Category Life

Trash Talk

Michael 4 Comments

We are already firmly into the fourth month of 2021. That itself is frightening, but more is that we still are filling our conversations with 2020 sound bite phrases (and some even older) which even in 2020 was depressing. So in the spirit of culture cancelling, let’s make a Second Quarter Resolution to, in no particular order, cancel these.

Eraser

Cancel Culture: Cancelling is becoming the new fad falling somewhere between hobby, and cottage industry. Old fogies like me tend to confuse cancel culture with “the mob” burning books or tearing down statues. It originated with some fashion or beauty type person who apparently was tight enough with the Kardashians to have amassed close to 2 Billion views on his YouTube channel lost over a million followers in a single day because of some spat he had with another YouTube beauty person. Seriously. You know I don’t make this stuff up. With origins that trite it’s time to cancel this bit of unculture.

Unprecedented Times: Many of last year’s news stories were unexpected, life-changing events. Of that there is no question. Were they unprecedented as the hyperbolic news media introduced every story. Consider this. To be unprecedented something must not have a precedent and a precedent is not merely the first of something, but the first of something to be used as an example for others to follow.  Let’s look at some of 2020’s “unprecedented” happenings. The pandemic was responsible for many of these events. First, there is the pandemic itself. Unprecedented, yes? Well, no, the WHO is currently tracking twenty different pandemics across the globe. Since 1900 there have been 12 worldwide pandemics, the most recent pre-CoViD were the 2013-2016 Ebola virus and the 2015-2016 Zika virus pandemics. Surely the vaccine response was unprecedent. Impressive yes, particularly in scope, unprecedented no. The 1947 smallpox vaccination drive in New York City claimed to have vaccinated 5 to 6 million people in less than a month. Verifiable data indicated 1.2 million doses were administered in the first week and a total of over 4.4 million administered during the 18 day campaign. Other “unprecedented” news stories from mass closures, to social unrest, to riots, to elections, even to the storming of the Capitol had precedents. The January attack on the Capitol was the sixth time the building had been breached and two other deadly incursions involving Capitol personnel occurred within its perimeter fencing.

Essential Worker – Clearly almost every worker can make an argument that a job is essential to somebody. Weather forecaster in San Diego might be stretching things but given that is only sunny there 362 days a year it could be essential for residents to know which three days to stay indoors. While I’m on this topic, there is no question of who qualifies as a Frontline Worker. If you have to ask, you aren’t one.

The New Normal – Do I have to say more?

Uncertain Times – A second cousin to Unprecedented Times, “Uncertain Times” is the nice little catch all to define any time that is uneasy or induces stress, real or imagined. Back when I was ineligible for AARP discounts, we called it a Get Out of Jail Card, AKA An Excuse to Get Out of Anything. You wanna know something, every time is uncertain. It if wasn’t it’s already past.

And finally, one to nip in the bud – Herd Immunity – Yes, it is a real thing, but unless you have a PhD in epidemiology or are a physician specializing in infectious diseases, you don’t know enough about it to carry on a Facebook level conversation let alone an intelligent one. Leave this to the experts. Hey, nightly news people, I’m talking to you, too.

There are a few hundred other choice words and phrases due for retirement: Blursday, Election Fraud, Super-Spreader, False Rumor (can a rumor actually be true?), and Remote [Anything]. Eliminate these and we have a good start on the return to intelligent life on this planet.

Genius

Reverse Engineering the National Pastime

Michael 2 Comments

If I read all the schedules right and didn’t miss anyplace, by the end of today all of the Major League Baseball teams will have hosted their season home openers. Barring rain delays. Or snow. Or CoViD. Yes, that new wrinkle for this time, game called on account of CoViD is a real thing. Last Thursday while much of the league was holding opening days somewhere, the Washington Nationals 2021 premiere was delayed until Monday, which was then further delayed due to an outbreak of infections on the squad and the ongoing contact tracing. All this was going on while a half of a country away the Texas Rangers were welcoming a sellout crowd of 38,238 people. (I suppose I could also call this post Alternate Facts and the National Pastime. You remember Alternate Facts. The Texas Rangers stadium actually holds 40,518 but according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the 38,000 attendance figure was “considered a sellout.” At least it wasn’t described as “the largest crowd to ever witness a baseball game  – period.” ) (Hmm) (Now, where was I?)

