March 2021 – Spring is arriving (at least on the West Coast) with a sense of hopefulness

sense of hopefulnessAfter the horrendously dreadful days of 2020 and the recently attained milestone of 500,000 Covid deaths, topping the combined totals of WWI, WWII, and Vietnam, we are devastated by a monumental sense of loss. We mourn and grieve for the families with empty beds, vacant places at the dinner table, shrouded in memories of the departed; the brothers and sisters, best friends and lovers who have left us prematurely. We miss our elders whom we cherished, who did not survive.

We could scream in pain, but we have been crushed under its weight. Our energy is still low. We have been plagued with chronic anxiety, panic attacks, smoldering depression that wakes us up in the night and pings us with insomnia. There is a name now for the nightly battle, “Covid insomnia”. These are our hardships.

Unemployment, loss of income, homes forfeited. We battle to stay afloat and to maintain a sense of hope. Teens have struggled with rising suicide rates. Children have contended with a strangely unnatural world.

We mourn our isolation, our desire to hug and be hugged by our friends and associates, as a natural course of relatability that had been our lives. We have lived in a nostalgic remembrance of things past: the trips we took, the fun we had on those trips, places, people, events – all vivid in our minds as we have so long sheltered in place, stuck in the now.

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February 2021 – Challenges and Progress with Vaccination

Progress with Vaccination

The roll-out of the vaccines has been arduous and grueling due to our past president’s negligence in procuring sufficient vaccines, his cavalier attitude, toward the virus, and blatant disregard for the mounting deaths. Most people have had a hellacious struggle spending infinitely long hours on the phone, investigating, and hunting for sites to procure a vaccine.

Biden is doing everything he can to enable sufficient doses to vaccinate as many people as possible.

Across the country, the death toll of the coronavirus is horrific — and it’s worse than many experts expected. (Dudding, Payadue, 2021) Now we are threatened with serious variants that have entered the US from many parts of the world. We are looking at adding booster shots on top of 2 doses. We are running as fast as we can to outfox the virus lethality, racing to get to the other side. (Zraick, 2021) The variant from South Africa, B.1.351, may also blunt the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Novavax. It has spread to at least 31 countries, including the U.S., where the first two known cases of the variant were identified in South Carolina this week. (Tumin, Bogert, 2021)

We are beginning to make progress with vaccination:

In the 2/1/2021 NYT Morning edition, Leonhardt says, “Here is a key fact: All five vaccines with public results have eliminated Covid-19 Deaths. They have drastically reduced hospitalizations.”
Beste-Potenzmittel.com
“Of the roughly 75,000 people that have received one of the five in a research trial, not a single person has died from Covid and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving the shot.” (2021, Leonhardt)

Our World in Data (2021) says “To bring this pandemic to an end, a large share of the world needs to be immune to the virus. The safest way to achieve this is with a vaccine.”

Cumulative COVID-19 vaccination doses administered per 100 people: 0.17

Start of vaccine administration: December 2020

So far 25.6 million shots have been given, according to a state-by-state tally by Bloomberg and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the last week, an average of 1.21 million doses per day were administered. (2021, Bloomberg.com)

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