At the moment I’ve got to admit, COVID’s not really terrifying me. Not like people do. Not like the racist radical right’s attack on American ideals and democratic principles, not like getting into a car accident and suffering insurmountable medical debt, not like running a mic cable, having someone trip over it, and trying to sue me over THEIR insurmountable medical debt… truly, betwixt my emPfizerment and my relatively good, if imperfect health, COVID’s low on my terror list.
But it’s there. And I fear for our fans. And I worry about broader messaging and community. There’s a post that’s gone viral (TOO SOON!!!) in the local community about “A personal friend who is fully vaccinated posted yesterday about how they and a group of close friends recently contracted covid. All had been vaccinated. The event was held indoors. No one wore masks. The area they live in has had the highest vaccination rate in the US of any county with a population of 300,000 or more residents. As of this writing 80% of the attendees have tested positive. All are symptomatic.” Variations on this story seem to imply it was a folk jam in Baltimore (which calls into question plenty of the above “facts” since Baltimore’s vaccination rate is quite low), but as with most things like this there seems to be no attribution, it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from or even if it’s real – but it hammers down the idea that too little too late, Delta’s taking its toll on the world and anyone who thought we were not just beyond the light at the end of the tunnel but fully out of the woods (yes, the long dark tunnel somehow grew trees as well – fungus probably) needs to double check where they’ve been getting their news.
A good place to get your news is PROBABLY Disney. Today they announced THEY’LL be going back to masking indoors at their parks, and that seems like a good way of watching which way the wind is whooshing.
Politicians don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the nation, or you, or even necessarily what’s best for THEM in the long run – they make decisions based on what’s likely to get them re-elected in the next election – so they really only care about short-term news cycles, at the most they care about the next 2 to 6 years of the future and whether they can blame anything bad on someone else. It doesn’t matter if it’s bad for YOU if it makes THEM look GOOD. It doesn’t matter if 10 years from now we realize millions died from the effects of their decisions, as long as we don’t catch on before the next election cycle.
Doctors are hanging on by their fingernails and scientists follow the ever-evolving science – but Disney is a multi-billion dollar operation that cares about the longevity of their profits, and the best way to ensure THAT is to make sure that people come out of their parks happy and healthy so they can come back again and again and again. You don’t sacrifice the sheep, you sheer them.
I wasn’t totally sure how serious COVID was until the NBA shut down. Till Disney closed. Till the big corporations that pay millions of dollars for the best advice to plan for ten years, fifty years – who plan to be around in a HUNDRED years – once THEY took it seriously, well ahead of the governors and senators and certainly our last joke of a president, I was pretty sure they weren’t cutting off their Life’s blood of paying customers on a whim or for a little political stunt.
Things were serious.
And so – with Disney’s announcement today, I hope people open their eyes even if their not seeing the above post in their Facebook feed.
Wear the damned mask. Get vaccinated. And CONTINUE to wear the damned mask. I’m not religious about it. I have faith in low-ramification settings like Live from the Lair amongst people I trust to say things like “meh, I’m not feeling 100% I’m sitting this one out”, but I’m not going to a supermarket without a mask. I’m not stepping into my Dunkin’ Donuts and dropping my mask. I know what the donuts smell like. I’ll sniff them when I get home.
I’m not gonna eat out in doors.
Now – how does that effect ilyAIMY? I’m frankly not sure. I think at the moment we’re planning to still do next week’s Friday night show at Victoria Station Cafe, but I can imagine wearing masks as we load in and stuff, unless we’re eating and singing… and we’ll probably be able to do the former outdoors.
That area of Connecticut isn’t (yet) seeing the uptick that much of he rest of the nation is seeing. Their vaccination rates are solid and it’s a relatively large space where… well… it’d be great to say our draw is so big this won’t be the case, but realistically there will be space to spread out. I AM beginning to worry about the 8/13 show in DC. We don’t have to make a decision for a little bit, but it’s got me concerned…
And so I continue to try to do the right thing, but reassure myself somewhat to the tune of : as long as you’re vaccinated catching COVID is no longer as threatening as it would’ve been, and those who can’t or won’t get vaccinated have the easy option of seeing us OUTDOORS cause we’ve got plenty of those gigs coming up too!