One moment they're there and the next they're gone

But this is no Rapture

The numbers look small but they send alarms, and should. (These images are from yesterday, at worldometers.)

Percentages can mislead when numbers get small. If a state has 300 new covid cases a day, a 20% increase is 60 cases. One church gathering, one birthday party in a state can cause that, if most of the attendees aren’t vaccinated.

For weeks now, other countries have seen some very disturbing covid spikes: Indonesia, the UK, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Iran, Bangladesh, Tunisia, Iraq, Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand are good examples. In the US, Missouri and Arkansas have been running uphill for at least 3 weeks pretty dramatically.

Globally, the charts show this uptick. This week, the declining overall US numbers shifted uphill. In the list shown, it’s still hard to see much rise in NCarolina, Arizona, Washington, Colorado, Ohio, New Jersey and Virginia. But in the other 15 listed states, and in Wisconsin, the charts are showing rises, including the big states of Texas, California, New York, Georgia and Illinois.. The rises are steepest in the southern states, where the percentage of the vaccinated is very low, some under 50% still. And many of those unvaccinated will die. Will.

Almost all the current cases are the delta variant. It transfers to others faster. It progresses in sickening patients faster. Instead of lingering on a ventilator for weeks, some may be dead within a week. It may not overwhelm hospitals like before but coroners and funeral homes will feel overburdened in some of the towns and cities hit.

Within 3 weeks, the US covid death rate will begin rising too. I don’t feel sad about most of the adults who will die. They made their choice to drive the crazy car without the medical seat belt. I feel a lot of sympathy for those under 8 who will die because the vaccines are still not approved for kids. And unlike the early covid outbreaks, this delta variant infects and can kill all ages.

The mask mandate was lifted here a week ago. Today, at my second indoor restaurant breakfast, the server and I were discussing how nice it was to see that people had mouths again. Smiling faces are everywhere.

Some businesses still require employees to wear masks. Some have signs insisting that people take their masks off. I mostly avoid the latter as they were the ones with rightwinger owners that bitched about the mandates throughout.

The adults, for the most part, have chosen a rather painful means of suicide. Maybe in states that avoid this rise we can now write their sympathy missives on masks to send to the funerals. I know, I know, that would be callous….

It’s all so preventable though, if grown ups chose to grow.

New covid fears rattled the stock market today too. Pfizer is urging our federal government to offer booster shots to the fully vaccinated by September.

And polling now shows most Americans think covid originated from a lab leak in China. Which just goes to show once again how effective rightwing media is in sowing misinformation because no evidence exists to reach that conclusion. Just like the Holocaust, nobody really died unless I get to count all 6 million corpses, and everything else is a liberal Chinese plot to take away their guns and prevent their women from making all the sammiches.(and let’s not forget the WMDs!)

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I don’t want to leave this on a depressing note once again so I include a reminder of why this all matters.