So this entire unmasking of Texas (and the poor folks in Mississippi) is just a surreal.
Businesses, large and small are forced to make very difficult choices.
Don't even get me started on the chaos and havoc it is causing schools. I am going to actually put something on the prayer page here because it is really a horrible situation right now. There will be districts going mask-less and only today (because of Biden's speech yesterday) is the entire state allowing for all educators to get vaccinated. My daughter lives in one of the few countries that prioritized educator vaccinations beginning last week. If a teacher is in a district that goes to and unmasked policy next week, most teachers will not have had even one dose of vaccination yet and be exposed to 20-600 kids each week, depending on what they teach. My daughter would be exposed to 500 different students in an enclosed classroom each week. She is not hopeful her district will keep the mask policy in place because of the parents who insist on their child's right to be taught without one.
The vitriol is unbeliivable.
At some point @unk-p wrote that the country may have to secede from Texas. I think it's going to be that Texas voters will "secede" from their state government by voting them out. It's going to take a lot of postcard writing to get them out, but it is going to happen.
from your lips to Goddess's ears! The last time Texas had a good Governor was 30 years ago. Ann Richards. She was fantastic, and so funny. And how did the people of Texas reward her? By giving her one term only, and replacing her with, of all creatures, G.W. Bush. Gah! That was the day i bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco- with the intention of never coming back, not even to visit.
I hope someone sues Gov. Abbott in Texas - actually I hope a LOT of lawsuits come his way. Seems like there will be more than enough reasons. There are so many people who have already suffered that I'm just surprised we haven't heard about a ton of lawsuits already.
@triciact and just like clockwork, Abbutt is now blaming immigrants for spreading Covid45. He is doing and saying such horrible things, i can only think that he is hoping to be the Repug nominee for President in '24.
The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation just came out with an updated projection for the pandemic.
Good news: The latest estimate shows this thing beaten back pretty well by mid-summer. They are projecting about 6000 new infections per day in the US on July 1. For comparison, the last time the infection rate (estimated) was this low was the end of February, 2020.
So if people will just behave themselves-- keep wearing masks, get vaccinated ASAP, and continue to reduce their mobility-- we may soon be out of the woods. (cross your fingers, pray, send positive energy, whatever works !! ? )
For anyone who can get The New Yorker, here is a thorough analysis of how the Covid variants will affect the pandemic here in the U.S: https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/what-the-coronavirus-variants-mean-for-the-end-of-the-pandemic
Meanwhile in Texas...
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened Wednesday to sue the city of Austin and surrounding Travis County after officials there, citing the continued threat of Covid-19, said they would continue to require residents to wear masks even “when outside of their residence.”
Paxton’s threat came on the same day the state’s mask mandate, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did away with last week, officially expired.
“City/county leaders must not be thinking clearly,” Paxton said in a Tweet. “Maybe it’s oxygen deprivation from quintuple-masking. Whatever the case, they’ve tried this before. They lost. Travis County and Austin have a few hours to comply with state law or I’ll sue them.”
Paxton, who like Abbott is a Republican, directed the threat at Travis County Judge Andy Brown, Austin Mayor Steve Adler, and cc’d Dr. Mark Escott of the Austin-Travis County Health Authority. They were given until Wednesday night to comply.
Adler responded to the threatened lawsuit by saying he and Brown will continue enforcing the safety mandates. "We will fight Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Paxton’s assault against doctors and data for as long as we possibly can," Adler told the Austin American Statesman in a statement on Wednesday.
A year ago on March 11th, WHO declared Covid 19 a global pandemic.
WOW. I remember thinking it took an eternity for them to label it as so. I commented on their lack of calling in a global pandemic for days and days on this site.
How many here foresaw how changed this world would become?
Not me.
We pulled our kids out until after Spring Break today. Over the last week I've received a SLEW of texts from the school with "A student (once it was a staff member) has tested positive for COVID 19 at your child's school. There were no close contacts." Not only do the sheer number of these texts indicate that maybe, just maybe, there were in fact some close contacts, but in doing the math they lost 5% of their school population from Thursday to Sunday evening when the last text came in. The last time I received a text was back in January.
It's no secret I've been critical of the district's handling of COVID but in the past month they've mirrored the "Former Guy's" response - it's out of control, doing something about it will be hard, so let's not and say we did. The staff is vaccinated which is helpful but for the first time since the pandemic began it's now running rampant in the kids in our community and it just feels negligent when there are steps that can be taken. I'm mad today.
