Covid – IV
Traveling with Covid
We traveled when colds spread in airline cabins. We traveled when flu was all around us. So now we’ll travel with Covid, too. Americans, though, have additional hurdles others won’t have to face. But if you’re an American, you’ve got to face them. Don’t walk away from distant travel, because America’s Achilles heel – and the disabling personal anxiety in our individual souls – is an unique cowboy loneliness that will take us down awfully quick. Travel is our antidote.
Americans sulk more than Africans or South Americans or even Europeans or Asians. Our poor understanding of fate often turns a temporary obstacle into certain defeat. That’s because we are usually more successful and entrepreneurial so we do usually win.
But there’s a hazard with usually winning. We get so surprised with a stubborn obstacle that we often just give up certain all sorts of easier successes lie just ahead.
The rest of the world is traveling like never before. Visa offices in Kenya and Tanzania are overwhelmed. But America is holding back.
WHO estimates a billion people at any given time, or roughly 1 in 7, have some version of the flu. Medscape estimates 250-500,000 deaths annually from 3-5 million cases.
You really can compare Covid to the flu when about 80% of a population is fully vaccinated or has recovered from the disease. This is now true of most of Europe and remarkably, much of the rest of the world. But not of America. America lingers at around two-thirds.
That’s why it’s harder for Americans who want to travel. When a population is poorly vaccinated with so many of its people vulnerable to serious disease, then you can’t risk bringing in that disease even if the person delivering it hardly knows she has a cold.
So unlike most of the world even Canada, America requires that all entering travelers show that they were Covid negative the day before they traveled home.
No further proof than your vaccination card is necessary elsewhere! America sticks out like a sore thumb.
It boils my blood but I understand. It has nothing to do with me, personally. If I get Covid it’s like getting a bad cold, something that often happens on vacation. It doesn’t stop me a bit. But if I bring those sneezes home and an unvaccinated catches it? His chances of dying are a lot more than if I gave him the flu or cold.
In a society with 80% or more vaccinated, the chances that a returning infected traveler will spread the virus are lower enough that these pre-testing regulations are no longer necessary to achieve the same public health goals.
Because so many of our fellow Americans refuse to be vaccinated we travelers have to spend the time and money to prove we aren’t carrying the disease when returning home.
The unvaccinated don’t care a hoot about what happens to us, why should we bother with them?
That’s crass and selfish, but the right thing to do is a bitter pill to swallow: I’m realistic, sensible, rational. The unvaccinated are brain-washed, cowards, revolutionaries or blind idiots. And I’m supposed to protect them?
These manifold ironies test our patience and morality. Of course my taxes pay for emergency wards and government purchases of ventilators. I’m better off in the long run if I prevent my crazy, unvaccinated neighbor from having to use them.
But it begs the question of how long we have to suffer this. It also begs the more important question of how dangerous this prolongment is with regards to fostering new, more dangerous mutants.
It’s time for mandates, just as in most of Europe. If our idiot Supreme Court strikes them down, then impose them again and fight another legal battle, then do it again and again if we have to fight a court system defending barbarians.
How awful we’ve become. The society that ended measles, chicken pox, polio and so much more now shirks its duty to put Covid under control. Are there really more crazies today than back then?