Masks can and have saved lives during this COVID-19 pandemic. So can social distancing. And certainly vaccines can. But there is no cure for stupid.
That’s why we need to keep our guard up for a bit longer and mask up. And it’s why we need to resist the temptation to use unmasking as a badge of political identity, as happened this week in Texas and Mississippi.
Yes, we’ve made a lot of progress against the pandemic, but we are nowhere near out of the woods yet. Variant and mutant strains of the virus – read here, more contagious and more deadly – continue to be found. Not just in the United Kingdom or Brazil or somewhere else. Here. And in the Southeast.
What’s more, the national trend of falling cases seems to have plateaued, even as fewer Americans are getting tested, according to health data. Meanwhile, Tennessee continues to rank 5th highest in the nation for total reported cases per 100,000 people.
Already, more than a half million people have died in the U.S., and even as a third vaccine has recently been approved, Tennessee is just now receiving enough vaccine to open eligibility for shots to the more than 1.1 million residents with conditions that make them more susceptible to dying from COVID – conditions that range from obesity and high blood pressure to diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.