COVID Continues

I keep typing "when will the pandemic end" in Google searches to get an answer to that very question about COVID, but no one seems to know.  And in fact, the latest news about COVID is not reassuring.

A lot of progress has been made in shutting down the virus in a good deal of the U.S., and despite a lagging vaccination rate, the number of fully vaccinated Americans goes up each day - 46.4 percent as of the end of last week.  It has been going up by a couple of tenths of a percentage points each day for the past several weeks, and while that may not sound like that big of an increase, it's still an increase and a steady one at that.  However, the so-called Delta variant of the virus threatens everything, even though the mRNA vaccines are still effective against them (provided you get two doses of either).   And in countries where vaccination rates lag, the situation is particularly dire. 

In Australia, for example, the federal and state governments have been effective at testing and tracing, as seen in testing sites like the one above, but their vaccine rollout has been a flop - only 23.9 percent of Australians have been partially vaccinated as of the end of last week with only 4.7 percent of Australians fully vaccinated.  And it's late June, which means it's winter down there - winter, of course, being an easier time for the virus to spread.  (True, it's only 60 degrees Fahrenheit down there at this time of year, not freezing cold like winter in the American Northeast or continental Europe, but its still chillier overall.)  So it should come as no surprise that the Sydney area is under a two-week lockdown because of the rapid spread of the delta corona, as I call it.   The Aussies have also given up on its main vaccine, the ill-fated AstraZeneca shot, switching instead to Pfizer and Moderna. 

Unfortunately, as always with COVID, it's worse than you think.  Israel has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.  As many as 57 percent of its population has been fully vaccinated as of last week.  Also, it's not winter there now.  And yet the Israelis have had to re-impose face-covering mandates as a result of a wave of delta corona infections  - some of them among the fully vaccinated.  The World Health Organization, meanwhile, has gone so far as to recommend that even the fully vaccinated continue to wear face coverings indefinitely.  And in some parts of the world where national and local governments have dropped face-covering mandates, private establishments continue to require them, making fully vaccinated people wonder why they bothered getting vaccinated in the first place.

Or getting unvaccinated people to ask why they should get vaccinated at all.  Back in the U.S. of A., many experts and politicians, like Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, are calling for the federal government to give final approval to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines instead of the emergency approval they're currently authorized under in order to boost vaccine demand among those hesitant to get it.  I say, do it - the results are in, they work!

Until all of this gets taken care of,  the question  "When will the pandemic end?" may have no answer.  And when it does have one, you probably won't like it very much.