nausea and trouble sleeping overnight, and now two days later the ache is mostly gone and all that’s left is a bruise.
*shrug*