Something's got to give

Happy Monday, er, Tuesday, everyone.  This is always confusing for me following a Monday holiday, but I made it worse by taking last Friday off as well.  Despite today's uncertainty, I enjoyed my long weekend, and hope you had the opportunity to do so as well.

One group that we can probably rest assured didn't get extra time off is our medical personnel.  I live in Kentucky, as mentioned here repeatedly, and it seems we're now on the list of states "of concern" to public health officials at the national level.  Why?  Because we have too few of our citizens vaccinated against COVID-19 and therefore our hospitals and emergency rooms are overrun with COVID cases of varying severity.

Kentucky is one of the states where a significant portion of persons have continued living their lives pretty much as they always have, without masks or social distancing or avoiding congregant settings.  So it isn't hard to understand why these circumstances are converging so rapidly.

Along with that, there have been numerous court challenges to some of the executive orders Governor Andy Beshear put into place in response to the pandemic, and now he's forced to work directly with the state legislature, which normally only meets every two years, to identify and enact new policies, rules and restrictions.  The only political comment I'll make in reference to this is that Governor Beshear is a Democrat and Republicans control most of the state offices (including Attorney General) and both houses of the state legislature.

I'm crossing my fingers that reason will replace rhetoric here.

Of course, many states have it far worse than Kentucky right now, as Florida continues to lead the way in case volume, hospitalizations, and the like.  The president of the state's hospital association has appeared on television quite a lot recently to praise Governor Ron DeSantis' policies for addressing the virus, but I don't know that he has any at present, except to prevent county and city governments from enacting the kind of restrictions and protections that should be common sense in a state overrun with COVID-19.  DeSantis said publicly that people who are not vaccinated are, essentially, only hurting themselves.  I wonder if he would feel differently if a family member could not gain access to emergency medical care if needed, because so many Florida hospitals cannot accept additional patients of any kind.

Another governor of a southern state, Tate Reeves of Mississippi, recently stated that people shouldn't fear the coronavirus if they believe in the afterlife.

I don't know what will break this cycle, if anything, as one would believe that those who denied the virus as being real or the vaccines as being effective surely now have at least a second-hand contact who's become seriously ill or worse.  And let's face it, no amount of dining out or attending movies and concerts and sporting events would ever be more valuable than just a few more minutes with someone you love.

Would it?