What does Northern California know that we don’t know?
Today it was revealed that Southern California’ s death rate for COVID was three times higher than Northern California’s in the month of January. That is a startling statistic that should cause people to have pause.
Do these northerners know something that we don’t? Perhaps it is that COVID kills. Very soon our national death rate from COVID will be one million people. If you don’t feel any emotion when you hear this statistic, you are definitely a part of the problem. You see, we are all in this together and that might be something Northern Californians understand better than we do.
The vaccination rate in Southern California has stagnated for months at around 70 percent and our booster rate is much more embarrassing.
The Bay Area, where people are inclined to spend more time indoors because of the weather, has a vaccination rate of 82 percent, while in Santa Clara it is even higher at 84 percent.
One of the major problems since Christmas is that people have been lulled into thinking that Omicron was not as dangerous as Delta because people seemed to have milder symptoms. It was revealed this weekend however in the LA Times, that because Omicron symptoms are milder, people have let their guard down.
Unfortunately, because it is more transmissible than the Delta strain, more people are falling sick and dying. It used to be that you knew few people who actually got COVID, just friends of friends. Now however, more people have friends and family who have caught COVID.
Hopefully those people you know are vaccinated.
All of the information and statistics are repeated day after day, article after article in the newspaper. Yet so many people do not keep up with the news because it can be unpleasant. Do more people in the Bay Area keep up with the daily news or is it just their inherent belief that we are all in this together that causes more Northerners to get vaccinations?
For those individualists who worry only about their own fate or have bought into the politicization of the pandemic, perhaps the only message that might work now is: COVID KILLS both Democrats and Republicans.
Lynn Lorenz / Newport Beach