The rest of the league is probably hoping for a season somewhere in between. At my local MLB outlet, the ball club is planning to welcome 8,000 to 9,000 fans, representing 25% capacity of its stadium, to a contactless, cashless, experience. (In Pittsburgh in April they should be hoping for a snowless experience also but that’s a post for another day.) Contactless experiences are no longer unexpected. Tickets are electronically delivered and optically scanned using a smart phone app, kiosk type food and souvenir stands will not be present on concourses, and food services including in luxury boxes will eschew buffet and hand packed selections for pre-wrapped and canned beverage choices. That takes care of the contactless, but cashless. Apparently, no outlets in the stadium will accept cash including the parking concessions. To handle the possibility that someone might wonder into the ballpark with a pocketful of bills to trade for hot dogs and pennants there is a solution.

What might be well known to others hit me as a completely new idea – the “Reverse ATM” dispenser. In the event somebody does not have a credit or debit card, machines will be available to accept cash and dispense pre-paid Visa cards.

I’m not too proud to admit my first opening day baseball game was so long ago I also went without a pocketful of bills to trade them for hot dogs and my personal ball game weakness, peanuts. I did have a pocketful of quarters though and I still got change in return.

Reverse ATM machines. I wonder how Leo Durocher would describe them.

BaseballInMasks

From 1919 baseball when ballplayers weren’t so concerned about what they looked like as long as they could play.

Bright Yellow Daffodils and Dirty Old Cars

Michael 5 Comments

It seems the bright yellow daffodils and colorful tulips popped out of nowhere to boldly welcome Spring!  That’s not an original thought. I stole it from a text I got a few days ago. My friend opened a conversation with that. She went on to say how exciting spring is and, how it fills her with wonder watching the world transform as nature awakens from its log winter slumber. As the chat continued she talked about her neighbor, bundled against the still chilly air while he conducted his own transformation, washing the last of winter from his car, wiping not only the visible exterior but getting under the bumpers, between the open spaces on the wheels, and in all those other nooks and crannies nobody sees whether the car is sitting in the garage or speeding down the highway.

How does one get from daffodils to dirty cars in the same conversation? They naturally go together of course! Consider how those daffodils and tulips, how the crocuses and all the other early bulbs bring forth their colorful displays. They spend the winter buried under layers of dirt, push they way through the surface, some rain comes and nurtures the part we don’t see until with a little coaxing, a shimmering flower blooms with a burst of color. Not so different is the car that spent its winter buried under layers of road grime and salt residue. No matter how often you spray it down with soapy water out of a hose it won’t really shine until you do a little coaxing, getting down to the wheel and bumper level and give it the attention is needs to pull it through the dirt.

Daffodils and dirty cars. We fit in that discussion also. We too need a good cleaning after sitting dormant for so long. We need to give ourselves that attention and wipe away our stress, wash off the fatigue, polish the shiny parts of what makes us burst on the scene, coaxing ourselves into a riot of bright ideas and invigorated thoughts. We need to wake ourselves from the dormancy of complacency and refresh, rejuvenate, and re-energize our lives a few times a year.

Now would be one of those good times. Now while there are flowers blooming and cars shining under the sun climbing hirer into the sky each day. Now while all things of nature and of man are going under their yearly rebirth and renewal, now would be a good time to act like a daffodil or a dirty car and do a little regrowth and self-polishing.

What do daffodils, dirty cars, and you have in common? If you can answer that you’re ready to boldly welcomed Spring.

