Repainting the Golden Gate Bridge

What do Uruguay, Cambodia, and Mongolia have that the US of A doesn’t?

Other than a functional Postal Service, the correct answer is a high COVID vaccination rate. Of course, we proudly independent Americans rank well behind those socialists in Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, but it is hard to believe that you are more likely to get COVID in New York than you are in Montevideo, Phnom Penh, or Ulan Bator.

Amid the confusion about “mix & match” boosters and inoculating children, the current New Yorker contains these surprising facts that you will never hear on Fox News:

One third of Americans (that’s 100 million people!) have been infected with the virus, but natural immunity fades with time. A study in Kentucky showed that people who had previously been infected but never were vaccinated were twice as likely to get re-infected as those who were immunized after the initial infection. Yet Kentucky Senator Rand Paul questioned Dr Fauci about the effectiveness of vaccines.

The Delta variant is really nasty. Four months ago, daily coronavirus counts were one-tenth what they are today. One hundred thousand more Americans have died of COVID since then. Yet police and fire unions are fighting against mandatory inoculation. Mustn’t the local cop or First Responder must be in physical contact with civilians and potentially spreading the virus to do their job.

“Breakthrough” infections among the inoculated still happen. In the UK, 97% of people over age 65 are fully vaccinated. When the Delta Wave struck, daily COVID cases there reached 80% of record levels. What good is vaccination anyway? Well, daily deaths only reached 11% of record levels. In the US, 84% of seniors are fully vaccinated. Delta caused daily COVID cases to hit a mere 67% of the previous record high which shows that we can beat out those Brits when we put our mind to it. Of course, our daily deaths were 65% of the previous max. American seniors are six times more likely to die of a reinfection than Brits. That 13% differential in vaccination rate may have something to do with it.

Colin Powell’s death was attributed to complications from COVID. Fox News was more than happy to point out that he also suffered from a rare blood cancer and that this reflected the Biden administration’s subversive attempt to falsely inflate COVID death rates in order to frighten the public.

Even if all the 700,000 + deaths since the pandemic struck were not strictly pandemic-related, the fact that the death rate in America exceeded our birth rate since March, 2020 indicated that politics should not be part of the discussion.

The New Yorker article makes a cogent point. COVID is never going to disappear. “Our collective immunity will rise and fall through some combination of booster shots, reinfection, and time. It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you are done, it’s time to start all over again.”