Coronavirus Part 7

5 months ago I checked-in on COVID-19 and it's impact on my life. Since that time, things went totally back to normal... briefly. By June the county I live in was down to an average daily new cases in the high-teens. Not bad for a county with nearly 500,000 people in it. However we've become plagued by the new, and more contagious, Delta Variant. As a result we're now seeing around 150 daily cases.

This is a major setback in the end-game of the pandemic, and one that could have possibly been avoided if more of my countrymen choose to get vaccinated. But alas, now we're back hearing about overflowing ICUs and spiking cases. This is incredibly frustrating, as there is a solution at hand, but for whatever reason many people are refusing to embrace it.

The good news is that for our family, it still hasn't been very impactful. Most everyone we see has been smart enough to get vaccinated, so we feel relatively safe around most folks. Our biggest worry is for our kids who are still too young to be vaccinated. They will start school/daycare in a few weeks and it's looking like that may be right in the middle of what is being called the 4th wave of cases. Even if we catch a breakthrough infection it appears that the sickness will be very mild compared to if we were unvaccinated, so our worries really revolve around our kids.

Life on the ranch continues with somewhat minimal interaction besides my wife's family and a few close friends. I did take a work trip to DC and then went to a wedding last week. Besides the masks, it was the most "normal" the world felt to me in 18 months. I didn't fret about getting COVID while I was gone, but I did get tested once I got home just to be safe. I think I'll really feel better once our kids can get vaccinated, but that may still be a ways off since they're so young. The good thing about our kids being so young is that I doubt they'll have any recollection of this whole pandemic, but can still tell their grandkids in 70 years that they lived through it, which will be kind of cool for them. But really they'll have to check their great-granddad's blog to get the true first-hand account of it.

At this point I predict COVID will still be a pandemic at least for another 6 months. More employers may make the vaccine mandatory which will help, but until we can get significantly more of the population vaccinated (including school aged kids) I think COVID will be with us at least through the holidays.