NEW: L.A. County Public Health is now recommending that *everybody*, regardless of vaccination status, mask up indoors in public places as a precaution over concerns about the Delta variant.

Sound off.

— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) June 29, 2021

I echo that red states will hold out as long as possible in bringing back masking measures. Blue, let's be honest, probably still have requirements or at least have masking with over 80% of the gen pop. So when you see potential mandates in LA or other blue cities, it's not surprising. Just got back from driving to the east coast (North Carolina), certain places like Atlanta seem to be stuck in May 2020. Restaurants (some not all) still had capacity limits, and the Georgia Aquarium and Coca-Cola museum required masks regardless of vaccination, which was ver annoying. The College Football HOF did not though. Which was great to see as they realize it's 2021. There still are some places that the Time Variance Authority needs to visit to reset the timeline back to 2021 no doubt.

I would have thought something similar about the red and blue states, but we just returned from a long road trip with stops in Colorado (blue), South Dakota (red), Minnesota (blue), Wisconsin (purplish? They flip flop), and Tennessee (red). We saw more masks at a gas station in Texarkana last night than we did during the rest of the trip. It was really surprising.

cc_ag92 said:

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I would have thought something similar about the red and blue states, but we just returned from a long road trip with stops in Colorado (blue), South Dakota (red), Minnesota (blue), Wisconsin (purplish? They flip flop), and Tennessee (red). We saw more masks at a gas station in Texarkana last night than we did during the rest of the trip. It was really surprising.

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I have not traveled much out of the State since Covid, but in the last couple of weeks have made the Austin-Corpus-Houston-DFW loop several times. Seems to me that there is a correlation between voting blocks and mask wearing, but voting blocks are very local. Even in a town like Texarkana.

Probably true and I know very little about Texarkana and their local voting blocks, but it was interesting to see and definitely not what we expected.

cc_ag92 said:

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Probably true and I know very little about Texarkana and their local voting blocks, but it was interesting to see and definitely not what we expected.

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Went to Kroger in Frisco/McKinney a little before 6 pm and was surprised at the amount wearing masks as it had gotten to a point where maybe 20% were wearing them about 2 weeks ago. Might have just been the timing and luck of the draw but I wonder if more had them on b/c of the recent variant hype.

We got back last week from a 2+ week trip to Utah,Wyoming, & Montana with driving time in New Mexico and Idaho. The only place masks were required in the 16 days we were traveling was at a restaurant on the Navajo reservation in southern Utah. The only things we found that were still closed were monuments and parks that are on Navajo lands. Even New Mexico, which had been quite restrictive was wide open.

Fan said:

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We got back last week from a 2+ week trip to Utah,Wyoming, & Montana with driving time in New Mexico and Idaho. The only place masks were required in the 16 days we were traveling was at a restaurant on the Navajo reservation in southern Utah. The only things we found that were still closed were monuments and parks that are on Navajo lands. Even New Mexico, which had been quite restrictive was wide open.

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That sounds like a cool trip

West Point Aggie said:

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Fan said:

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We got back last week from a 2+ week trip to Utah,Wyoming, & Montana with driving time in New Mexico and Idaho. The only place masks were required in the 16 days we were traveling was at a restaurant on the Navajo reservation in southern Utah. The only things we found that were still closed were monuments and parks that are on Navajo lands. Even New Mexico, which had been quite restrictive was wide open.

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That sounds like a cool trip

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It was!

So all the talk of achieving heard immunity at 75% or whatever, between vaccinations and those who have had it already, is no longer the target? Is the theoretical target 100% vaccinations now?

NM

I just drove through 10 states in the midwest (mostly red, but some blue) and I didn't notice any masks until I got back to TX which surprised me.
I didn't see any masks at the restaurant we ate at in Texarkana, but around the major metros in TX the masks are still fairly common. I attribute this to TX being more of an urban state and melting pot than the others.

agsalaska said:

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texan12 said:

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It's already a talking point regardless of who is or isn't vaccinated amongst the healthiest of people. Chris Paul was a victim too. I believe in NC State's case contact tracing screwed them. Either way it's completely ridiculous and the unvaccinated players will be the cherry on top for reporters. This thing will linger.

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Only because so many people refuse to be vaccinated.

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Jon Rahm tested positive well after vaccination has to withdrawal from olympics. Where is the logic behind this?? It's an outdoor sport with no spectators.

Gordo14 said:

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Herd immunity is very fluid. The Delta variant is verifiably much more contagious than the original strain. Just look at India, the UK, and Israel as examples. As a result herd immunity requires far more immunity than the original strain did.

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Or it requires the people worried about the virus to get a vaccine, which results in the vast, vast majority of vaccinated having no to minimal or mild symptoms.

And of course this ignores, once again, the recovered.

I would bet that covid is here for the long haul now that it is gotten a strong foothold throughout the world.