 

Weather Fools Day

Michael 2 Comments

April Fools and all that. Yeah yeah yeah. I understand it is still early spring, I know I live in a “temperate” zone, I get that average temperatures, especially nighttime temperatures are still “cool” — but it’s snowing! And not that little fluffy pretend snow. This is sticking snow! According to the weather nerds we could be looking for at least an inch accumulation and there could be 4 inches in the mountains. Now I’ll admit, that’s not a whole lot, but hello! It’s April! Now watch, this will be the only time the weather people get it right.

I don’t usually care much about weather, but this year it’s getting old. And it’s only April!!! If somebody offered me a grass shack on a tropical island where I would never see freezing precipitation again, I’d take it. I’d rather take my chances with hurricanes, sun stroke, and shark attacks than go through one more inch of snow fall this year.

On the bright side, we only average 140 days of any precipitation all year and we’ve already had 60 days of the stuff so in another couple months I should be able to take the convertible out of the garage.

Sheesh, a convertible – here. That’s about as much use as a pair of galoshes on that tropical island. Hmmm. Let me get those galoshes out instead.

SnowmanCar

Go to the Tape

Michael 4 Comments

Do you ever wonder why? Just – Why, Huh, Really, Yeah, Unbelievable I’ve been doing that a lot lately. Lately there have been a lot of news reports about the charges being filed against the people who attacked the Capitol. In case you are wondering, yes, I did think about that word choice and that is the one I settled on. All you need to do is look at the tape. And that’s where I’m going.

For years, hundreds of years, we’ve settled on a system of innocent until proven guilty. It’s a good system.  The Presumption of Innocence is so good most people assume it’s a guaranteed right. Actually, it isn’t. Due process is. Due process requires certain procedures are followed before a person can be charged with, tried for, or convicted of any illegal act. The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution demands due process in federal cases and the Fourteenth Amendment extends that protection to those accused in state and local cases. Part of due process at the level of conviction is that the accuser meet a “standard of proof.” That’s where things enter the “Really?” realm for me. Stick with me for another minute please.

Because the accuser has to meet a burden of proof is it assumed the accused is innocent until that proof is met. I prefer to think of it as the accused has not been proven guilty. In fact, if you have served on a jury you might recall before deliberations began the judge instructed you and the other jury members that you were to determine if the accused is guilty or not guilty. Nobody voted for innocent.

Eagle eyed wordsmiths will have noticed in the previous paragraph’s opening sentence I used the word “assume” instead of “presume.” If we have to call the current system something it really should be call an Assumption of Innocence, rather than the Presumption of Innocence.  To “presume” supposes there is some unspecified evidence to reach a conclusion; ‘assume’ takes for granted that whatever is supposed is true. That’s really what we have, we are assuming these people are not guilty. If we were to presume anything it would be the other way around. Why? As another great phrase we’ve all heard goes, let’s go to the tape.*

With cameras so ubiquitous you can certainly presume, darn near assume, that nothing happens without a record of it happening, often by those doing what’s happening, I am utterly amazed at what people say they did not do within days of proudly sharing videos of what they just did. That some rebel can grab a battering ram, slug his and/or her way through a locked door, smash through inner doors, steal items out of offices, take pictures of himself and or herself while battering, slugging, smashing, and stealing, and then plead not guilty of all charges just does not compute. “Yes, I went to Washington but I didn’t go inside.” Let’s go to the tape.

This is all happening at the same time news outlets are publishing security camera video of attacks against Asian Americans including a violent assault of an Asian woman on a street right in front of a police car. Let’s go to the tape.

This all got stirred up in my head over the weekend listening to the reports of the trial of that cop who killed George Floyd. (I don’t want to call it the Floyd trial because he isn’t being tried for anything, and I don’t want to call it that cop’s name trial because I don’t want to give him any extra recognition.) Let’s go to the tape.