Today our county made news by becoming the 8th worst county in the nation ranked for COVID-19 spread with the NYT dataset in their "Places hit hard" map. Michigan is third worst right now.
#Libberdy. #Freedumb.
With one day of school left we just received a text that our district would go virtual tomorrow. This is at least a week too late. The communications stressed that school WILL resume on April 5th. I know a ton of people headed down to Florida, so my overall prediction (not intuition, just reasonable assessment of the available data) is that we'll be off that NYT list next week (because everyone is gone) and schools will say "See? Crisis averted!" and bring kids back. And the week of the 11th the texts and phone calls (all of which end with "There were no close contacts" will rocket out of control.
My wife and I are discussing the logistics of homeschooling the twins for the rest of the school year. She's finally come around to how badly our district is handling this. Literally every school district in the surrounding counties is handling this better. A parent friend of mine in the same district got a call yesterday to have her daughter quarantine until tomorrow (this was before they canceled) because of an exposure she had early last week. That was a 9 day turn around time for contact tracing. I checked with neighboring districts. A very large one and the second largest one in the state are averaging 24 hour turn around, with rare exceptions being no more than 48 hours. My district has just buried their head in the sand.
So while I am still enjoying the whispers of the awakening land around me, I'm preparing to double up my hunkering down. We're going to my moms for a few days (just an hour away - all of us vaccinated and staying in her house 99% of the time - we just want to SEE her.) and will come back home and -- homecation for a little while.
All this while the Michigan Legislature continues to introduce bills designed to open us up completely and strip the governor of her emergency powers: https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/2020-michigan-election-results-voting-polls-proposals-vote
@dannyboy Back at the start of this school year, a good friend of mine and his wife decided they just were not going to deal with the back-and-forth and chaos of what was happening with their local school, and just completely pulled their kids out and homeschooled them with for the year with a curriculum they found.
They and their kids seem to be the most "okay" out of my friends with the schooling situation this year. Admittedly their kids are pretty small (I'm not sure how this would have worked if they were dealing with AP chemistry), but taking out the uncertainties of "Is school back? Do we have to go back? How is it going to work?" etc. really seemed to have helped everyone's mental health A LOT.
And my Governor JUST announced getting rid of all restrictions. Counties and cities are not allowed to enforce their own mask mandate either.
2 days ago he allowed everyone 16+ to get a vaccination so most of the state stilll hasn't even received a first dose and many can't event get an appointment yet.
He should not have taken away the right of counties and cities to enforce one. And he is about 6 weeks too early to lift all restrictions. Only Federal government buildings must still have them. This is going to create a lot of problems for business owners who can still require them own their own but have no law enforcement to back them up.
How are things going in your corner of the world regarding Covid 19?
I am staying low here in AZ. Now that our governor has opened back up the state and no masks are required, I feel less safe to go out than I did a week ago. I received my first vaccination Friday and am a long way from feeling comfortable out mingling with "the unmasks". I am putting off doing a home repair which needs to be done but isn't critical in the next couple weeks, because I don't want to go to Home Depot now with a bunch of unmasks. ( We found a slow leak in the bathroom under the sink. It is fixed now but our cabinet is now ruined. No mold thank goodness, I was able to dry it out, but it is majorly warped.) Finding a replacement is trickier than I thought online and it is turning into a plot from the children's book 'If You Give A Mouse A Cookie" because in replacing the cabinet, we will likely need to add some tile because I haven't been able to find a cabinet that will work with the original footprint of the old cabinet online. So I will need to go to someplace in person. But that brings me back to the whole "unmasked thing" in my state.
Pima County is keeping the mask mandate in place even though the Governor has ruled they can't do that. So it is a legal battle right now. I don't live in Pima County.
It is taking a long time to get vaccinated at our state sites (drive thru). My husband took 1.45 hours and when he was done the line was even longer than when he first got in it. I read there are a lot of factors in my state, including needing to switch out i Pads faster because of the warmer weather. It is also trickier getting volunteers because more people now have their first shot and aren't volunteering to get one. That and at our big NFL stadium, vaccinations are moving to overnight hours only, not many want to volunteer for the 11pm-6:00am shift.
