A Journal of the Pandemic #28

 So, got some interesting news yesterday.

At work we've had our fair share of employees who've come down with COVID-19 since March 2020.  Until yesterday I had never had someone working in the same room as me get it.  Yeah.  So.

I'm already on vacation.  I was actually asked to consider coming in the rest of the week to help out while my coworker's out.  I have no interest in doing that.  I'm very content with how I'm spending this time, thank you, and how I intend the rest of the week to play out.  I'm feeling fine, by the way.  

How this is playing out is very interesting.  Yeah, we've been dealing with this pandemic for very close to two years now.  When the Delta variant hit, we came very close to dealing with it as we had at the height of the response last year.  Close, but in my experience, not that close.  As much as some people want to be extra cautious, things are slowly returning to normal.  I mean, other than the giant backlog of materials floating off the coast of California.  (Which, again, for those keeping score, is kind of ironic, as my first awareness of COVID-19 was the cruise ships held in quarantine off the coast of China.)  

The government passed a mandate, just before my previous vacation, for all federal employees to be vaccinated.  At work they just made that an official requirement of continued employment.  And, thanks again for asking, I am vaccinated, and would've been sooner if things had played out differently, but, and I don't know how it is for everyone, things have been progressing at a leisurely pace, the less the urgency of the whole thing has been felt.  

There are plenty of people who are still unvaccinated, and at this point we can probably assume it's people who have made deliberately decisions to be so, and this is beginning to be an issue.  Southwest Airlines just had a fairly dramatic showdown with the whole concept, at one point denying that a rash of flight cancellations had anything to do with it (it could also have been, I don't know, UFOs).  A lot of people have a lot to say about this sort of thing, but there is, surprisingly, a lot of different ways to view things, and even if I personally think a lot of it is stupid, it's still going to be that way, and there's no good reason to try and deny it from happening (that way lies tyranny).  So that's how things are.

I had no bad reaction to the shots, and anytime I've felt sick during this whole period, especially when I went to the effort of getting tested last December, I've had no doomsday effects.  Some people have been far less fortunate.  

The protocols keep changing.  Previously they would've shut down the room, at work, but they're either not going to or working slowly toward it.  So far they aren't, and the stated reason is that every member of the regular room staff has been vaccinated, and we still wear masks, as we have all day every day since returning to work in May 2020, and at this point that seems good enough.  (Except the one who contracted the virus.  They're out at least through Friday.  The previous standard was a two-week quarantine, or until they tested negative.)

There's a lot of people who want to remain as cautious as possible, but slowly, we're emerging from the various restraints.  Movies are routinely making $100 million and above at the US box office again.  We're not being bombarded with dire warnings about outbreaks, and for much of the year mass gatherings have been happening.  They recommend booster shots.  

I've begun wondering about life without masks again, but then, I'm at a library today where two days ago I wore one of my mustache masks for the first time, and the staff loved it.  These are certainly interesting times.  They won't be hard to remember.