Dawn, 1 - 7. Inflection Point.

I am falling back into the old ways of writing every few days rather than every day. In part, it's because the newness of the pandemic, and the necessity of recording its ever-changing nature has disappeared. We have become more or less inured to the illness and the numbers that we are still barraged with every day. Those numbers are now going down, though certainly not through our actions.

The beginning of the new school year has brought thousands of students together in university towns and cities. In Santiago, thousands have had to be hounded off the streets by riot police where they were binge drinking and keeping the neighbors awake with their revelry. In Barcelona in recent days, forty thousand were rousted from the largest plaza in the city. With these enormous get-togethers, with the flux of tourism this summer, and with our complacency, the numbers should have gone up.

But vaccination is a wondrous thing. Over seventy percent of the total population in Spain is completely vaccinated. Of the regions, Asturias is at over 84%, with Galicia behind it at 83%. The least vaccinated is the city region of Melilla, with only 63%. The goal now, however, is to vaccinate at least 90% of the population, thanks to the transmissibility of the Delta variant. Still, the numbers of contagion in the regions with the most vaccinations have begun to plummet. Now, the health services are beginning to give booster shots to the older generations and those who are immuno-compromised. The vaccine is being studied for children younger than 12, and probably will soon be administered to them. 

In contrast, the U.S. states with the least vaccinated are those states where the pandemic is beginning to overwhelm the health system. Vaccination there has stalled, and anti-vaxxers are starting to be fired from their jobs in those states where it is seen as a public health problem, not merely a personal choice, and where vaccine mandates have been imposed. 

So, I'm starting to subtitle the blog with a different name, Dawn, because it seems to be the dawn of a new era, of living with Covid and not being overwhelmed by it. Masks continue, but nightclubs and discos are going to start opening. Football games will have a hundred percent of their seats available to the public. Venues are opening with greater numbers of public allowed. Eventually (it better happen), masks will not be necessary neither indoors nor outdoors when people are close together. We'll probably get a booster dose of the vaccine every X years, and we'll be otherwise done with it, just as we're done with the mumps or the measles.

Let's see when the next pandemic hits. With the destruction of the ecosystems that we're rushing through, I'm sure it won't take another hundred years.

Life continues.