This is the only thing I can blog about right now.
Right now, in Florida and across half the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic is flaring back up due to a Delta variant that is more contagious and more harmful to our young.
Every day it is getting worse out there. Even with the good news that full vaccination can minimize the damage, people are still catching COVID and likely to spread it to others.
A fellow librarian I follow on Twitter just reported this morning she tested positive. She has children, the youngest apparently at high risk if he catches it himself.
We've spent more than a year now fighting this pandemic, and yet the political will to push back against this spike - the necessity of closing down public places again like we did in March-April 2020, the need to keep our children and teens out of super-spreader locations like schools - has pretty much died.
Our elected leaders like Gov. DeSantis are actively pushing laws and executive orders forcing our cities and counties to stay open, forcing our schools to reopen for fall semesters this August, and insisting our schools NOT do the simplest easiest step of mandating face masks to reduce transmission of the virus.
It's like DeSantis and his fellow Republicans WANT the virus to spread to our kids.
And nobody's rising up to stop them.
It's like we've given up fighting the anti-vaxxer and anti-mask madness.
If I were able to talk to every parent in Florida, I would be telling them right now to insist on keeping your kids at home and safe from the Delta COVID. If I were able to talk to every business owner and county/city commissioner, I would be begging them to close the offices and do all work remotely and over the phone like we did last year.
If I were able to talk to Joe Biden, I would be begging him to realize this is another medical crisis threatening our entire nation and he needs to issue executive orders overriding every Red State governor's madness, insisting on masks in public and delaying our school openings at least until September, and DEMANDING we make vaccinations mandatory for people to go to work or travel from state to state.
Something, ANYTHING, to get our nation back to fighting against COVID and preventing our hospitals from getting overwhelmed again.
I know everyone's tired and emotionally screwed up from more than a year of this pandemic. I'm there myself, my anxiety and depression are all over the place. Thing is, what's causing my anxiety is the reality I work in a public sector - library - and I have to deal every fucking day with the nightmare that just one person can come in sick as hell with COVID and spreading that damn thing everywhere.
I may be fully vaccinated but I am still a high-risk person (diabetic and sleep apnea/pulmonary issues). I am ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED I WILL CATCH COVID.
My anxiety and stress would go down a lot if we mandated masks and did a two-week lockdown to reduce the spread of the virus. But it's not going to happen, is it? I live in a Red State that was already notorious for crazy self-destructive behavior, and everyone around me is doubling down on this shit.
And DeSantis' failures of leadership right now - refusing to put Florida on even a temporary lockdown, refusing to mandate masks indoors, refusing to admit COVID is back and more dangerous than before - increases the risks I face every day.
I am going to see more of my fellow librarians report online that they've caught COVID.
I am risking every day I go to work that same fate.
Goddamn you, DeSantis. Your posing and preening for the cameras while Florida burns in fever ought to condemn you to the deepest pit of Hell.
Goddamn every anti-masker and every anti-vaxxer. Your contrarian bullshit is not only killing yourselves but killing the rest of us.
1 comment:
Hard to know what to say to this. All that you say is justified. DeSanitize seems to have concluded that catering to Trump and to the anti-vax "it's just the flu" crowd will pay political dividends outweighing the steadily-growing pile of corpses in the state.
The number of serious covid-19 cases among the fully-vaccinated is very small, so you're probably pretty well protected even despite your complicating risk factors, but the concern is legitimate. I'm still self-isolating most of the time despite being vaccinated, and I live in a fairly low-transmission area.
Even our very Democratic governor is pushing ahead with re-opening schools for in-person instruction, despite the high infection rates in the rural parts of our state. None of the politicians seem to have quite grasped how the delta variant has changed the picture.
It's a mess. There's no sugarcoating it.
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