In four weeks on August 17 the sun will be setting in the west-northwest (289°) at 7:54 pm,🌄 which is 33 minutes and 37 seconds earlier then today. In 2020 on that day, we had mostly sunny, patches of fog and temperatures between 78 and 54 degrees. Typically, you have temperatures between 82 and 61 degrees. The record high of 97 degrees was set back in 1913.
Many experts have argued that, even with Delta, the United States is unlikely to revisit the horrors of last winter. Even now, the country’s hospitalizations are one-seventh as high as they were in mid-January. But national optimism glosses over local reality. For many communities, this year will be worse than last. Springfield’s health-care workers and public-health specialists are experiencing the same ordeals they thought they had left behind. “But it feels worse this time because we’ve seen it before,” Amelia Montgomery, a nurse at CoxHealth, told me. “Walking back into the COVID ICU was demoralizing.”
Those ICUs are also filling with younger patients, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, including many with no underlying health problems. In part, that’s because elderly people have been more likely to get vaccinated, leaving Delta with a younger pool of vulnerable hosts. While experts are still uncertain if Delta is deadlier than the original coronavirus, every physician and nurse in Missouri whom I spoke with told me that the 30- and 40-something COVID-19 patients they’re now seeing are much sicker than those they saw last year. “That age group did get COVID before, but they didn’t usually end up in the ICU like they are now,” Jonathan Brown, a respiratory therapist at Mercy, told me. Nurses are watching families navigate end-of-life decisions for young people who have no advance directives or other legal documents in place.
Almost every COVID-19 patient in Springfield’s hospitals is unvaccinated, and the dozen or so exceptions are all either elderly or immunocompromised people. The vaccines are working as intended, but the number of people who have refused to get their shots is crushing morale. Vaccines were meant to be the end of the pandemic. If people don’t get them, the actual end will look more like Springfield’s present: a succession of COVID-19 waves that will break unevenly across the country until everyone has either been vaccinated or infected. “You hear post-pandemic a lot,” Frederick said. “We’re clearly not post-pandemic. New York threw a ticker-tape parade for its health-care heroes, and ours are knee-deep in COVID.”
This kind of makes me sad. You don't have to love Joe Biden to get vaccinated and save your own life, so you can have your cattle, your guns, your big jacked up truck or off grid homestead in Missouri. The shot is a bit annoying with the side effects but it's a temporary nuisance more than anything else. COVID-19 is a nasty way to die, and it's totally preventable even if you are a good ol country boy deep in the pig shit in the back woods of Missouri.
Those western wildfires 🔥 have kept the skies dusty and gray, the air polluted and of exceptionally poor quality by modern times. The moon is such a blood red like an total lunar eclipse.
Mostly cloudy with haze and 79 degrees at the Elm Ave Town Park. ☁ Calm wind. The dew point is 69 degrees. The skies will clear tomorrow around 6 pm as the front pushes farther east and allows the air pollution from the western wildfires goes out to sea 🌊.
The moon is such as dusty red color much like the sun today. 🎴Welcome to the world of the changed climate. Summer is only going to get more dusty and gray as western wildfires 🔥 get even worse every summer. The air more polluted.
I was reading today that 40 years ago that Albany had 50 to 60 air quality days a year, it has fallen to less than 10 days a year in recent years. 🚭 Catalytic converters and better controls on power plants 🏭 have made a big difference. But as more of the west burns it might prove all for naught in the long run.
Went down to the town park 🏞 for a while, so I could let the ticks climb on me 🐜 because I like sitting on the grass. Dangerous all fuck in the era of Lyme disease. But I couldn’t stay long ⛈ as there is a strong thunderstorm ⛈ on the radar. Looks violent but short lived. Not likely to leave a lot of rain ☔. But that’s a growing problem too.
(CNN)The massive Bootleg Fire in Oregon has scorched an area larger than Los Angeles, and it's only 30% contained. The fire is so large and is burning so hot that it's creating its own weather.
It's just one of the many blazes raging in the West; the National Interagency Fire Center is watching 80 large fires across 13 states this week -- a testament to just how destructive the US wildfire season has become.
And the effects of the fires stretch all the way to the East Coast.
Gov. George E. Pataki said yesterday that he was not inclined to support a plan that would allow garbage to be trucked for the first time into the Adirondack Park from a city outside the park's boundaries.
The proposal, made to state environmental and park officials by a financially strapped county inside the park, would expand operations at a county landfill so that five tons of garbage hauled there daily from nearby towns would be joined by up to several hundred tons of garbage a day from the city of Troy, more than 100 miles to the south.