I know the medical community is harking on how the vaccines are reducing severe illness and death. The vaccines seem to be doing their job. For now anyway.
It’s concerning when you read about cases rising in every state and you learn that in your very highly vaccinated state breakthrough cases have surpassed 5,000 with 80 people dying, 23 of them weren’t even in the hospital and 272 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized after becoming infected.
At least two communities in my state have told people to start wearing facemasks again and visitors to Provincetown have been urged to self-isolate and get tested. There have been 256 confirmed cases from that town alone. Nantucket just issued a mask order today. I’m expecting the rest of the state to catch on soon enough.
We can understand hearing about the daily unvaccinated cases. But when you also hear about daily breakthrough cases in vaccinated people, and see the numbers rising all around the country, not just for the unvaccinated, it’s understandable how the confidence in the vaccines can be waning. Add in the fact that many didn’t have much confidence in them to begin with, being only emergency authorized, I can understand the hesitancy of many.
And you can say, well, would you rather have the vaccine and possibly be safer from Covid than if you didn’t have the vaccine, or go unvaccinated and get Covid and become really sick. Especially with the Delta variant running loose. And yes, on the surface getting the vaccine does seem like the right thing to do. For now.
But considering we don’t know how long the vaccines last, and the number of breakthrough cases rising daily, my fear is that soon the vaccinated crowd getting Covid is going to surpass or equal the unvaccinated crowd. And there’s going to be higher numbers of hospitalizations and deaths among them. And then what? We finally put our facemasks on, go back to social distancing six feet apart and start washing our hands again? Because all of that has stopped along with the virus suddenly being “gone”.
With the creation of the vaccines, which have been great and were much needed, and with the CDC declaring facemasks off (for the vaccinated–but read as everyone) and not such a great idea with Delta on our doorstep back in May, it has created a great false sense of security in many minds that, hey, that Covid thing is gone and we’re free! We can run around maskless (I still wear one) and go out to eat at that buffet (which I have recently done–not a good idea), we can go to the movies again (and pay the price), we can travel again (and pay the price), we can go back to work (I am still working from home), etc., etc. We have been fooled into believing it’s gone because we’ve gotten a shot and some highly paid medical authority figure told us because of the shot we can go maskless. Well, when she said that, everyone heard her. Not just the vaccinated ones.
For the past several days I’ve wondered how high the cases would be right now if the CDC hadn’t said it was okay to remove our masks back in May. I know the cases would still be high, considering many weren’t wearing masks to start with. But I have a feeling the cases would not be as high as we are seeing. Even among the unvaccinated.
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michellemchatton.com 