Surface

Posted on by Thor

As hospitalizations decline across America, politicians are once again in a rush to declare victory and lift all safety measures. It seems there is always a knee jerk reaction to the changing landscape of the pandemic and a high degree of acceptance of easily avoidable death.

Is it too early to lift all safety measures? Only about 27% of the US population has received a coronavirus vaccine booster shot, according to CDC data. The moves to phase out state mask mandates conflict with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention‘s guidance to continue wearing masks in areas with “high” or “substantial” Covid-19 transmission, which includes about 99% of U.S. counties.

States lifting mask mandates include, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island. The percentages of people vaccinated in these states are…

  • 66.8% in Delaware and Illinois
  • 68.2% in Oregon
  • 69.6% in California
  • 73.5% in New Jersey
  • 74.8% in New York
  • 77% in Massachusetts
  • 77.2% in Connecticut
  • 79.7% in Rhode Island
  • 59%. in Nevada

That means on average, over 25% of the people in those states are unvaccinated and therefor highly vulnerable to possible hospitalization and death. There are well over 100,000 new cases of Omicron a day. So why are states declaring victory over COVID? There is a new variant on the rise named Stealth BA.2 which spreads even move effectively than Omicron. This variant may create a new wave and stall the drop in hospitalizations as it has in the United Kingdom. In the next two weeks we should see just how bad BA.2 will become. It would make more sense to jump into the freezing water moments before a rescue is on the horizon.

Of 5 to 11 years olds, only 23% are vaccinated and they will be the first to be thrown under the bus. Omicron is more severe in children than adults. 1 in 7 kids can develop long COVID. Children infected then bring the virus home to their parents and grand parents.  There is likely to be another surge in the summer just as there was in 2020 and 2021.

Chris Hayes put out a Tweet saying, ” A big part of American Exceptionalism is just generally tolerating a lot more death and illness and violence and shorter life spans than other peer countries.” Over 900,000 deaths means less in America than it does for other nations. Politicians are fine with justifying the deaths of children, saying the children are dying with COVID rather than from COVID. That is a morally warped semantic perspective that seems to imply that children are expendable. Since the advent of a vaccine to combat COVID over 200,000 unvaccinated Americans have died needlessly due to an aggressive anti science sentiment.

History is once again repeating itself, we have been to this rodeo multiple times during this pandemic. America is unsinkable. This too shall pass, but stay safe in the mean time folks.

 

Winter Surge

Posted on by Thor

The Omicron blizzard that continues to sweep across America will find just about everybody this winter.

“Omicron, with its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, will ultimately find just about everybody,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Those who have been vaccinated … and boosted would get exposed. Some, maybe a lot of them, will get infected but will very likely, with some exceptions, do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.”

Those who are not vaccinated are “going to get the brunt of the severe aspect of this,” Fauci added. Across the United States, at least one in five eligible Americans — roughly 65 million people– are not vaccinated against Covid-19. Only 23% who are fully vaccinated are also boosted, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

US Food and Drug Administration acting commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock said at a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on January 18 2022, “I think it’s hard to process what’s actually happening right now, which is: Most people are going to get Covid… and what we need to do is make sure the hospitals can still function, transportation, you know, other essential services are not disrupted while this happens.”

Dr. Fauci pointed out that there are 5 stages of the pandemic and we are still in phase 1. He cautioned against thinking we are further along than we actually are. The first phase of the pandemic—or the “The truly pandemic,” according to Fauci—is “where the whole world is really very negatively impacted as we are right now.”

The following four steps are deceleration, control, elimination, and finally eradication.

Deceleration will be a slowdown in the number of newly confirmed cases.

Control refers to endemicity. That means that COVID-19 would become integrated into the broad range of infectious diseases we commonly experience, like the flu or the common cold.

Elimination comes when the virus still exists in the world but it has been eradicated from certain regions or countries.

Eradication will be nearly impossible to reach.