Mutations and Masks

According to this article, thanks to the much-discussed "new variants," it's time to clamp down even further on activities and interactions, including those basic, "life-sustaining" things like going to the grocery store. They make it sound so easy: "We simply need to do what we’ve been doing all along to prevent infections, just much, much better." Too bad there has been so much opposition to those basic preventative measures, I can't imagine asking people to do them even more! But the most concerning part, to me, is that "More cases will also give the virus more opportunities to mutate further and potentially escape our vaccines, perpetuating the cycle of doom."

August de Richelieu for Pexels

The article above also echoes another one that got a lot of publicity this week - why aren't we wearing better masks? I love my cloth masks and have quite the collection of them now, but even though they're still what the CDC is recommending, they were only ever meant to be a stopgap until the supply of surgical and N95 masks was able to keep up with demand. Other countries have been distributing supplies of surgical or N95 equivalent masks to their populations, and now that there's more contagious variants of the virus, it's even more urgent to get everyone properly masked.

Our president elect has been naming more people to the COVID-19 task force, and has proposed delivering 100 million doses of vaccine in his first 100 days (to make up for the very slow rollout thus far), as well as having people wear masks faithfully for his first 100 days. (I still feel like the people who want to wear masks are already wearing masks, and the people who didn't vote for him will probably avoid masks and hold parties to lick each other out of protest 🤷🏼‍♀️)