Delta Dawn

Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today To take you to his mansion in the sky? And so on and so on it goes. The delta variant of COVID is rampaging through the country, worst in places where there are no mask mandates and fewer people are vaccinated, but it is everywhere. We are now well over 100K people testing positive a day and we are starting to inch back up to a thousand people a day dying. And the real numbers of people who have the virus is likely to be well above that. The Provincetown outbreak taught us a lot. The first is that while for most of us this is our first epidemic, for gay Americans, this is the second round, and they learned a hard fought lesson that knowledge is power. We owe the largely vaccinated vacationers on Cape Cod who underwent testing for the knowledge we have going forward. But what good is it doing? The vast majority of those who are dying and severely ill are unvaccinated, but we now know that vaccinated people get sick with the delta variant and that they can definitely spread it. There are two thing that really break my heart about this. Besides just how insanely stupid it all is. The first is that there are more and more children who are hospitalized--many of them too young to be vaccinated. Just at the moment that they are trying to reopen schools. We cannot even for a moment prioritize children. The other is that for healthcare workers who have spent the whole pandemic watching people die are now watching senseless preventable deaths. It just has to take a toll on their mental as well as physical health. So mask up!