Optimism AND Caution
Some people are directing anger at optimism due to the vaccinations, or frustration with the insinuation others make that those in leadership who urge continued precautions are lying. Truth is both. There is lots of evidence that there is light at the end of the tunnel AND lots of evidence that the tunnel could cave if we don’t keep taking precautions.
Issues are rarely black and white. Instead, they usually require viewing in gray.
This is not a zero sum game in the same way that most people are not criminals but we still need police. An example: folks are rightly angry when they hear people say all protests are peaceful so we should dismantle the police departments and anyone who says different is lying to you and lying about the risk. Telling people the truth about crime isn’t a problem.
Opening Schools
As of mid-March, the federal government, Washington state, and California have either encouraged or opened up vaccines for educators and teachers. The focus is in trying to get schools opened up as quickly as possible. The concerns voiced by others is that schools not being able to set up mitigation strategies to prevent or discourage virus spread should proceed very cautiously, and also the fact that children aren’t vaccinated yet. They can still bring in the vaccine and spread it to others.
Texas completely re-opening
The governor of Texas is completely re-opening, with no mask mandate. It will be interesting to see what happens to the disease spread. The CDC and health professionals are advocating against opening up quickly and too soon. I plan to follow up on this in May.
Johnson and Johnson Vaccine is Being Distributed
It’s happening now! And President Biden has also announced that all adults will be vaccinated by the end of May. This is due to the new vaccine and also to the additional supplies of Moderna and Pfizer that have been arranged. I have noticed, through checking the Washington websites, that now there seems to be a big influx of available locations for obtaining the vaccine and more mass vaccination locations. It’s almost like a dam has broken. And our California central valley friends have told me that getting a vaccine down there isn’t a problem any more.
I’m lazy regarding tracking the numbers
At the beginning, I very conscientiously tracked the numbers and watched them steadily decline or rise. Now, I’m not paying as much attention. I do occasionally go into the Washington health department website and I check the weather app every day or so to watch the trend. I think that’s all that’s needed right now. I should be able to tell if the counts are going up or down so I can vet the information I’m getting in social media, friends and other sources I may not completely trust.
Still No Side Effects
It’s now March 3, and Lynn and I are experiencing no side effects from the first Pfizer vaccine. The CDC app that we are signed up with asks us every day how we are doing. I don’t anticipate that we will have any side effects at all. We’ll see what happens after March 22, when we receive the second doses.
As We Approach Mid-March
A year ago on March 11, WHO officially announced that we are in the middle of a pandemic.
So where are we now, what do we know, and what is yet to learn?
(Source: Coronavirus Fact and Fiction Podcast – March 11, 2021)
It’s been a year since the pandemic was announced. Here is what they are saying.
Here is what was going on a year ago (and believed by me):
- President Trump was dishing out botches and poor optics via his very wide bully pulpit, deflecting and marginalizing the epidemiologists and scientists like Dr. Fauci and uplifting other questionable characters.
- We were seriously behind in testing so we were literally flying blind. There were lots of confusing messages (for example, Trump announced during a press conference that he was going to shut down traffic from Europe but we had no idea how many people were already in the United States from Europe that had COVID. Trump ad libbed that maybe Americans wouldn’t be able to come home either, which meant thousands of Americans rushed to the airport and who knows how many cases from COVID 19 came out of that … all those people bunched up together. What we now know is the disease was already here, primarily on the East Coast, and in all of Europe, and was originally from China. What a fiasco!
- The horse had already left the barn to a very great extent. At that time, we didn’t really know what we were dealing with. The realization that many asymptomatic people spreading the disease was what made managing COVID 19 so critical wasn’t realized by the public yet. Partly because we had inefficient and inadequate testing, we had incomplete data. We weren’t really prepared, and people were making ersatz and ad hoc decisions on the fly. CDC was eventually “shut down as a reliable source by the White House.”
- The chaotic disorganized unfolding is what set the pace for what happened in the upcoming months. Canceling NFL, Tom Hanks getting sick, etc., no national strategy, and a bunch of people running around doing the best they could with limited information.
I’m not gonna and you can’t make me.
Texas and Mississippi are opening everything. President Biden reacted by criticizing the Republican governors’ Neanderthal thinking. The reality is that while infections have dropped from their January peak there are still more Americans hospitalized than there were last June. Also, more infectious variances are spreading and the danger is far from over.
There are legitimate arguments about where and when to open up. Currently, Red state governors are rushing to lift restrictions only because of the desire to become a political symbol. Have Republicans become literally reactionary opposing whatever the left is doing? It seems like there’s a perpetual adolescent howl of I’m not gonna and you can’t make me.
Texas
Last April in Texas, the governor allowed nonessential stores to re-open followed by bars, leading to a surge that forced him to reimpose closures. In October he opened bars again and by November, Texas had the most COVID-19 cases in the nation. For the governor to lift all restrictions now with his state’s test positivity rate three times the national average shows his utter disregard for the health and safety of 29 million Texans. And this surge could affect other states. Areas in Texas are imposing their own restrictions; however, that’s only partially helpful. Because of the governor’s stance, people are going to resist the protocols. I think this is a bad moment to abandon the measures that led to this progress in the first place.
People Love Certainty
But right now, there is uncertainty. People are trying to sort out just how much they should be doing post-vaccination. The CDC is doing a good job of transparently and frequently releasing new or revised advice, based upon available data updates .
The Third Stimulus has Arrived
Most people that I knew had received their third stimulus check on March 17. I confess that I didn’t pay much attention to the rest of the package, because it didn’t directly affect me. But I was pleased with the unemployment compensation benefits and the packages to assist small businesses, renters, property owners, schools, and other financial incentives. Many businesses and schools are unable (hopefully not unwilling) to establish mitigating protocols. Hopefully financial assistance will help with this.
