July 9--OMG, one third of July is gone.

We have cool temps today--not out of the 70s so far. We have had some clouds that look threatening but then move off making way for the next batch after a bit of sun. We are expecting company a little later--Mom's step-granddaughter and her daughters. We haven't seen the girls for two years. That will be nice.

COVID keeps rearing its ugly head. Japan has decided that their Olympic Games will be held without spectators after declaring a health emergency amid another spike in coronavirus cases. Some new reports from Europe say that a new wave is building with the Delta variant leading the charge. Missouri has become our newest hot spot. Their hospitals are filling up fast and they had to beg for ventilators over the last week. Nearly all of the new cases (99+%) are Delta cases. Missouri is one of the states with low vaccination rates. I remember saying early on in the push to get people vaccinated that only about 45% of people the flu shot the notion of getting 60% vaccinated for COVID was probably a bit optimistic. The 67% reported over the last weekend was phenomenal. Unfortunately, that 67% isn't spread evenly over the country as a whole.

 Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark wonders at the seeming "insanity" of who choose to be blind to obvious risks. I also find the anti-vax movement perplexing. I have wondered often over the last 20+ years whether we have become very complacent about vaccines because the diseases they prevent are rare nowadays. 

July 10

It is cool so far and cloudy. I got a bit of the shed outside swept and straightened out. I should have done it last spring but didn't have much ambition or energy for much so I did what I could which meant getting the containers planted. Then the heat hit and about all I did outside was water the plants. I hope this cooler weather hangs around for a while. If it does I will get the shed completely cleaned up, rearranged and some stuff thrown away. I got rid of half a dozen trellis stakes because the plastic coatings had been badly cracked and broken allowing the steel core to rust. They aren't strong enough to support anything any more. I have plenty more so no need to think about replacements.

Continuing the last thought from yesterday--

I am 72. When I was a kid all of us got measles, chicken pox, mumps. The vaccines for those didn't come out until the 1960s. Whooping cough vaccines have been available since 1914 and in 1949 was combined with one for tetanus and diphtheria to form the DPT vaccine which is standard today. I and all of my friends and their younger siblings got over the diseases but though considered "childhood" maladies they could and did have serious, long lasting consequences. In my life I have seen one case of polio--a girl in my 7th or 8th grade class who immigrated from Eastern Europe. But before the vaccine was introduced in the mid 1950s it was a perennial summertime terror that hit all income groups and left many with serious disabilities. Over the last decade I have seen news reports of measles, mumps, and whooping cough. They had become so rare that a couple of doctors didn't recognize them at first. At the same time the incidence of autism in children has increased and a report of a study linking autism to vaccines caused a lot of parents to reject vaccines for their children. The report was later shown to be based on phony data but damage has been long lasting. More people today have experience with autism than have experience with measles, mumps, rubella, polio or pertussis. That provides a reservoir of resistance that has lately been augmented by political partisans.