A nice bright milestone happened last week when the Navajo Nation recorded their first day of no new Covid cases. That was huge.
@lovendures NYC is all over the place. We've got an uncontroversial mask culture here. Everywhere you go, inside and out, people are all masked up. Yet our infection rates have spiked and are pretty high again.
I'm fully vaxxed at this point but I'm not planning to ditch my mask, go to movies or any crowded places for now. I've stayed alive and healthy for this long, and have no desire to throw it away. I want to know more about how well my vaccination will hold up against variants before I start to make any major changes.
With 2020 behind us there's a lot to look forward to, including an emerging progressive country I've waited my whole life to see, and I plan to live long enough to see as much of it as I can!
I Love your outlook Lynn. SO much to look forward to indeed.
@lovendures Cases in my less-populated region of FL have leveled off. My (blue) county has a mask rule but the state will not allow enforcement of the rule. Nevertheless, I almost never see anyone indoors without a mask! Surrounding counties (red red red) are a different story.
This week the age for vaxxes is 40 and up; next week it will be 18 and up. It is becoming fairly simple to find an appointment with very little wait. Even my teenaged son got one-- he heard of a site that had so many doses available they were giving them to all ages, so he drove 2 hours and got Pfizered . (thank you Dannyboy for making "Pfizer" into a verb.) And he had no reaction to the shot beyond a slightly sore arm. So there's another exception to the generalization that young healthy people have strong reactions. (But of course we will see what happens with the second dose. )
Bottom line is there seems to be plenty of vaccine around here, but getting it into people's arms has not been as successful as it could be, and people in the very rural areas are not masking up. People need to WAKE UP and just do it-- both mask and vax.
How are things going in your corner of the world regarding Covid 19?
We went to visit my mom for a few days - first time since last July. It was mostly wonderful, though she's still a fan of the Former Guy and we had a couple of rows over that.
Masking in my home town is non-existent now, but we actually ate out in a restaurant and did a couple of quick shopping trips Muskegon and everyone was masked everywhere - this is a stark reversal from about a year ago when everyone in my county was taking things seriously and everyone down near her was treating this like it wasn't a thing.
Awaiting word of the extension of the MIOSHA order that has me working from home. I'm not ready for pants without an elastic band just yet (though this shutdown I gained far less weight than last shut down). I know the MIOSHA order will be extended because Governor Whitmer was planning on extending it three weeks ago when our numbers were still low. Now that it's exploding -- it'll happen, I'm just waiting on the "when" - I'll finish this school year from home and god willing be back to my old shenanigans next school year.
In Massachusetts, people are being careful but we have a lot of students due to all the colleges and covid is now surging again after spring break.
When I go out in public, everyone is wearing a mask. I have been to Home Depot several times this past week, and everyone wears a mask there too, including all those macho contractor guys who populate Home Depot. You simply may not go anywhere here without a mask on.
The governor, who got off to a very bad start with vaccinations, has now seen that he either shapes up and gets people vaccinated, or he can expect to get ousted. He has shaped up and has become the vaccine energizer bunny.
They were vaccinating thousands a day in Fenway Park until yesterday which was opening day for the Red Sox. (It was rained out.).They moved the whole operation over to a humongous conference center down the street in the middle of downtown Boston, and are prepared to vaccinate thousands per day. They are also vaccinating in Foxboro Stadium, a huge soccer stadium, and in the chain pharmacies and some grocery stores. The only thing limiting us now is the federal supply, and the supply has been a problem.
FYI, Here are some interesting articles. The first is about the side effects of the vaccines. It also talks about the similar effects of Pfizer and Moderna, which are manufactured using the same principle...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/01/health/covid-vaccine-side-effects/index.html
...and the second one is an update of yesterday's Pfizer statement. Yesterday's statement said that it was still effective after 6 months. Today's update gives us a percentage number, 91% effective after 6 months. No vaccine has been able to say how long it will take for our doses to wear out, because it hasn't happened yet. The people that are still in the study are holding on and it has not been a year since they started with the then experimental vaccines.
And I know the pill to treat the Covid is coming. Just a prescription from your doctor, a trip to the pharmacy, and it could be treated at home. I wouldn't mind another pill in my daily life, as long as it keeps me alive, and I don't get anybody else sick.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article250206305.html
FYI, News about Moderna vaccine. The response of the Moderna vaccine is robust after 6 months and still counting...