I haven’t heard him making the argument that the unvaccinated should now get vaccinated for the “greater good” of the society. Did I miss it?
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Uh, nope!
I can’t find this in the news with a google search. Can you link to it?
I can find the CDC’s page on human rabies cases from 2009 to 2018. There were 25, though 7 were acquired outside the US. 2 survived. 23 died. 13 came from bats. They estimated 30K -60K get preventative treatment each year due to suspicious bites. This is for the whole US.
In MN there have been 7875 deaths from Covid as of this typing (NYT source).
Travis County TX has had 44 deaths just in the last two weeks with an average of 3.7 per day. TX overall is losing on average 164 people per day to Covid.
Quoting from the NYT page:
Cases have increased recently and are very high. The numbers of hospitalized Covid patients and deaths in the Travis County area have also risen. The test positivity rate in Travis County is very high, suggesting that cases are being significantly undercounted.
Your post reminds me of people who fear shark attacks or plane crashes, but have no problem texting and driving because they know they are safe drivers fully capable of doing it even if others aren’t.
On our farm alone we get rid of a suspected rabid animal every couple of years and there are certainly far more in our county. I have no fear of dying from rabies, even watching the bats in the evening. We enjoyed watching them at Carlsbad in the past too. The ranger there asked the audience how many were afraid a bat would get tangled in their hair and a few raised their hands. He asked how many times people thought it had happened in the past. I don’t remember the guesses. I do recall the answer. None. We handle suspected rabid critters carefully (kill first) and know we’d get meds if we got bit or scratched somehow. Hasn’t happened. Our personal animals are all up to date on their rabies vaxes and always will be.
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Yes, I’m a lot more afraid of COVID than bats, and we certainly have those around here.
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Sometimes I just hate people
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Travis County cases have been on the decline the past week. Hopefully deaths (which lag) will follow.
This sounds like a really bad idea. Refusing to allow people to use sick days encourages people to come to work while sick.
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to be clear, they can use their Delta sick pay. What Delta says they cannot take is the additional sick days provided by Congress last year. (Didn’t know such a thing existed…perhaps it was for the airline industry only?)
But yes, going to work sick is not a good idea. heck, I’d love to see some DA’s start to prosecute employees for purposely transmitting a communicable disease at work.
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The population of Maine is only 5% greater than that of the metropolitan area of Austin. Currently, the metropolitan area has 4.7 times as many hospitalizations as Maine, 3.9 times as many people in ICU, and 4.8 times as many people on ventilators. Having seen the quality of care my dad got in an Austin hospital last year, I wouldn’t recommend a stay there. 
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I’ve been to Carlsbad which was very enjoyable.
Obviously rabies is a very rare disease and only becomes an issue if you have contact with a rabid animal but I wonder who else has been in the situation to have the rabies vaccine in the first place. Two in our family - me and one of my kids (separate incidents). I agree that It’s probably not the most intelligent thing for me to worry about but I’ve had enough brushes - my own vaccination, two incidents with strange-acting bats (as a kid and as an adult), my kid’s own vaccine, and then that darned fox. Unfortunately in our county animal control just shoots and doesn’t test unless there’s been physical contact so the number of rabid fox is well under-reported in our community. It’s not pleasant getting the vaccine either. The entire experience isn’t pleasant and causes a lot of worry. When my D told her friends she was getting the rabies vaccine I was questioned by other (suburban) parents who were worried about letting their kids come over to our place LOL. Is this all irrational? Probably. But those are real fears, even if eye-rolling. By the way, those parents may have been right to worry - that cat that bit my kid returned to the neighborhood and bit the kid next door shortly afterwards. No one could ever catch it so she had to go in for the rabies vaccine as well . . .
Covid pay protection ends for the unvaccinated on September 30th for Delta employees. After that, only the vaccinated get to use covid sick days (up to 14). Unvaccinated have to undergo weekly testing. If they test positive, they have to isolate. No sick days provided. Unless I’m reading it wrong. Article on CNN I think.
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We are starting to have the same problem here in the Twin Cities - “perfect storm of Covid cases, demand for delayed procedures, and staffing shortages.” We are also down to a minimal number of available ICU beds and are earlier in the surge than what’s going on elsewhere. Really hoping it doesn’t get as bad.