What the MRNA Vaccine Really Is
The (messenger) RNA vaccine is a piece of genetic information which is able to instruct cells to make proteins. More specifically, for the Coronavirus, “instructional” pieces of the virus are distributed throughout the body, so that the immune system cells can see the pieces and can be trained to strike back at the virus.
This is a nucleate acid-based vaccine. Nucleate? What is this? The messenger RNA is a very transient molecule. Once the cells have “received the instructions,” the vaccine contents are absorbed by the body. Consider an email sent to someone that contains instructions. Once the instructions are read and acted upon, the email is no longer needed. In the same way, the molecule is degraded by natural mechanisms and is then gone, and it’s not integrated into the genomes. This means that it is not some sort of genetic manipulation.
In mid-March, an amazing finding from data collected in Israel, (where almost all the citizens have been vaccinated), has revealed that the vaccine is well over 90% effective in minimizing the transmission of the virus by asymptomatic individuals. This is big news because, the urgency in developing a vaccine was largely driven by the fact that asymptomatic individuals could unknowingly transmit the disease to others, creating the possibility that COVID 19 could become totally out of control.
Variants Update
While developing the vaccine, the goal was to create a multi-layered immune response: (1) to provide the instructions to the cell to create antibodies to block viruses entering the cell, and (2), to provide a T Cell response (what is T Cell?), to recognize and kill infected cells. In this way, a second layer of protection is provided for possible variants. The variant is not able to escape the T Cell response. This alarm system is different in every individual. New vaccines can be tailored to attack variances as this is needed. Perhaps this is what will lead to us needing annual boosters like we do with the flu shot.
Consider what I’m willing to give up and what just isn’t relevant anymore.
What’s Important and What Isn’t
No more getting my nails done. How do I feel about this? I’m not lazy or falling back on my grooming standards. To me It’s actually freedom. Freedom from having to go to the nail salon and look a certain way. I never liked getting my nails done. Compare that to sweat pants all of a sudden becoming OK instead of interpreting it as a sign of laziness or slovenliness.
But my hair is important. As of March 18, it’s been 6 months since my hair has been cut or colored. I realize I need to change my hairstyle to reflect my age while also taking into account how easily I can get it maintained close to where we live. The current practice of yanking it back into a ponytail isn’t going to become a permanent practice!
Lots, and I mean lots, of stay-at-home and alone time. I have realized just how much that is important to me. No more hectic schedules with people to see and things to do, crammed in one after another …. unless …
Travel
We want to travel again. So … we will look forward to that!
Last But Not Least
Spending time with family and friends will be our highest priority. It was before the pandemic hit, and it has become even more important as we begin to visualize a post pandemic-future.
Relying on my relationship with the Lord! I am never alone. He is the Great Physician!
We Got the Second Dose of the Pfizer Vaccine
We were happy to have received this second dose, which happened on March 18 (they called to reschedule us earlier). What is next?
I was happy to journal that Lynn and I experienced only a few minor side effects from the second Pfizer vaccine dose. minor soreness in our arms, and I was very tired and achy the following day, but happily, two Tylenol tablets took care of this temporary problem. That was it.
The Immediate Challenge
(March 21) We’ve been fighting a new, invisible enemy with guesswork and evolving science, and even now it’s not clear when, or if, we’ll reach heard immunity. I will feel so grateful when we do return to a new normal whatever that ends up being, and I will never take it for granted for the rest of my life.
Vaccine Hesitancy
There are different buckets. The one we’ve heard about the most has been the black and brown communities, along with the roots of their distrust. But then there’s the large bucket of white conservatives. Their reasons are different. Most are based on distrust of the government, the vaccine, and not wanting to be controlled.
I’m now starting to read and listen to a lot of information regarding vaccine hesitancy, now more than ever. The concern is that we won’t reach heard immunity as quickly as we should be able to, once the supply is more than adequate, which is now projected to be in a few months. So hopefully the public information and the medical professions and medical care providers will continue to work on this. Distributing strategies, information, asking questions, and giving out numbers in an understandable way broadens public understanding. Also, the importance of risk versus benefit based on fact.
Dealing with attitudes might be more difficult. The one that I personally know of is based on not wanting to be told what to do, and really not interested in listening. I think that this person is going to eventually convince herself because of the risk versus benefit. The benefit to her will have to overwhelm any perceived risk. Numbers, social pressure, and the possibility of mandates that would interfere with lifestyle should push a lot of these people to vaccination.
Looking Back: The Testing Failure
Dr. Robert Redfield, who was the Director of the CDC back in the early spring of 2020, talked about how the inadequate and late testing was why COVID-19 got out of control. In early Spring 2020, CDC wanted to develop its own testing mechanism but it took five weeks to get it approved in order to implement and by then, the virus was widespread. Also, they were still testing for symptoms and there was not a realization yet that the reason it was spreading so quickly was because there were asymptomatic infected people out there doing most of the infecting. At the time they should have been testing at the rate of 5 million a day. And still, at the present time they’re not even testing half as much. He claimed he didn’t have the full support of the Secretary of Health. Science and politics collided and the American people paid the price. He also claimed he was pressured by Secretary Alex Azar.
As March 2020 Ends
People are wondering out loud just how much they can do once they are completely vaccinated. New information comes out almost daily … so far, it’s encouraging.
Lynn and I, along with Brian and Vicki, are happy that we made plans to travel to Fresno in mid-March. We feel safe doing so … although I will feel better when guidelines say it’s pretty safe to travel.
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