I went to Lowes today, still double masked. Since the CDC released their relaxed indoor mask recommendations, I quickly went from a majority to a minority. Our area is still considered high risk, but that seemingly was not heard.
Got to admit, I felt people were looking at me funny.
Our community has a major research hospital that gets tough cases. I do wonder if the relatively high rates of hospitalization is from people flown in, and not representative of our community exposure.
We still won’t go indoors to play pickleball, but we did finally decide to play with other partners outdoors, not just with each other. That was lovely.
On a positive note, our dog who got covid with us in February 2020 and has had lung issues ever since, actually seems to be improving. His Prednisone is down to almost nothing and we will try eliminating it soon. He has much more energy and is more social as well, no longer bloated like a too full water balloon that may pop if you touch it. Perhaps the end to his long covid? He is the reason we have been careful to the extreme in minimizing exposure, given he has no vaccine available.
Texas is reporting 14% and Florida 12% – both are “no-go zones” for me. I’ll wait for Darwin to finish up his work.
This reminded me of something I wanted to mention! A family member visited in CA a few weeks ago and noticed that the testing sites were literally (the old version of “literally”, not the new-fangled figurative “literally”) pulling random people off the street to come get tested. They said that they walked near the California Science Center and within a short walk was approached twice to be tested at a sidewalk testing site. There happens to be a university right there, and a bunch of university housing, so they probably get a lot of students for testing. So that seems to bring up the test numbers there. Meanwhile in places like FL and TX, such a thing is a rarity, if it ever even happens. Can you imagine if people regularly solicited people to be tested on the street in TX??? In places like TX and FL, people only test if they feel sick or were potentially exposed (or are required to test for travel, of course).
So it is possible that the denominator (number of tests) is much higher in CA than in TX, and if many of those additional tests are “solicited” from random people, especially young people, with no symptoms or anything, then the positivity rate might naturally come out much lower.
Using the new metrics, CDC data show more than 90% of US residents live in a location with low or medium Covid-19 community levels. A CNN analysis of the data finds only 7% of the US population is in a county with high Covid-19 community levels.
In places like TX and FL, people only test if they feel sick or were potentially exposed (or are required to test for travel, of course).