So you think the pandemic’s over?

According to Wednesday morning’s Kansas City Star, the Summer Olympics are shaping up to be a TV-only event with few fans attending in person because Tokyo is having a surge in coronavirus numbers.

(On the other hand, the Star is now printed in Des Moines, Iowa — 2 hours and 52 minutes away — which means today’s newspaper deadline was sometime yesterday and Godzilla might have destroyed Tokyo in the meantime and if so we’ll find out about that on Saturday, except the Star stopped printing a Saturday newspaper. More on that shortly.)

Anyway…

If you’re asking “Why worry about COVID-19 in Japan?” you have a point because unless you qualified for the Olympic team in the uneven parallel bars or a hotdog eating contest (I’m a bit hazy on what events are currently part of the Summer Olympics) you need to start worrying about what’s happening right here in the US of A.

For instance, last month 130 people died of COVID-19 in Maryland: none were vaccinated. And what’s happening in Maryland is happening all over the country.

According to CNN’s website:

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gave a White House briefing in which she said 99% of the COVID-19 deaths in June were among unvaccinated people. States with below-average vaccination rates have triple the number of new COVID-19 cases when compared to states with above-average vaccination rates.

OK, so Tokyo and Maryland are in hot water, what about the Midwest?

A highly preventable death

A Kansas City man in his 40s who chose to not get vaccinated because he didn’t think he needed to, recently died from COVID-19.

That was in last Saturday’s Kansas City Star and if you didn’t see it I’m not surprised because the Kansas City Star does not actually print a newspaper on Saturdays. But they do send out an email that allows subscribers to see the paper they would have printed had enough people been interested and that story made front page news, assuming electronic versions count and they must because once they decided to quit printing a Saturday paper I don’t recall the Star lowering my subscription rate.

Anyway…

The story also pointed out that hospital beds are filling up again – this time with Delta Variant victims – and the numbers are skyrocketing in Branson, Missouri which is a huge tourist attraction for the kind of people that consider Cracker Barrel fine dining and can’t believe they ever took Hee Haw off the air.  

(OK, having read what I just wrote, it seems kind of snooty and dismissive of a certain class of people and my only defense is it’s the class of people I come from. I was lucky to have lots of different kinds of friends with lots of different backgrounds, but am overly-familiar with the concept of using your front lawn as a parking lot and beer-can disposal area and I’m talking about my family, not theirs. The first time I had to fill out a form identifying my race, I was stunned to find out Poor White Trash was not an option.)

If I’m being elitist I’m not alone because the people who come up with incentives to convince Jethro and Elly May to get out of the cement pond and go get vaccinated, have offered them free donuts, free beer, free marijuana, free hunting rifles (I actually didn’t make any of that up because who would believe it) and are at least considering offering a chance to win a lottery to the list.

Also, over in Kansas, if you get vaccinated you get to take a couple laps on a NASCAR track in the the family RV.

The vaccination incentives appear to be aimed at a certain demographic and if the next enticement is a lifetime supply of pork rinds and Confederate flag bumper stickers, we’ll know for sure.

Anyway…

Too many of us are acting like the pandemic is over and because we’ve stopped wearing masks and social distancing and a bunch of people haven’t gotten vaccinated, COVID-19 is making a comeback with its new and improved version, the Delta variant. 24 states have seen an increase of at least 10% in COVID cases in the last week.

Neat, huh?  

The guy who died said he didn’t get vaccinated because he didn’t think he needed to and before he died said he wished he’d made a different choice. CoxHealth CEO Steve Edwards took to Twitter and said the following:

“If you are making wildly disparaging comments about the vaccine, and have no public health expertise, you may be responsible for somebody else’s death. Shut up.”

(A statement I take so seriously that I didn’t even make the obvious joke about “CoxHealth,” but if you want to make a penicillin comment, be my guest.)

The cartoon posted above was based on people who have “heard” some unsubstantiated rumor on social media, like people who take the vaccine have died or developed Alzheimer’s and here’s what I have to say about that.

Google “has anybody died from the COVID-19 vaccine” and you get sent to a CDC website that says more than 331 million doses have been administered in the United States and after getting the vaccine there have been reports of 5,946 deaths (0.0018%), but the website also points out that the FDA requires reporting the death of anybody who dies after getting the vaccine, even if it’s unclear the vaccine was the cause.

The website goes on to say:

“A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records, has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines.”

So we’re vaccinating old people in retirement homes and when some of them die or develop Alzheimer’s – which they were going to do anyway – people who are looking for an excuse to not get vaccinated blame the vaccine when you might as well blame lime Jell-O or excessive watching of The Price is Right.

Natural selection continues

As Dr. Anthony Fauci has said; no vaccine works for 100% of the people because people are different and react differently to vaccines so you still might see someone get vaccinated and get sick and die, but the overwhelming number of people getting sick now are unvaccinated.

So if you’re vaccinated why should you care if people who still aren’t sold on the benefits of indoor plumbing chose to skip vaccination?

For the answer to that question we’ll go to Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center:

“The more unvaccinated people are, the more opportunities for the virus to multiply. When it does, it mutates, and it could throw off a variant mutation that is even more serious down the road. So unvaccinated people are potential variant factories.”

Unvaccinated people present an opportunity for the virus to mutate into something that can get vaccinated people sick.

I’m big on metaphors so think of it this way: we’re in a lifeboat, in a storm and we need to row to land which we can see in the distance, but some people refuse to row because the rest of us can’t tell them what to do.

I recently heard someone argue that not getting vaccinated was his personal choice, but his personal choice is affecting everybody in the boat. We know how to stop this, but some people refuse to be part of the effort.

Wake. The. Fuck. Up.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/