Summer Games, COVID-style
Let’s lead off with some good news. The Teletubbies are vaccinated. They posted their vaccination cards on Twitter, so you can see exactly when Tinky Winky got jabbed. They are technically British citizens and not necessarily human, but let’s take the win.
Are we in the aftermath of the pandemic? Or are we still in the math? The math says the U.S. average daily number of cases more than doubled in the past 14 days. Can something be over while it’s getting bigger?
The national number for fully vaccinated Americans is 48 percent. That’s nice, but it’s also not budging very much, as if we’ve located a soft ceiling.
One indication that 48 percent is not good enough is that Florida – currently posting horrible case spikes – is at 47 percent.
One indication that vaccines work is that the states with more than 55 percent of their populations fully vaccinated do not have these problems. We can talk about the delta variant until we’re blue in the face – at which point we should clip on an oximeter – but if we realized our vaccination potential in this country, the delta variant would lay down its spike protein and surrender.
So what else is happening?
The Summer Olympics. With no spectators.
Japan is in a very odd situation. Their case rate isn’t horrible, because they did such a good job with social distancing, masking and other mitigations.
Their vaccination program is a mess, mainly because the political leadership wanted Japan to develop and manufacture its own vaccine. When that didn’t happen, the country wound up in line with lots of other places.
Few other modern societies have such ingrained ways of doing things from which they are incapable of departing. I would have accepted my vaccinations from a reasonably dexterous mynah bird who had been taught to say “Pfizer.” In Japan, only doctors and nurses can give the shots, and a fair number of people want it to be their own doctor or their doctor’s nurse. Dentists were grudgingly approved as shot-givers and then never called upon.
Japan also insisted on sticking to its traditional policy of doing its own domestic testing of vaccines that have cleared the bar in international trials.
In a way, their success at controlling disease may have lulled them into thinking they didn’t need something called, oh, I don’t know, Operation Warp Speed. If we had Japan’s COVID death rate, we’d be at 30,000 to 40,000 instead of over 600,000.
So only 17-19 percent of Japan’s population is fully vaccinated. Japan has the oldest population in the world, with 28 percent over 65. (We’re at more like 16 percent.)
Banning Olympic spectators was an act of self-preservation. One Tennesseean with a hacking cough is way more dangerous over there than he is here, although could you move a couple of seats away, please, Joe Bob?
Japan was meanwhile poised to win the gold in the Mixed Message competition by handing out 150,000 condoms to the athletes.
In an ordinary Olympic year, this would make sense. The Village, full of fit young people away from home, inevitably turns into a sex farm, and nine months later, babies are born who are simultaneously good at fencing and rowing or at both kinds of polo.
This time the athletes are being told to make no unnecessary physical contact and to stay out of bars and restaurants. The condom plan has changed, so that the competitors will get them as souvenirs on the way out. Buh-bye. Go home to Kazakhstan and make sexy time.
Japan is one of several countries to realize that alcohol is not their friend right now. Japan has tried to implement a spotty and confusing ban on serving booze. South Africa went for something that looked like Prohibition.
Obviously, people who congregate in bars exhibit worse and worse transmission-related judgment as the night rolls along, but South Africa also acknowledges that drinking routes a lot of extra bodies into the already overburdened ERs.
But we’re fine, right? Here in Connecticut, 62 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. What could go wrong?
Well…while I was writing this, a Red Sox-Yankees game was called off due to positive tests among three Yankees who were supposedly vaccinated.
Fortunately, Laa-Laa the Teletubby has recovered from Tommy John surgery.