covid entry. in Every day scata

I should have been keeping better record of the plague. Kind of late to start now, but, eh.
strong text“The latest
Each new phase of the coronavirus pandemic has pitted the speed of viral spread against the speed of human responses. Now, the contest is the delta variant vs. vaccines and prevention, in races playing out over and over in communities across the planet.

Consider the young adults in Washington, D.C.: At the recent graduation ceremony of Ballou High School students, D.C. Health workers were there, ready to offer shots. No graduates took them up on the offer. Younger Black adults have reported being wary of medical establishment and side effects, or they said they don’t feel at risk. Ankoor Shah, who leads D.C.’s vaccine program, said, “The solution is not only some program or initiative. I think these are systematic and systemic and historical, structural problems that have happened for hundreds of years.”

Or residents and travelers in Europe: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron urged European Union member countries to work to coordinate travel restrictions. “In our country, if you come from Great Britain, you have to go into quarantine,” Merkel said Thursday. But that’s not universal across the E.U. — an opening, she feared, the delta variant could exploit.

Or the city dwellers in Australia: Sydney began partial lockdown Friday because a cluster of the delta variant broke out there. Contact tracers have identified at least 65 cases following transmission that started with an airport limo driver. The lockdown has been likened to a circuit breaker, with New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian saying the week-long pause will “prevent further spread and prevent further dislocation.”

Meanwhile, Brazil offers a grim lesson for what happens when the race is not run. President Jair Bolsonaro had promised his hands-off method to the pandemic would help the poor. Permitting them to work through the pandemic without support was better, he had claimed, than the alternative — that hunger would be more devastating than the virus. But allowing things to take their own course has had doubly harmful results, economists say: Brazil’s crisis has been prolonged, and even more people there have entered poverty, because the government did not offer sustained help for the needy.