With few exceptions all of those so far charged have pled not guilty, certainly that’s their right. They can say whatever they want and the system is built that they don’t have to prove they are not lying when they say it. Let’s go to the tape.

ReplayOne of the standards of proof is “Clear and Convincing Evidence,” that it is highly probably to suppose what is presented is how the elements of the action had occurred. On the legal ladder of liability this standard lands on the rung below “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,” that is the elements of the action had occurred as presented (which although is greater than to suppose the elements are present it does not mean “beyond all doubt” or “beyond a shadow of a doubt” or any other such absolute).

Call me an old fuddy duddy but I’m still of the school that if I see something happening with my eyes, I can pretty much suppose that’s how it went down and those actions did occur. Whether it is breaking door the doors to the Capitol, lifting a pack of gum, pushing an elderly Asian woman into a busy street, or kneeling on somebody until their life is snuffed out, I say we change the standard to “Let’s Go To The Tape.” It’s not just for sports anymore.

*The phrase “Let’s go to the video tape,” sometimes “Let’s go to the audio tape” is attributed to sportscaster Warner Wolf. Wolf published his memoir, Let’s Go to the Videotape: All the Plays and Replays from My Life in Sports, (Grand Central Publishing) with Larry Weisman in 2020.

Everyone Happens for a Reason

Michael 2 Comments

Buried under all the recent CoViD-19 news, a variety of natural disasters, and a couple of mass shootings, the really big news was pretty much missed. Last week the 2021 Oscar nominations were finally announced!

I’ve checked out all the entertainment news outlets and I haven’t seen one yet this year but soon, because there is at least one every year, soon there will be an article about some actor who had turned down one of the nominated roles. “I coulda been a contender!”

The saying is “everything happens for a reason.” Maybe it should be. or at least be augmented with, “everyone happens for a reason.” Everyone does you know.  We all have our purpose and that purpose is ours alone. We’ll not do anything just like anybody else and whyever the genes mixed however they mixed when they were mixing to make one of us, there was going to be only one of us. (Thoughts on identical twins still pending.)

The good actors, that is to say the actors who happen to be good people (they are a few) will joke about missing out on a possible award winning role and say, “Oh yeah that could have been me. As the line goes, ‘I coulda been a contender,‘ but I’d not have been half as good.” The rest of them are not so magnanimous. Surely they would have given not just nominated performances but certain award winning performances just because they are they. They are them? It is unthinkable that the hard work and superior skill of anybody else might have actually contributed to one’s nomination.

Bad actors aren’t the only bad actors in the world. We may all have had some moment in life where we made a decision to do or not to do and had we instead not done or done, life may have been significantly different. We fell victim to the shoulda, coulda, woulda syndrome. If I had gone to school, if I had taken that job, if I had played that game, if I had married that person I would be the one with the book deal, the corner office, the vacation home, or the beautiful children. Of course it wasn’t the school or the job or the partner that made any of those things happen. It was the effort of the one in those positions. In truth, when we made those decisions to do or not to do we already set into motion something significant. If our effort would have been great enough to be of value going down one path it also would have been going down another.

DirectionYears ago I saw a poster I shoulda bought. I’m sure it woulda made all the difference. I coulda had it on the wall always to remind me to take the right path, which woulda been remarkable because in truth it said I shoulda not take any path. Of course you coulda figured it out by now. It was Emerson’s quote, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Even without the poster (which woulda likely gotten lost by now anyway) I think I figured out that it’s not the role that makes me me. It’s how I fill it.

I’m not a contender. I’m already a winner.

A Tale of One City

Michael 2 Comments

It was the best of times, it was the worst … no, wait, that’s taken. That’s two cities anyway. How about: it was the best of intentions, it was the worst of intentions. The one city is here, the time was Saturday.

