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V-Day
What a profound mental effect of having those appointments in hand. But later I did feel some guilt -- because if I lived in PA I wouldn't be eligible yet. Why are they allowing people who aren't eligible yet, or who live in other states, to make appointments at that particular CVS in York, PA? I can only presume because nobody else is showing up in that area of rural PA. It is Trump country, voted 2/3 for Trump and represented by Republicans in Congress. I've read that rural folks and Republicans are less likely to want the vaccine. So if you want a shot, go look in rural Republican areas. Seriously.
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I did write before about how I'd look for appointments in the rural areas, that I'd look everywhere in MD, that I was willing to register at every single location and drive for hours for a shot, and now ... yep, I found a rural appointment mere hours after I became eligible. But across the state line.
It's fucked up. I'm taking a dose that would otherwise go untaken, while in many other places people can't find a dose.
I complained to Public Health Friend and he said this was all Trump's doing, that people went to Trump last year and said, "OK, we need your authorization to mobilize the national FEMA vaccination plan," and Trump refused. They had a national vaccination plan, and Trump refused to pull the trigger. [Strangely, this is not unique to Trump, it happens quite often that politicians ignore the pre-existing disaster plans that have been carefully rehearsed by the career civil servants. That's human ego in action.]
And the Biden team isn't going to rock the boat by trying to redesign a fucked up system in midstream, they're just trying to push more supply into that fucked up system ASAP. So there are pockets of oversupply, and pockets of undersupply, and millions of people who aren't even looking yet because they've been told they're not eligible, and millions of people who are jumping the line. And millions of people who don't give a fuck because they don't believe in either COVID or the vaccine.
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My two brothers had COVID last year and they were both pretty sick, but they survived, but I also know people who died. I just don't want to roll the dice. I'm a bit older than my brothers are, I have asthma. Why take that risk? The last thing I wanted was to die from COVID while Trump was President. It's why T and I wore masks and socially distanced within our own house when he was sick -- probably from a cold virus, but he never got tested. And I didn't catch it from him.
But it was more than just me -- it was the risk that millions of people would die if we didn't take precautions as a nation, as a species. If we all got sick at the same time and overwhelmed the hospitals, the percentage of us who would die would skyrocket. To me, it was about avoiding millions of deaths in the US. And, we did avoid millions of deaths. We're at 551,000 right now in the US.
Some countries took extra precautions, keeping their death toll way down. While others didn't. And still other governments tried to take precautions but their citizens didn't care. Or, their citizens cared at first, but then got sick of the restrictions and protested or rioted.
In the US, even where our state or local governments took precautions, there was practically zero enforcement. I heard about other countries where people were put into strict quarantine with police checking on them. Strict lockdowns where you needed permits to leave your neighborhood. There was nothing like that in the US. No police checking on you. Practically zero enforcement. Nobody bothered to stop me last spring when I started heading to the condo during lockdown. And then the White House itself started holding superspreader events without masks or social distancing -- it's possible the President had COVID while he was debating his opponent on national television! His family sitting in the audience unmasked.
It makes no sense to me.
And now the US has the largest death toll in the world from COVID. Yet Republicans aren't ashamed of this at all, instead they claim our death toll has been exaggerated in the US while minimized elsewhere.
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It still isn't over.
But if my luck holds, it will be over for me, personally, soon. Only because a friend of a friend found a place where we could skip ahead of our neighbors.
Mixed emotions.
And COVID won't go away, we'll probably need booster shots every so often, and the people who don't get these shots -- either because they're uninsured or uninformed or purposely defiant -- will still get sick and some of them will die.
If we'd all been like New Zealand, we could've wiped this out, like we wiped out SARS. We still could wipe this out, but we still haven't set up the Test, Trace, and Isolate regime that would be necessary. Half the country is going back to normal regardless, the other half is going back to normal after they get their shots, and COVID will continue to spread. We will not reach herd immunity in the US, because as a country we aren't trying, because not enough of us care. And I don't know how to fix that.
-----
I did write before about how I'd look for appointments in the rural areas, that I'd look everywhere in MD, that I was willing to register at every single location and drive for hours for a shot, and now ... yep, I found a rural appointment mere hours after I became eligible. But across the state line.
It's fucked up. I'm taking a dose that would otherwise go untaken, while in many other places people can't find a dose.
I complained to Public Health Friend and he said this was all Trump's doing, that people went to Trump last year and said, "OK, we need your authorization to mobilize the national FEMA vaccination plan," and Trump refused. They had a national vaccination plan, and Trump refused to pull the trigger. [Strangely, this is not unique to Trump, it happens quite often that politicians ignore the pre-existing disaster plans that have been carefully rehearsed by the career civil servants. That's human ego in action.]
And the Biden team isn't going to rock the boat by trying to redesign a fucked up system in midstream, they're just trying to push more supply into that fucked up system ASAP. So there are pockets of oversupply, and pockets of undersupply, and millions of people who aren't even looking yet because they've been told they're not eligible, and millions of people who are jumping the line. And millions of people who don't give a fuck because they don't believe in either COVID or the vaccine.
-----
My two brothers had COVID last year and they were both pretty sick, but they survived, but I also know people who died. I just don't want to roll the dice. I'm a bit older than my brothers are, I have asthma. Why take that risk? The last thing I wanted was to die from COVID while Trump was President. It's why T and I wore masks and socially distanced within our own house when he was sick -- probably from a cold virus, but he never got tested. And I didn't catch it from him.
But it was more than just me -- it was the risk that millions of people would die if we didn't take precautions as a nation, as a species. If we all got sick at the same time and overwhelmed the hospitals, the percentage of us who would die would skyrocket. To me, it was about avoiding millions of deaths in the US. And, we did avoid millions of deaths. We're at 551,000 right now in the US.
Some countries took extra precautions, keeping their death toll way down. While others didn't. And still other governments tried to take precautions but their citizens didn't care. Or, their citizens cared at first, but then got sick of the restrictions and protested or rioted.
In the US, even where our state or local governments took precautions, there was practically zero enforcement. I heard about other countries where people were put into strict quarantine with police checking on them. Strict lockdowns where you needed permits to leave your neighborhood. There was nothing like that in the US. No police checking on you. Practically zero enforcement. Nobody bothered to stop me last spring when I started heading to the condo during lockdown. And then the White House itself started holding superspreader events without masks or social distancing -- it's possible the President had COVID while he was debating his opponent on national television! His family sitting in the audience unmasked.
It makes no sense to me.
And now the US has the largest death toll in the world from COVID. Yet Republicans aren't ashamed of this at all, instead they claim our death toll has been exaggerated in the US while minimized elsewhere.
-----
It still isn't over.
But if my luck holds, it will be over for me, personally, soon. Only because a friend of a friend found a place where we could skip ahead of our neighbors.
Mixed emotions.
And COVID won't go away, we'll probably need booster shots every so often, and the people who don't get these shots -- either because they're uninsured or uninformed or purposely defiant -- will still get sick and some of them will die.
If we'd all been like New Zealand, we could've wiped this out, like we wiped out SARS. We still could wipe this out, but we still haven't set up the Test, Trace, and Isolate regime that would be necessary. Half the country is going back to normal regardless, the other half is going back to normal after they get their shots, and COVID will continue to spread. We will not reach herd immunity in the US, because as a country we aren't trying, because not enough of us care. And I don't know how to fix that.