Tripledemic

[canyonwalker]

Oh, great. We've got another new word to describe the hardship of the ongoing global Coronavirus pandemic. Tripledemic.

"Tripledemic" refers to the overlap of three viruses going around in elevated numbers right now. There's Covid-19, now entering its fourth year; good old-fashioned flu; and now an oldie-but-goodie that's surging this year, respiratory syncytial virus— more commonly known as RSV.

The CDC is urging mask usage, particularly in the hardest-hit parts of the country. Those are the counties classified as High Community Levels of Covid-19. The area where I live, Santa Clara County, California, is in the High tier. Update: CDC page with Covid-19 Community Levels map.

It's unlikely this warning will make any difference. The CDC can "recommend" and even "urge" masking all it wants, but little's going to change. President Biden himself announced over a year ago now that Covid-19 is "over". Around half the country made that decision for themselves long before that. Oh, I wear my mask in public indoors places. So does Hawk. So do many of our personal friends. But even here in politically progressive Silicon Valley, overall masking in indoors public spaces has fallen below 20%.

Comments

[sorcyress]

I have been _shocked_ to see mask use go up at work...which means that in any given room, I'm one of three or four people masking, instead of the only one (and frequently I'm still the only one in N95s). There've been a lot of very sad emails in the past few weeks, pointing out how so many students and staff are out and please consider wearing a mask. They'd probably be more effective if the admin team regularly wore masks --I mean all of them, not just one co-principal.

If you could convince the community support team* to wear masks at the front doors each day, I think that alone would go a long way to convincing the students that this was actually something worth doing. As it is, I'm quite sure the teenagers look at the adults saying "wear a mask" but not actually doing so themselves, and the teens just laugh it off because it's clearly just another arbitrary rule we're making to control them and not anything real.

~Sor

*We currently don't have a School Resource Officer (translation: cop) in the building, which is a good thing in many ways. The community support team is the group of people who do things like make sure you have your ID badge when you come in, and wander the halls during class time to encourage students to go to class. One of the single best changes my high school has made in the past decade is finally _finally_ replacing the CST so that now the faces that greet students when they come in are primarily smiling black or latine former students now in their twenties, instead of scowling white men in their sixties. Given that our school is minority-majority, it feels _so important_ to have a community team who actually feels like the same community as most of them!