We had hopes of waxing happy about a new year beginning brightly for us on Jan. 1, 2022. We hoped to say COVID-19 was behind us and finally numbers of illness and death were falling, falling, falling. After all, that’s what Tennessee leaders were bleating in the fall as they legislated common-sense preventions out of the grasp of local and workplace leaders. But wishes aren’t horses, and things didn’t go in the way that might have had us cheering a brighter new year.
Even before the sun set on 2021, the U.S. had marked a new record for daily new cases of COVID-19, and Tennessee was continuing its lock on a front row seat. Tennessee cases – and those in Georgia, too – were and are soaring. Here in Hamilton County, COVID deaths on Wednesday hit 900.
Just to put this Hamilton County number into perspective, consider the timeline:
* As of Dec. 29, we had mourned 900 of our neighbors and family members.
* Two weeks before on Dec. 16, the day the first case of COVID’s omicron variant was confirmed in Hamilton County, the number stood at 736.