I was listening to a local radio station this morning and the two hosts were talking about their frustration with our current Covid-19 situation. It is a mask thing primarily so I thought it would be appropriate to update this blog posting from back in May. Let’s start with what I wrote at that time.
“So the Director of the CDC surprised us with new guidance that if we are fully vaccinated and there is no State or Local mask requirement, we can take off our masks indoors as well as outdoors. The guidance I heard advised us to wear our mask if we were not comfortable with it off in any particular situation so nobody is telling us that we must take our mask off.
“There was another scientific factoid around the same time that didn’t get the same recognition by the media and that is that if you are fully vaccinated and are unlucky enough to get a breakthrough infection of the Covid-19, you won’t be able to spread your virus to others as easily as if you were not vaccinated. Your infection may well be asymptomatic.
“So, if you are fully vaccinated you have as small a risk of Covid-19 infection as you will ever have and your risk of spreading Covid-19 to an unvaccinated person is also as small a risk as it will ever be. Your situation personally is as close to pre-Covid-19 normal as you will ever get. You can wear a mask or socially distance according to your personal comfort and not be overly worried about the vaccine deniers. Like you, the vaccine deniers bear the responsibility of their decisions.”
That was then and this is now so let’s focus on what has changed. The change is captured in one word and that word is Delta. The Delta variant is what has changed. First, we knew that Delta existed back then, but we did not know a lot more than that because there wasn’t much of it here at that time. It seems to have arrived in the US in the May, 2021 timeframe. Second, as we got to know Delta better we found out that it was substantially more transmissible than the previous variants. Third, we also learned that fully vaccinated persons could get and spread Delta just like people who are not vaccinated so the population of spreaders continues to be all of us. The unvaccinated target population is slowly getting smaller, but the potential population of spreaders remains just as big as it was before we started getting vaccinated. This situation has been described as a unvaccinated pandemic.
Like those two radio show hosts, we are all frustrated with the current state of our Covid-19 pandemic, but we must remember that we are not in charge of the situation. No, the Covid-19 is in charge and it is aided by unvaccinated deputies. As soon as those unvaccinated deputies decide to get vaccinated, we can all start to move back closer to a more normal way of life.
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