Pandemic agitation and horror continue as it appears the US, and most likely the world, will feel a COVID-19 surge this winter (sooner than later) and despite all the vaccines you’d need/want being readily available in this country, the situation is scary in its foolishness.
As of this Wednesday evening and according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine, 802,389 Americans have died from the coronavirus since it started to spread in early 2020, though, the numbers in reality are probably much higher. Reportedly, about 200,000 of those deaths, and maybe more, were preventable.

People are dying because reasons:

“Almost all the people dying are now dying preventable deaths,” said Dr Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“And that’s because they’re not immunized.”

When the vaccine was first rolled out, the country’s death toll stood at about 300,000.
It hit 600,000 in mid-June and 700,000 on 1 October.
Beyrer recalled that in March or April 2020, one of the worst-case scenarios projected upwards of 240,000 American deaths.
“And I saw that number, and I thought that is incredible — 240,000 American deaths?” he said.
“And we’re now past three times that number.”
He added: “And I think it’s fair to say that we’re still not out of the woods.”

Not by a long needle-shot:

As of December 13, 2021, national forecasts predict 620,000–1,300,000 new #COVID19 cases will likely be reported during the week ending December 25, 2021. More: https://t.co/7AP4I3S9PU. pic.twitter.com/HpKMu8nEgR

— CDC (@CDCgov) December 15, 2021

In all those digits, graphs, and charts, not-young-people like me are paying the price for the MAGA-hatters acting the fool with vaccines, masks, social distancing, the simple, easy tactics to slow and stop the COVID-19 virus, from the Delta and Omicron variants, from all that shit from continuing to spread.
And killing us old folks — I’m 73, smoked heavily for decades and even a slight, less-severe Omicron infection could maybe quickly/or longly kill me. This is shitty news — from The New York Times on Monday:

Seventy-five percent of people who have died of the virus in the United States — or about 600,000 of the nearly 800,000 who have perished so far — have been 65 or older.
One in 100 older Americans has died from the virus. For people younger than 65, that ratio is closer to 1 in 1,400.

The heightened risk for older people has dominated life for many, partly as friends and family try to protect them. “You get kind of forgotten,” said Pat Hayashi, 65, of San Francisco.
“In the pandemic, the isolation and the loneliness got worse. We lost our freedom and we lost our services.”

Since vaccines first became available a year ago, older Americans have been vaccinated at a much higher rate than younger age groups and yet the brutal toll on them has persisted.
The share of younger people among all virus deaths in the United States increased this year, but, in the last two months, the portion of older people has risen once again, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 1,200 people in the United States are dying from Covid-19 each day, most of them 65 or older.

Still under siege.

Item one and lowest form of action in combating the virus is wearing a mask indoors. Starting today here in California, we’ll be under a statewide mask mandate for indoor public spaces and will be in effect for a month. The reason is a surge of COVID cases statewide, and here in the Central Valley, we’re a low-vaccination-rate area (I’m fully-vaxxed, even with a booster): “This is a critical time where we have a tool that we know has worked and can work,” Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s health and human services secretary, said Monday. “We are proactively putting this tool of universal indoor masking in public settings in place to ensure we get through a time of joy and hope — without a darker cloud of concern and despair.”

Maybe real-loud again for everyone to hear: Face masks work!
Latest screaming, repetitively-factual study published last Friday at the American Journal of Preventative Medicine — nailed it, delivered straight-faced, serious, and understatedly-low-key:

Results
Average COVID-19 mortality per million was 288.54 in countries without face mask policies and 48.40 in countries with face mask policies. In no mask countries, adjusted average daily increase was 0.1553 – 0.0017?×?(days since first case) log deaths per million, compared with 0.0900 – 0.0009?×?(days since first case) log deaths per million in the countries with a mandate. Sixty days into the pandemic, countries without face mask mandates had an average daily increase of 0.0533 deaths per million, compared with the average daily increase of countries with face mask mandates, at 0.0360 deaths per million.

Conclusions
This study’s significant results show that face mask mandates were associated with lower COVID-19 deaths rates compared with countries without mandates. These findings support use of face masks to prevent excess COVID-19 deaths, and should be advised during airborne disease epidemics.

What can you say?
Dangerous, ignorant morons:

Not real funny, huh, maybe need to even further darken the punchline?

Here we are, once again…

(Illustration out front: ‘A Break in Reality,’ by Xetobyte, found here).