20210321_200444Saturday afternoon might have been one of the better times for this fair city as a small group peacefully assembled with speakers in support of the “Stop Asian Hate” movement, supporting the local and national Asian communities. The diverse group was mostly college aged people with some families and one celebrity who was in town filming a movie. The rally started at a corner a little bit out of the downtown district and after the speakers spoke they move to a nearby park and held a moment of silence for the those slain in Atlanta. It was a good, positive time, Definitely one of the better times. But then again . . .

Earlier Saturday a group of a few hundred gathered at the baseball stadium and accompanied by motorcycle mounted police, they march across a bridge, through town, then to the large state  park that dominates the focal point of downtown. There celebrities, local and state politicians, and candidates for upcoming races assembled to make speeches opposing the ongoing state mask mandate and protesting the results of the 2020 Presidential election. Still. One of the participants spoke about the danger of the right to bear arms “being taken away.” One of the speakers referred to Donald Trump as “the real President of the United States” from the podium. One of the marchers said “freedom is tenuous” when asked about his opposition to the mask mandate.

There is a local TV reporter who each morning posts an inspirational message to her social media accounts. Sunday’s was “Don’t wait for things to get simpler, easier, better. Life will always be complicated. Learn to be happy right now. Otherwise you’ll run out of time.” it’s a great message. The people at the small “Stop Asian Hate” rally would get that. The people at the whatever it was supposed to be rally never could understand that and probably wouldn’t bother to try. Yet those are the people who if they did try and then stopped trying to make everything “better” by their own definition and just be happy that they have the opportunities so many other people around the world do not, there wouldn’t be a danger of not having enough time for happiness. There might be an overabundance of happiness because the rest of the world, the majority of the world I am certain, wouldn’t have to spend so much time protecting themselves from the ones who are never happy.

It’s sad that a small but so loud group of people so desperately clinging to a fantasy still garner so much attention and cause such an extreme amount of hate that a peaceful group of people, ones of all ages, colors and ethnicities, are held hostage by the fear that that desperate ones might any moment mutate into desperados.

I was right the first time I thought about it. Saturday afternoon indeed represented a better of times in my one fair city. Let’s just leave it at that.

IMG_20210321_200836

Spring into Action, Spring into Love

Michael 9 Comments

Spring is close to being around the corner you can smell it in the air. I cannot remember a Spring I have waited for more than this year, and that’s a lot of Springs. Talk about a winter of discontent. It should have been one of great hope. A vaccine was out and in use! Even though the first doses were administered in December, technically that was still Fall. And then it went downhill.

Right out of the gate, reports of cheating among West Point cadets hit the papers. Of course the Commander in Chief was busy trying to beg, steal, or cajole a few million nonexistent votes (oddly he never tried to buy) so why shouldn’t the youngest of the military try to game their way through the system especially when just the following day the first of over 40 pardons or sentence commutations were issued by Trump in his last month in office. December wrapped up with three people shot in a bowling alley in Illinois. January saw landslides in Norway, blizzards in Spain, and nutcases raining down on Washington DC. In February, if CoViD-19 wasn’t an infectious enough problem to deal with, avian flu broke out in Russia and an Ebola outbreak in Guinea had all of West Africa on alert. The month wrapped up with 5 dead from a shooting in Indianapolis. That lead to February opening with 4 dead in an Oklahoma shooting, and in a weird homage to December, three people were shot in a bowling alley in Central Pennsylvania. Uprisings and protests dominated the news in February and March with unrest in Myanmar, Ethiopia, Catalonia, and Somalia.

With just 3 days remaining in this winter, the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center released a report documenting 3,795 incidents of harassment, physical assault, and civil rights violations against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since March 19, 2020 that include 503 in January of February of this year. (The Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on March 19, 2020.) These are only the reported incidents. It is impossible to say what the actual incident frequency is although the Pew Research Center estimates 3 in 10 Asian Americans have been verbally abused since the start of the pandemic last year.

