Lunacy continues to infect those who flaunt the recommendation and regulations that could protect them from the COVID-19 virus.
This suicidal group includes those who refuse vaccinations to protect them from the virus. Many shun the vaccine for purely political partisan reasons that have nothing to do with health or safety concerns.
Others have had one of the two shorts of Pfizer or Moderna and now brag that the one does is also they need.
“Just plain dumb and stupid,” fictional Forrest Gump said. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, is more polite but shares the feeling that those who are ignoring vaccinations or taking needed safety precautions are playing an infectious version of Russian Roulette.
Dr. Fauci says the current American rate of 50,000 new virus infections a day is too high.
“That’s a precarious level, and we don’t want that to go up,” he said on ABC’s Sunday talk show. Polls also say that more and more Americans with one of the two-needed shots are not planning to get the second one.
Don’t tell that to the more than 21,000 people who caught the virus after their first shot. Many of them let their guard down too soon, medical experts say.
“The thing people need to remember is the vaccine is not 100 percent protective, nothing is 100 percent protective,” Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease doctor in South Carolina, tells The Washington Post. “We want this to become akin to it feeling like a nuisance cold if you get vaccinated. We don’t want people having significant morbidity and mortality from COVID-19.”
Some of those who got infected decided to socialize right after getting their first shot and paid for being lax. It takes at least five days for that first vaccination to start providing some immunity but not all. The second shot will also needed a week or two to raise that protection level to 90 percent.
The one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine provides about 65 percent immunity, tests show. Mutant variants of the virus could lower immunity protections by any of the vaccines.
Pfizer is already talking about a potential need for a third “booster” shot to deal with the mutations of the virus. Some medical experts say we could need annual shots, like the ones for flu, to deal with the evolving virus.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is easing some restrictions in crowd sizes for gathering, including indoor and outdoor music venues, effective May 15 but says mask and social distancing requirements remain in place.
Some infectious disease experts predict masks will remain a requirement for at least the rest of this year and possibly into 2022.
As of Monday morning, the World Health Organizations reported that about a billion shots have been given around the globe, but that’s not even close to half of the eight billion inhabitants of planet Earth.
The virus is still a pandemic.