I’ve been following Florida’s stats on Covid cases since the beginning of the pandemic. IO use Worldometer. Today, July 28, 2021, the count was 17, 589 new cases, with 56 deaths for the state, 398 deaths for the country, and that’s without all states reporting.
When I cite this statistic to friends who think the pandemic is overblown they shrug and usually reply, “Well, not as many people are dying.” As though that justifies – well, something.
And that’s true. With 49 percent of the country vaccinated, there aren’t as many deaths now. But even one death is tragic. Every number represents a family impacted by the person’s death. And just because the numbers of death has gone down, case numbers are rising daily. On July 28, the total number of new cases in the U.S. was 92,485.
I’ve been vaccinated and still were a mask when I’m indoors. At the gym, though, I remove my mask if the place isn’t crowded and I’m not close to anyone else on a machine. But everywhere else, mask on. If it’s true that the vaccinated can still transmit the virus to the unvaccinated, then it would be selfish of me to NOT were a mask.
But this is Florida, where our idiotic governor has declared no masks mandates, and vowed the state will never shut down again. He even sued the CDC about their mandates concerning cruise ships. Many of them leave from Florida ports and want to be able to implement protocols about who is vaccinated – and who isn’t.
DeSantis is a mini trump married to an ex-Fox News host, and doesn’t have a clue about governing anything. He acts like some delusional Ayn Rand character who believes that true capitalism is screwing your competition – in the case of DeSantis, the “competition” is the people of Florida.
The only person on his cabinet who speaks the truth about anything is Dem Nicki Fried, a lawyer and the 12th Florida commissioner of agriculture since 2019. She points out that DeSantis instructed the Florida Department of Health to stop providing daily numbers on anything related to Covid. Now, with the number of cases rising along with positivity rates – (17%) – her department will now be collecting daily figures from the CDC and posting them to the public.
I noticed that the dailies started up about a week ago.
If you know family or friends who haven’t been vaccinated, do what you can to change their minds. Don’t get annoyed or angry, as I often do. Don’t make it emotional. Give them facts. CDC statistics. Be left-brained. We had two Pfizers back in March. We haven’t grown extra heads or limbs. If Bill Gates is on a chip somewhere in those vaccines, then I feel bad for him if he’s watching us. Not much happening here Bill. No inventions you can buy. I haven’t gotten sick.
Mask up and get vaccinated. Otherwise, we’ll still be having these conversations into 2023.
It seems the epitome of American entitlement that as thousands are dying in India and Brazil, so many Americans refuse to get vaccinated, believing instead in some kind of Trumpish conspiracy theory, their own arrogance, or, for the many alternative people I know, that it’s “not natural” or they are “anti vaxxers”. This is an ethical issue, and I am personally rather disgusted by how many of my friends refuse to get vaccinated because they think it will make them autistic, or there are micro chips, or they just think they are special and let everyone else make the change for them.
We come up against the same thing here, Lauren. It’s another kind of epidemic. Today at the gym, I was the only person who was masked while working out. At least at the grocery stores, employees for the most part are still masked.