In front of a house on a road I use often there is a sign proclaiming, “Impeach China Joe.” I doubt the people responsible for posting that sign understand what the words mean. Like most bullies, they simply repeat what the head bully says. One of their favored means of attack is denigration. In the school yard fifty years that would be “Four Eyes,” or “Stinky Pants.” Now it’s China Joe, Crazy Nancy, Braindead Bernie. Now it’s every time that somebody wants to look tough without a pack of Marlboro’s rolled in the white t-shirt sleeve, they repeat a select epithet. Even if it was just name calling to make themselves feel superior it would be so wrong, but the modern societal bullies do not stop there. Actual violence, hospitalizing and killing people make up over 10% of the reports received by Stop AAPI Hate. That was before six Asian women were killed and one other wounded in the Atlanta shootings this week.

IMG_20200726_232745We have a new season starting Saturday. Spring is supposed to be a season of rebirth, hope, and beauty. This would be a good time to start acting like reborn, hopeful, beautiful people and stop the unrelenting slide into the ugliness this country and this world have become. It will take action of your part. Positive action, not just a heart and praying hands icon on your Tweets and emails. I have said this here before, you cannot stop the hate if you are doing the hating. You must love. Make no mistake, the opposite of love is not hate. It is however the cure for hate. The opposite of love is apathy. If you are not actively loving then you are not truly loving, and if you are not loving you cannot oppose hate.

RogersClemmonsI don’t suppose that it is coincidence that Saturday is not only the first day of Spring but also Fred Rogers birthday. If I had to pick only one hero to model my life on it would be Mr. Rogers. For over thirty years Mr. Rogers was a friend to millions of young Americans, and with a diverse group of performers shared time, stories, music, and make believe. Unfortunately at the same time, thousands of young American bullies were already gearing up to throw water and hatred on the devotees of Fred Rogers gentle manner and universal friendship.

Don’t let the bullies take over. Spring into action. Spring into love!

We Will Survive

Michael 4 Comments

Did you watch the Grammy Awards?  That’s okay, I didn’t either. It’s been a while since I watched them. Possibly getting on to 40 years. The 1980 Grammy Awards are of particular note. That was the year Gloria Gaynor, Freddie Perron, and Dino Fekaris won for Disco Record of the Year* with “I Will Survive.” It was the first year an award category for disco was considered. It was also the last year for disco music to have it’s own category for consideration. Thanks to recently separated singers at karaoke bars “Survive” survives, but the respect for disco didn’t. (Actually, Rodney Dangerfield ‘s “No Respect” won Best Comedy Album that year.) ( Just sayin’)

Disco was born in 1970 when The Loft opened in Manhattan. It took almost the whole of the 70s to reach its peak, slowly building, earning its own hit chart, Billboard Magazine’s Dance Club Songs, in 1974 (its first #1 song was another Gloria Gaynor record, “Never Can Say Goodbye”), and topping out in popularity in 1978 following the release of “Saturday Night Fever.” After years of sharing the Grammy spotlight with the R&B categories, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (more commonly The Recording Academy) gave disco its own spotlight just in time for it to wither and die.

That seems fitting for America. We take forever to recognize something, throw together a quick acknowledgement, and then when it loses favor, drop it like a hot potato. We have little tolerance for what doesn’t give us an immediate benefit, ideally with no work on our part. And yet, like that classic from time gone by, we still survive.

We’ve spent the last year tempting fate with questionably adequate hand washing and poorly worn masks, packing thousands of people into small squares of urban real estate protesting a little bit of everything from everything side then aiming the blame for the subsequent week’s spike in CoViD cases, and making many wonder what year we just lived through when over 60% of Americans polled claom they will refuse to get vaccinated or will get the shot only if required (Kaiser Family Foundation poll, January 27, 2021).

Another thing fitting for America – with so many showing as much respect for our current situations as they had for Rodney 40 years ago, the rest of us will do our best Gloria Gaynor impersonations and still will survive. So there!

