US Covid Rant #2

The last time I went on a US covid rant was back in July of 2020, right in the thick of things. It is hard to believe that is over a year ago, and here we are, dealing with many of the same issues. In some ways things have gotten better (yeah vaccines!) In other ways, things have gotten much, much worse (burnout and anger are on the rise). Nearly half a million Americans have died since my last rant, and the US is more divided than ever.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been watching the covid numbers creep - then jump - upwards in my old hometown, Austin, Texas. Last week the US reported over 100,000 new covid cases in a day for the first time since February, and this is without the CDC counting breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalisations. My friends in Austin got alert messages from the city stating the covid situation is “dire.” As more and more stories pop up about hoards of vaccinated individuals falling ill and spreading the virus, I wonder how much that undercounting is skewing everything in the US. (Please don’t read into this that I don’t support vaccination. I 100% do, but I realize they have their limitations.)

I’ve watched my friends go from hopeful that the worst of the pandemic was behind them to facing the crushing reality that the hospitalisation projections for the Austin area are much, much worse than at any other time in the pandemic. One projection from UT shows up to 12,000+ covid hospitalisations by October if current trends continue. To make matters worse, many of the tools used to combat the spread of covid in the past, like mask mandates and stay-at-home-orders, are no longer possible thanks to restrictions put in place by Governor Abbot. And this is all in the summer when the kids are out of school, the weather is hot, and there aren’t seasonal illnesses like the flu to worry about. Parents are terrified to send their kids to school in a few short weeks and equally terrified to have another disrupted school year. People seem desperate to get their kids into private schools that require masks, but are finding that there are no available spots left.

And meanwhile, here in New Zealand we’re trotting along with normal life, but with constant little reminders that at any moment this could change. There are QR codes to scan everywhere - but only 10% of Kiwis do so regularly. On our recent flight to Queenstown, we wore mandatory masks on the plane - but no one wore masks in the airport where people were in very close proximity. There are also frequent news articles about how we would go into a lockdown as soon as Delta is detected in the community because it has the ability to spread so fast and overwhelm contact tracers. It is a very surreal existence, and I feel very lucky to be able to live a normal life unlike my friends and family in the US. Fortunately, I’m able to put much of my anxiety on the back burner 95% of the time. I have confidence that New Zealand will do what it needs to do to return to normal as quickly as possible, and I have the luxury of being fully vaccinated.

But I don’t have much confidence in the rest of the world. I resonate with everyone who is feeling fed up with the covid-denying, anti-vax, let “freedom” ring crowd. Then I feel absolutely heartbroken because there is no way out of this purgatory in the US. Enough people aren’t going to get vaccinated to ever reach a magical number where there is immunity and nowhere for variants to form. I joke (because if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry) that by the time New Zealand opens the borders, we’ll need about forty booster vaccines because there will be so many mutations made possible by the millions of petri dishes who have fallen down a misinformation rabbit hole.

So stay safe, get a vaccine if you can, and don’t do anything stupid or selfish. Maybe one day we’ll get to visit the US again.