(03-20-2021, 08:31 PM)(Poison) PenLady Wrote: Americans seem to think they are free because checkpoints, NSA wiretapping, and TSA groping only happen in other states.
OVER 10% OF THE ENTIRE U.S. population has been fully vaccinated for the coronavirus, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.n numbers: 23 million in UK receive first jab
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More than 33 million people have received either both doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech or Moderna vaccines or a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Roughly 64 million people have received at least one dose of a vaccine.
With more than 29 million [url=https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6]documented cases of the coronavirus in the U.S., more people have now been fully vaccinated than have been reportedly infected with the virus.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-03-11/cdc-10-of-total-us-population-fully-vaccinated-for-coronavirus
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We may not be at the beginning of the end for COVID-19, but we are certainly past the end of the beginning.
That depiction is now more than a week late. Americans are getting inoculated faster than COVID-19 is finding human bodies to occupy. I am not the most optimistic of thinkers, but the statistics satisfy my reservations about optimism. The two-dose inoculation consists mostly of people who expect a second dose which is scheduled in one month after the first one. I have gone from one of those with one dose of a two-inoculation regime into that group who now has less than two weeks for nearly 100% protection against COVID-19. I now have more cause to dread vehicle crashes (and I am prone to that due to sleep apnea... I have started to doze off on a round trip of 120 miles only fifteen miles from home and decided to play it safe. I stopped in the parking lot of a Dollar General, picked up a soda, drank it down, and then drove off safely.
Wise people assess the risks before doing anything. We can't fully excise risk from our lives, but we can make our adjustments.
Because the Indiana Toll Road has long stretches between interchanges I do not drive it. Had I known of this peril I would be living in a big city with solid mass transit (like Chicago) instead of a rural area. The county sheriff has seen me pulled to the side of a modestly-traveled road and has asked me what was wrong. It wasn't alcohol.
COVID-19 has already killed like a war. We have passed the equivalent of D-Day against a menace that has killed 554 thousand people in America alone. Whether we are past the Battle of the Bulge as an equivalent is much in doubt. Inoculation is now swifter than infection. I have good cause to expect a rapid drop-off in infections as Americans gt hed immunity as the sensible (if only because they are scared) people literally hed thelmselves into sites wherein they get inoculations.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.