* Gloria Gaynor, Freddie Perron, and Dino Fekaris won for Disco Record of the Year with “I Will Survive” with the 12-inch club version. The same song in its commercial release version was nominated for Song of the Year.

IWillSurvive

Hugging Hope

Michael 9 Comments

March 11, 2020: “WHO declares corona virus disease pandemic.” March 11, 2021: “Government says in person nursing home visits OK.” Who would have thought in a year we’d be turning this corner already? That’s who, little letters, not WHO. I don’t know that WHO is that optimistic. The CDC is not that optimistic either if you read beyond the headline. Not unlike another headline from this week, “Fully vaccinated people can have small gatherings indoors.”

It’s been a year. More than a year really as WHO probably should have declared the pandemic a pandemic 2 or 3 or maybe more weeks earlier than it did. People want to return to normal even though many can’t define normal. I will say that we are approaching a point in an exit to the pandemic that I figured we would not have reached until the end of this summer. That’s approaching(!) an exit. But there are many encouraging signs: Three approved vaccines in the US, four in Canada and the EU, twelve different vaccines throughout the world. Export and travel agreements and restrictions minimizing rampant spread. Voluntary mitigation efforts taking place in larger than anticipated numbers when official orders have expired – with some notable exceptions. All that and more is hastening a resolution to the pandemic, not an eradication of the virus and its disease, and a resolution is the best we can hope for against as cunning enemy an enemy as Orthocoronavirinae betacoronavirus-2.

But many people – and most Americans – aren’t good at reading beyond the headlines and that’s why the same papers also are running headlines, “Texas Rangers plan to allow full capacity of fans for 2021 MLB Opening Day,” “Gov. Wolf indicates Pa. restaurants and bars can celebrate St. Patrick’s Day,” and “Wyoming to lift statewide mask mandate next week.” (If you are wondering, Wyoming will join 16 other states without mask mandates.)

It is a great thing that the fully vaccinated and can re-socialize with other fully vaccinated and low risk individuals (fully vaccinated occurs 2 to 4 weeks after the final shot), and that nursing home residents can enjoy indoor visits with contact (hugs!), but there is more to the guidance beyond the headlines. In the nursing homes contact visits are allowed for residents who have completed their vaccination, precautions such as wearing masks and using hand sanitizer should continue, and outdoor visits are still preferred. When the CDC released new guidelines earlier this week that included, “Fully vaccinated people can visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing, visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing, and refrain from quarantine and testing following a known exposure if asymptomatic,” the same guidance document recommends,“ it also noted that fully vaccinated people should continue to:

  • Take precautions in public like wearing a well-fitted mask and physical distancing
  • Wear masks, practice physical distancing, and adhere to other prevention measures when visiting with unvaccinated people who are at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease or who have an unvaccinated household member who is at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease
  • Wear masks, maintain physical distance, and practice other prevention measures when visiting with unvaccinated people from multiple households
  • Avoid medium- and large-sized in-person gatherings
  • Get tested if experiencing COVID-19 symptoms
  • Follow guidance issued by individual employers
  • Follow CDC and health department travel requirements and recommendations

20201004_185802We do well to celebrate the approach of near normalcy but approach the celebration cautiously. Otherwise these will be the more representative headlines in the next few weeks: “Brazil hospitals buckle in absence of national virus plan,” “Africa’s new variants are causing growing concern,” and “1 in 5 in US lost someone in pandemic.” You don’t want to be one of the 1s or you may find out “Why the ‘grief pandemic’ might outlast the worst of COVID-19.”

______

Please Note: All headline quotes are actual headlines from Associated Press, Austin American Statesman, BBC, CBS Sports, CTV News, and the Pittsburgh Press from March 8 through March 11, 2021. CDC Guidance from “Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US Dept. of Health and Human Services, March 8, 2021. Links included in guidance direct to CDC web-site.