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/covid-19-surge-taking-toll-on-mn-hospitals/89-63eebabb-7338-4295-9213-8237493cbd4d
Page has a date of October 23, 2007, and “The man told health workers that he felt a pin-prick on his skin when handling the bat.” I.e. it was not an unnoticed event that led to the rabies infection.
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I haven’t read what the Lt. Gov. said exactly. But I am familiar with a few quality studies on the long-term impact of economic recession on those who are unlucky enough to be joining the labor market around that time. Diminished long-term earnings and early death are two unfortunate outcomes.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/recession-graduates-effects-unlucky
We already know that recessions will hurt cyclical workers, less educated workers, younger workers and more marginalized workers. Which Groups Suffer Most in the Labor Market During Recessions? | NBER But what is surprising is just how long-term those impacts can last. So having a strong economy does, indeed, serve the “greater good” and economic downturn does, indeed, put lives at risk.
There is more. From the article:
“The man told health workers that he felt a pin-prick on his skin when handling the bat. But the victim reportedly did not think he had been bitten because he didn’t see any blood.”
"Most recent cases of rabies in humans in the U.S. have been due to bat bites that were not recognized or reported.
Danilla says it’s sometimes hard to detect a bat bite because the animal’s teeth are very small and sharp.
“Therefore they don’t seek any medical advice or any medical treatment,” says Danilla. “In recent years in the United States, a large proportion of the cases are associated with bat bites. And a large proportion of those are people that failed to recognize that they were actually bitten by the bat.”
This isn’t really worth debating. Unlike Covid, rabies is rare. But for those of us unlucky enough to have been at risk of exposure, it’s unnerving. It may not be something that most can relate to.
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SCOTUS ended the eviction moratorium. So that’s over.
“If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it,” the court said.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/26/politics/supreme-court-eviction-moratorium/index.html
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No, in 2020 the federal government provided for 14 sick days for lots of employers, maybe all? It was to help businesses out and allow their workers to take the time off when needed.
I work for local government and they gave us 14 freebie days (didn’t get deducted from sick time) to use for Covid quarantine, covid illness, or to care for kids because schools/daycare was out. However, the leave policy ended sometime this spring. But, any time that you didn’t use got added to your sick time balance. I got 14 days. We don’t lose sick time and can add it to our years of service when we retire.
Our school system also had the same policy. But I also know a co-worker’s family owns a car dealership and they received the $$$ from the feds to help cover their employees as well.
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We’ve seen plenty of examples of irony in the opposite direction: universities requiring their students (customers) to vaccinate but not their faculty/staff/admin (employees).
Governors might simply be picking their battles and understanding the limits of their executive authority. Some constituents, for example, may want to prevent a healthcare system from mandating the vaccine among their own doctors and nurses. Others may want healthcare systems to refuse anyone service due to lack of vaccination. The proper forum for bringing these issues up for discussion and debate so that all voices are heard would be the legislative (law-making) branch because those guys are elected to represent the will of their constituents. The governor is elected to run the executive branch and execute the laws.
I think you illustrate vaccine reluctance very well with your rabies comparison. You said in a previous post that you didn’t know anyone personally with a bad Covid case and this rabies thing decades ago still has you unnerved because you personally experienced it. From a human “experience” perspective to you, the first isn’t worth worrying about and the second is. From a data perspective, the two aren’t even close.
It’s why my main hope from the unvaxed who die now is that their followers (friends/family/whoever) can learn from it because they seem unable to learn from anything else. How many said they thought it would never happen to them? They thought they were safe?
Many are safe, of course, but no one knows this Covid lottery ahead of time. The TV news reported last night that some are predicting 100,000 more deaths by the New Year if we stay on the same trajectory. The vast majority will come from the unvaxed who thought they were safe. It’s sad. It doesn’t have to be that way, but humans aren’t always capable of assessing risk well.
FWIW, the reason the Minnesota rabies death didn’t show up in my Google search is because you said it was “not too long” ago. It was in 2007. We have different definitions of not too long ago. I was searching in the wrong decade. Thanks for the link though. It helps show anyone reading just how rare rabies deaths really are, esp compared to Covid. Far more 40 year olds have died from Covid even though that’s not a super bad age to combat it.
ps It’s common to kill a suspected rabid animal and just dispose of it without testing if there was no contact. It’s what we’re supposed to do here on the farm. We kill, dispose, and warn all the neighbors so everyone can be aware it happened. And we use vaccines on our critters because we care about them.
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