If we get rid of it, we are going to get rid of it through vaccines for nearly everyone. It is not going to disappear, except for short periods of time, left on its own.

There are very few diseases that we have actually eradicated. Smallpox comes to mind as the best example. It took vaccines to do it. There is another, but I don't remember which it was off of the top of my head.

Even with the success of the polio vaccines, there are still small outbreaks in the Afghanistan - Pakistan area. It has yet to be eradicated.

It does look like we have eradicated the earlier SARS from the human population without a vaccine. In that case, though, the disease was apparently not very contagious until after the disease had progressed to the point of having clear symptoms. Also, the Chinese used quick and strict means to isolate those with it -- if you got it, you really didn't have any choice about whether you were going to be quarantined no matter how you felt. It worked.

If SARS had gotten a strong foothold, it could easily have been much different.

Any zoonotic disease is going to create more issues because it depends on the animal reservoirs to keep going. That's why rabies is such a problem with something like 20,000 to 40,000 deaths yearly worldwide. Even if every person in the world was vaccinated, the disease would continue to survive in the animal populations of the world.

The same goes for diseases such as anthrax and bubonic plague. Did you know a little girl (9 years old, I think) recently died from the plague in Colorado?

A few years ago, we were even exporting the bubonic plague from the Texas Panhandle to Colorado. There was a prairie dog town near Lake Meredith that the animal rights people wanted to save and so they were trapping prairie dogs and releasing them in Colorado. It turned out that plague was running through the prairie dog town.

Fortunately, for covid, that animal reservoir is limited in where it is found and people generally don't come into contact with that reservoir.

There is also the question about how long the vaccines remain effective. With many people, it seems to be more like wishful thinking than anything else. My gut feeling is that the current vaccines aren't enough to eradicate the disease even if everyone did get them.

With everyone abdicating personal responsibility and wanting to not have to do anything about it including getting vaccinated, covid is not going away any time soon.

I saw something in the news today about deer and covid. In the effort to determine if there are any animal reservoirs for covid (besides bats, of course), they found that many deer have antibodies to it already:

From https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/over-half-the-deer-in-michigan-seem-to-have-been-exposed-to-sars-cov-2/

Quote:

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The USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is studying a variety of species "to identify species that may serve as reservoirs or hosts for the virus, as well as understand the origin of the virus, and predict its impacts on wildlife and the risks of cross-species transmission." This is the same group that identified the spread of the virus to a wild mink in 2020.

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I didn't know about the mink, either.

Quote:

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Using a captive deer population, the USDA had already determined that deer can be infected by the virus, although the animals display no symptoms. So although direct interactions between deer and humans are relatively limited, checking the wild populations made sense. The USDA checked populations in a total of 32 counties in four different states, obtaining blood samples to look for antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2.

The antibodies were quite common, ranging from a low of 7 percent of the samples in Illinois to a high of 60 percent in Michigan. All told, a third of the deer tested had antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.

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If it turns out to spread easily from deer to humans, it may be nearly impossible to eradicate no matter how effective our vaccinations become.

To the point of when does it end....starting to think never....even if we have a 100% vaccination rate.

Jerome Adams on Fox News just a minute ago....."lockdowns are coming" due to high hospitalization rates (note...he did NOT say high deaths).

If vaccinated people can spread....the only way to "end" this is to just lockdown permanently.

This guy is spewing fear porn as much as anyone while also saying we need to stop playing politics.

West Point Aggie said:

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Covid really ends when it is no longer politically advantageous.

First we just had to flatten the curve
Then it was just two more weeks
Then it was "get vaccinated" (totally agree there)
Then it was get vaccinated and get back to life (pervy Joe even said so)
Then it was the variants (oh no!)
Now it is mask up regardless of vaccination status
When "delta" runs it course it will be some new variant (don't be surprised if they call it the Texas variant so they can focus attention on politics in this state)

Aside from the real need to be smart about this virus, the fear porn is real and the thirst for power has made this thing so very attractive.

News people should never wonder why they're loathed as they are!

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This. And yet Covid!!!!!! is their lead story every day. I'm fairly certain most Americans stopped listening months ago.

I think it's over when we get relaible data that definitively segregates groups by below categories. The "experts" are doing everything they can to gaslight public bc they feel its their higher duty to meet vaccine targets.....and we are all just peasants unable to determine our own immunity status.

1) prior infection, vaccinated (N & S antibodies)
2) prior infection, unvaccinated (N & S antibodies)
3) no prior infection, vaccinated (S antibodies)
4) no prior infection, unvaccinated (nothing)

Honestly, what news are y'all watching where Covid is the lead story right now? Every episode I've watched lately has led with the Olympics. There's a story about the temperature reaching 100 degrees again. Cowboys training camp is the lead sports story in Dallas. There's a report about Covid in there somewhere, but it's not been the lead. Maybe change the channel.