Captain's Log book entry:
Eh, I think people are tired of politics in general and how everyone seems to love to get in the weeds on meaningless things like him wearing a mask.
That and we're not supposed to talk politics here anyway so...
Now they're tired?
I had seen somewhere that kids start there as early as this week. They were waiting for the study on heart inflammation to start vaccinating kids. Without kids they have been stagnating at 60% of the population with 1 shot, but that appears to be more than enough to crush the virus in Israel. We should be above 55% and approaching 60% of the total population with 1 shot in the US by around July 4. Hopefully that same ballpark works for us too. We do have a Similar amount of natural infections but obviously the US is much larger and diverse so not as easy to get a unified national level.
You know that the pandemic is coming quickly to an end when the extremes on either side get more confrontational and start bringing up random stuff from Feb 2020. When there’s nothing left to argue about and you still desperately want to continue the fight you have to invent stuff to be upset about. The end is almost here and for the rest of us it’s a happy time to be celebrated.
My friend who is a server at the Olive Garden can attest to that. His location is packed every night with hungry guests , tipping very well.You know that the pandemic is coming quickly to an end when the extremes on either side get more confrontational and start bringing up random stuff from Feb 2020. When there’s nothing left to argue about and you still desperately want to continue the fight you have to invent stuff to be upset about. The end is almost here and for the rest of us it’s a happy time to be celebrated.
I went to my favorite steakhouse last night. The waiter said business is still down during the week because they had a heavy draw from business travelers on expense accounts but the weekends have been packed. He said he still does really well on tips even during the week because they are short staffed so even though there are less tables full overall he gets more tables a night. Seemed pretty happy. No masks required anywhere inside for fully vaccinated customers but the staff still had to wear masks. It felt almost like normal.
Disney, at least, is trying to get back in the game:
www.mceconferences.com
My company just removed the restrictions on business travel. You had to get VP level approval to travel anywhere up until now. For sales positions we are also slowly bringing back door to door and in person sales as well which were completely eliminated during Covid. Slow return to normal.
Same with my wife’s company. They’re back to face-to-face consulting, traveling, etc. Office reopened around Mother’s Day. Relatively small company of ~200 employees scattered around the US and another 40ish centra office folks. They’re also required to be vaccinated as of mid-May.
By fall/winter, don't ya think COVID-19 will not be big problem anymore such as no more spikes / surges, as conventions, Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, Halloween events, Christmas events, trade shows, and others will go back to normal by end of the year...?
My biggest issue with the extreme mitigation measures that were done (not talking about things like masks in WDW queues) was that they were all implemented under the assumption that everybody was sick, when, even at the peaks in hot spots, less than 5% were possibly contagious.
Those types of mitigations in general lasted only for a few months in the beginning of the pandemic when we didn’t actually know how many people were sick. We didn’t have enough testing to even test people we were pretty sure were positive back then. By June 2020 or earlier the stay at home and essential only orders were dialed back almost everywhere. Some places like CA reimposed during wave 2 but most places never went back to that level.
We also don’t know, but with the transmissibility of the virus can cautiously assume, 5% might have turned to 10 or 15% in short order. Especially without a robust test and trace system in place. There’s a reason the field hospitals were set up, assuming the worst wasn’t far away.
In seven weeks, since April 14th, the number of daily cases (seven day rolling average) in the USA is down 77%. It was 16,501 yesterday. It's been a pretty linear slope down. If the same slope continues (I'd expect it to accelerate a little as more get vaccinated), the USA would be down to about 3,800 cases per day (1.15 per 100k) by 7/20.
