Coronavirus Part 6

My last coronavirus post was back in mid-October, in that post I predicted that we were still 6 months away from widely available vaccines. I'll give myself a point for that prediction.

In my second coronavirus post I wrote about my debate on whether to call it COVID-19 or Coronavirus and wondered which name would ultimately go down as the commonly used name. It turns out COVID was the winner, but I'm keeping the naming convention in these post titles, but I'll start calling it COVID in the post itself.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the day everything shut down. In the past year 530K Americans have died of COVID, which equates to about 1 death per minute. The good news is that it's the beginning of the end. Three vaccines are available today and they appear to be effective against even the more contagious variants of COVID that have popped up. Cases are way down and about 20% of Californians have been vaccinated. When things opened back up in the summer and the fall it felt too soon but now it feels like it's the right time. There are only 10-20 new cases a day in our county with 220,000 residents. 

As for us, Carly and I have both been vaccinated. Nearly all of the adults in her family near us have been too. Last weekend for my birthday we were able to have what would seem to be a pretty normal birthday party with us all sharing pizza and brownies & ice-cream. I'm now thinking about getting my first real haircut in over a year, though I still regret cutting off my mullet.

There is talk of being able to send the kids back to school soon, and we've started planning a trip to meet up with some friends on the Oregon coast for 4th of July on the assumption that all the adults will likely be vaccinated by then. We're still keeping our social interactions to a minimum but have started to think about opening the aperture (like for a haircut). While I'm excited to get back out to public places, if I've learned anything from the past year it's that I'm a bit of a homebody these days - especially with small children.

It's hard to say when we'll finally be able to declare victory over COVID. That's probably a ways away until kids can be vaccinated, but even then I'm sure there will be pockets of cases in the news for a long time to come. It'll be interesting to see what the long term impact of this will be on American society. Part of me thinks things will spring back to normal and people will carry on as they always have, but I also wonder if this will result in some major changes in how we value in-person events and activities like traveling to weddings or attending work conferences. Only time will tell.