Blinders, Last

So our country  is basking in an abundance of vaccine availability, so much so that I heard they were handing out vaccines to fans attending a NBA basketball game.  If you want a vaccine in America you can get it without much difficulty at all at this point.  However as is sadly most often the case, Americans are blind or just don’t give two shits about the reality in the rest of the world.  Latin America is getting obliterated by Covid, it is running rampant, overwhelming the resources available.

India is even worse, where only 1% of it’s population has been vaccinated and the country has a horrible shortage of oxygen to help keep covid patients alive and hospital space to treat them.  It is an unmitigated disaster.  What is even more scary was that in February India proclaimed that they had covid under control and relaxed restrictions, much the same script as in Latin America. Hell even Canada just did a one week hard lockdown in certain areas because Covid started to spike wildly. It has been a classic example of what happens when you trust people to use their better judgement, most of them will fail that test.  It’s no different here in the USA, the only difference is we have a tidal wave of vaccination going on to help blunt the edge of human beings ignorance.  The hospitalization numbers all across the country have steadily risen since restrictions have been relaxed.

I have seen the end result in my immediate circle of existence where more people have gotten sick in the last month than at any other time during the pandemic.  You see mass indifference to pandemic protocol everywhere in the US.  Lemming mentality is strong, you see a group of people doing or not doing something in this case, a large portion of people will just go with the flow of least resistance.  I guess my point is to all of those that have said that the potential impact of covid has been overblown, all you need to do is turn your TV off of local news and take a look at what is going on around the world to see what reality can be in other circumstances, it’s dark.

This weekend is our last branch conversion.  I am looking forward to knocking it out.  This branch is only about 5 miles from my house so at least it is more geographically convenient.  I have several smaller tasks already written down on the weekend list.  Cindy and I started talking about doing a small long weekend road trip to the Kennedy Space Center.  We originally were going to incorporate that into my birthday celebration a couple years ago but wound up skipping it.  It’s far enough away to make it feel like a road trip but close enough to not require a lot of planning to make it happen.