Moving forward with COVID

I nearly called this post "Returning to church", except that implies things that are not the case for me. 

Don't get me wrong -- I have a far easier time skipping church than I should, especially now that we're on the early schedule -- but my not going for the last two months has been strictly a matter of not feeling safe. 

Before that, even though I was not going into the building, I was listening to the meetings on Zoom. 

Then, as I was expecting a spike in new cases following Christmas and New Year's, they announced that they were ending the Zoom meetings.

(I wrote about this here: https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2022/01/take-shelter.html)

In that announcement, it said if you did not feel comfortable meeting in person to set up an appointment with the bishop. I assume there were some exceptions possible, or maybe the meeting would just be to resolve concerns.

(If you write to Salt Lake, that's all the follow-up meetings with the stake president are about. Trust me: https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-letter.html)

I did not set up an appointment, because I really believed that after those two weeks things would settle down. Maybe there would be a third week for safety's sake, but that this was a temporary pause.

I underestimated the length of "temporary". 

I kept checking the numbers for how Washington County cases were doing. It kept being horrifying. 

I am sure part of this was Omicron, but I think part of it was also just the sheer amount of infected people. 

During the first lockdown, there were very few cases, and the spread was slowed. During that time period we were supposed to make personal protective equipment widely available and develop testing and contact tracing protocols... to do things to help us be safer. Unfortunately, the administration at the time didn't care about that, and many of its supporters made it a matter of religious devotion to fight those fighting the disease.

So instead of keeping the number of infections low, that number continued to grow. If there are 24 local cases versus 2400, the odds of my encountering someone infected (or someone infected by them who doesn't know it yet) go up.

The United States has now had 935,093 deaths. Even with cases starting to drop, we seem sure to hit a million.

But the cases are going down. 

I still think talk of easing up on mask mandates is too soon. I will continue masking in public. I will continue carefully choosing my activities.

Unfortunately, the people least likely to take precautions against catching COVID are also those least likely to try not to spread it, a big reason why the distancing is a stronger strategy than the masking.

But I do intent to be in church next week, masked.

I will also check the stats again before I do. Because after March 11th, I would not be surprised if there is another spike.