What Are We Supposed to Do Now?

I can feel two different things happening in my head lately. They’re occurring concurrently and in near parallel, but I do think that at some point they’re going to converge.

Like many of us who are vaccinated, I’ve been making some small plans to do some real traveling. Airports! Cities! Adventure!

But at the same time, I still watch the news. I’ve been watching Delta spread, I’ve been watching the numbers as hospitals fill up again. And last night I heard for the first time about this “Delta Plus” variant which is apparently even more dangerous and transmissible than the normal Delta, which itself is even more dangerous and transmissible than the original Covid that send us all into our homes last year.

I go to meetings during the day about returning to work in-person and about campus repopulating. I check my vacation time and look at flights. I look at the calendar and ponder when I could take some time off. I have tickets to Hamilton in October for God’s sake!

And yet, I think back on the trip I took with friends to Washington state in early June. We were all vaccinated of course, but that trip required two airports, airplanes, being around strangers … I felt comfortable about it at the time and the CDC said it was fine at the time and Dr. Fauci said it was fine at the time, and yet … I’m not sure if I would make that trip tomorrow under our current circumstances. I’m not 100% sure I wouldn’t either, but I would really have to think about it.

The thing that really worries me is the recent announcement from the CDC that fully vaccinated people who get a breakthrough infection can spread Covid. That’s really bad. When this all started in 2020, when we first learned that asymptomatic spread was not just possible, but common, I sat myself down and had a little conversation about how to be; what was the ethical way to live? This was back before vaccines and before testing was even reliable. 

I realized then that if it was functionally impossible to know if you had it, then the only responsible way to behave was as if you knew that you had it. As much as that sucks, there really was no other way under the circumstances to protect other people.

So I was pretty responsible about my quarantine. There are a couple things that — in hindsight — I would not have done knowing what I know now, but on the whole, I followed the rules, because that’s how you keep people alive.

As I look at the way things have been changing in these last few weeks, I am beginning to feel like our situation is getting worse and worse by the day. It makes me angry, because we didn’t have to end up here, but there are so many people who won’t get vaccinated — people whose calculations about proper and ethical behavior are the polar opposite of mine — that I really have started worrying that I won’t get to see my family at Christmas this year either. 

I don’t think that American society has the will or the fortitude to really do another Quarantine. I think that the last year — to say nothing of the last four — has really demonstrated what a feckless nation of petulant children we are. So I don’t know what happens if our collective situation keeps getting worse day by day.

And yet. There is an optimist in me. So I still check on flights. I still make my lists of places I want to go. I still check my calendar. 

I just haven’t booked any tickets yet.

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The Month that Just Won't End.

YESTERDAY I GOT MY SECOND SHOT!

That’s it though, I don’t want to celebrate too much because when I woke up this morning I saw that the Johnson & Johnson roll out of vaccines has been “paused” apparently over concerns about blood clots. To date something like 6.8 million J&J shots have been administered and there have only been six reports of possibly related blood clots.

I know this is how safe science is supposed to work, but damn, that is just a kick in the gut. Having no special knowledge about any of this, I know that when the EU briefly paused their AstaZeneca roll out over concerns about blood clots, they determined that the occurrences of vaccinated people with blood clots was actually lower than in the population over all, so I’m hoping that a similar type of determination could be made in this case. Fingers crossed.

Maybe things had been seeming to be getting slightly better lately and maybe that is why the J&J thing has hit me so hard this morning. I’m a big fan of thinking about second and third and fourth order effects and the ripple effects this could cause in the supply chain and in the culture could really be significant.

I’ve been concerned for awhile now that America isn’t actually going to reach a herd immunity threshold, basically because we are a nation of anti-science assholes, and this is not going to help matters any. People who were on the fence about vaccines because they only believe in handguns and healing crystals, will now have yet one more data point to misunderstand. The irony of course being that a pause like this over six possible blot clot occurrences should actually INCREASE their trust in the way science and medicine work specifically because when there was even a whiff of a problem, the distribution was stopped so more information could be collected. That is the sign of a system working, not the sign of a vaccine failing.

It is also a bummer that no matter what this means the overall vaccine distribution will be slowed to at least some degree and that means we may not hit those optimistic thresholds we’d all been hoping for; July 4th barbeques and life looking normal-ish by Fall. The pause means this whole thing could stretch on longer and we’ll be stuck in this situation where some people are vaccinated and others who want it aren’t and that is not a good recipe for anything.

Here we are in April of 2021 and yet it turns out we still are not as done with March 2020 as we’d thought.

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WATCH THIS SPACE

 I’ve been a bad blogger the last few years, but look, I’ve been very busy. At least I shared photos! But then I was heartbroken to discover that somehow this little blog has become unlinked from the Instagram account I was using to update it. That’s why my last several years of posts are all just ghost posts now. I’m trying to figure out how to fix it, but I am a bad blogger, not a web-internaught, so - you know - this process is going to be terrible.

In the meantime, just know to watch this space, because we’re living through a pandemic and possibly the last democratic election America will ever get to have. It seems like someone should be writing about all this shit as it happens. And not on your social media, which is so ephemeral and combative that it doesn’t even ever feel like anything but anger bubblegum. 

In the weeks and months to come, I’ll be here. I’m not promising to be helpful or useful or enlightening or - let’s be honest - even interesting, but I’ll be here. And maybe I’ll even figure out where the hell all my pictures went. It’s like my past has disappeared. I’m basically the boringest version of Jason Bourne.

Watch this space.

P.S. Have you listened to Fiona Apple’s latest album. You outta.

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