I haven’t written about COVID-19 in a little while. Not a whole lot has changed for my family and me. We’re homebodies by and large, so other than essential trips out, we mostly stick around the house. We venture out to do outdoor things occasionally.

The Biden administration, though surely flawed in many ways (e.g. there are still kids in cages at the Mexico border), has really taken the pandemic seriously and oversaw the distribution of 100 million vaccines within the first 60ish days of the administration. I believe they’re on course at this rate to have distributed 200 million by Biden’s 100th day in office, doubling his ambitious initial goal. We haven’t been vaccinated yet, but I today scheduled an appointment to get my first dose in about a week.

I don’t know if vaccination will be enough. There are variants of the virus, and I imagine complacency and easing of restrictions will result in resurgences of the disease in spite of mass vaccination. Every time I drive by places like the Applebee’s and the nearby bowling alley, I find the parking lot pretty much full. I would think the bowling alley would be very nearly the last place you’d want to find yourself during a pandemic (“here, let me stick my fingers in the holes in this ball that other people’ve been sticking their boogery fingers in”), but I guess dummies gonna dumb.

Groceries and toilet paper are not hard to come by, as they were this time a year ago. Gas prices have risen again, to something like $2.80 a gallon if I’m not misremembering. Mostly I still see people wearing masks in places like the grocery store, and I wonder how long that’ll go on for. Flu cases were way down this year, and I’d like to think that our memories for that will not be so short that we forget to keep up with effective precautions next flu season.