Hate masks? Like having kids in school? All you have to do is roll up your sleeve.
Sixteen months after we entered the fear and confusion of the COVID-19 pandemic and ... we are still scared and confused.
After a brief period of normalcy provided by the COVID vaccine, cases are jumping across the world, the nation and Kentucky, thanks to the hyper-aggressive Delta variant. On Monday, Gov. Andy Beshear recommended that people in high exposure jobs should start wearing masks indoors again, and showed that outside the Golden Triangle of Lexington, Louisville and Northern Kentucky, less than 50 percent of the population is vaccinated.
Then on Tuesday morning, we got some even worse news: 20 percent of Lexington’s current COVID cases are in fully vaccinated people. Although those are still very low numbers, about 78 total, that’s not so helpful in persuading the vaccine hesitant to get the shot, which is hard enough in many rural areas, as reporter Alex Acquisto illustrated in a story last Sunday.
On top of that, school is due to start in less than a month, so we will soon begin the debate over masks in school. As we already know, that’s a lot of fun. Almost as much fun as watching our kids struggle with online instruction.
The political divide is no help, of course. Tuesday morning, CJ reporter Olivia Kraus noted that House Education Chair Regina Huff had deleted a tweet in which she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci’s vaccine advocacy to the Jonestown massacre. We used to be a nation of science. Now (as the world burns down around us) we let conservative news shows convince us that the vaccine is depositing microchips into our arms so Google can figure out what you had for breakfast, as though it didn’t already know this from your phone. One in five Americans believe the microchips, according to a new poll by The Economist and YouGov.com.
The only place the political divide comes together is over schools. We can all agree that closing schools was an unmitigated disaster, particularly for our most vulnerable students. Why wouldn’t we do everything we can to avoid that situation again?
Once again, we have choices. We can go on as we are, with high rates of unvaccinated people and watch as the number of very sick and dying people starts to skyrocket again. We can descend into lives of masks and shutdowns. And to those of you who say good riddance to those who reject vaccines, please think about all the people in healthcare who don’t have a choice in treating these sick people. It’s doubtful that mask mandates will appear from gun-shy politicians, so the numbers will continue to climb until we are back in some kind of shutdown situation.
Or we can somehow persuade our families and friends to go ahead and get vaccinated. It will most likely keep you from getting sick at all, and will keep you from dying even if you get COVID. Despite the breakthrough cases, fully vaccinated people are much less likely to face hospitalization; a British study found that the Pfizer vaccine was 96 percent effective against hospitalization from the Delta variant.
This doesn’t have to be so complicated. If we want a return to our old lives, if we want our kids to stay in school, if we want to end fear and confusion, just roll up your sleeve.
