As the summer moves along and the prospect of returning to school looms for our kids, we really need to be aware of 3 important facts.
#1 – If you count all the kids under 12, less than 50% of Americans are fully vaccinated. Another 14% or so received one of two shots.
#2 – The last few weeks have seen the sharpest rise in new Covid cases since even the start of the pandemic.
#3 – 99.5% of the Covid related deaths in the last 6 months occured in unvaccinated people.
The simple takeaway points are that
- this pandemic is not over by a longshot,
- we may be headed into the same kind of fall we experienced last year and
- vaccinations are the best, and only way to protect ourselves, our friends and loved ones and to mitigate the progression of this scourge.
Don’t waste time trying to convince the vaccine-hostile people. Nothing will change their minds. They skew the facts to fit their beliefs and not even getting seriously ill or having relatives or friends die is incentive enough to change their minds.
Try to be an example and educate those who are vaccine-hesitant, since they simply need to be made aware of the facts. Some of those facts evolve, but that is the nature of science and experience.
Of course we don’t know the long term side effects of vaccination, but we know the short term risks and we know what can happen if you get sick with covid. At best, you lose out on 2 weeks of your life because you need to isolate. At worst, you can die or pass along the disease to someone else who may be more seriously affected.
Vaccines are safe and effective, even, it turns out, against the Delta variant.
We have no definitive recommendations yet about boosters. It seems that we have longer term protection than previously expected.
Please enjoy being with family and friends while we still can, since that can all change in the coming weeks. Mask mandates are already starting to creep back in. Just do so safely.
Know your audience. I still wear a mask in any store. Some of it is habit, some paranoia but because of the simple fact that when half the people are not vaccinated and this variant is so much more infectious, I certainly don’t want to catch it or pass it along to family, friends or patients.
MASK UP when appropriate.
VACCINATE.
VENTILATE. Remember that this is really an indoor disease.
PRACTICE BASIC HYGIENE.
DISTANCE.
GET HEALTHY. Despite the repeated calls for people to work on their weight and health, both seem to have deteriorated for the average American. Remember that simply being overweight, itself a chronic disease, increases your risks of contracting Covid and/or having a worse course of it.
Stay safe and be well.
AC