COVID-19 Update: January and February

It has been so long since my last COVID-19 update. There has been a lot going on, so I'll start with the numbers and the overall view. When I wrote in December we continued to have high case counts and the country as a whole continued to spike. By January 9th, cases were again at just under 3,300 per day on average over the last 7 days, just below the peak of about 3,400 cases per day over a 7 day average on November 22. The United States peaked on January 8 with an average of more than 259,000 cases on average of a 7 day period. It was truly sad to see. However, since then, cases have slowly begun to decline. I'm sure in part due to the vaccine distribution, partially because many have already been sick and partially due to masks and social distancing. The case counts in Utah have dropped to about 650 on average as of today. Nationally case counts have dropped to about 70,000 per day. 

I'm grateful for the improvement, and it is drastically better, but we still have a long way to go. We have to remember, that 650 cases per day is still far too many. Hopefully as more people are vaccinated in the coming months it will continue to improve. 

Here are a few charts. 

Here you can see two things. First, a 3rd vaccine (Johnson and Johnson) was approved today which is wonderful and will continue to help us be able to progress. You can see so far, 254,000 Utahn's have received both doses of the vaccine. I'm grateful for the blessing of having a vaccine available. 

Now, a look just for our family. The most excited news is that they just opened the vaccines up to people 65 and older, and my parents were able to go get the first dose, which is amazing. They are really excited. 

We overall are doing well. For the most part, we continue to try and keep distance and continue to wear masks. We did go out for dinner for Valentines, which was the first time we've been at a restaurant together in the last year. The kids are doing well. 

The Rencher's came for a quick Valentines porch visit. 

Shantel has started to do a watercolor class as part of homeschool with some other kids (with masks of course)

Plus, a snapshot of pandemic life, Shantel and Caleb in masks at the hospital (getting an X-ray on Caleb's arm, which was thankfully not broken - but we'll cover that elsewhere). 

Shantel and I have definitely commented that we are ready for COVID-19 to be over. There are so many things that we want to do and just can't do yet. However, we also really believe that we have worked hard to be careful for almost a year now, and we don't really want to give up as we are hopefully getting close to a "finish line." At least hoping that as at least 80% of people are vaccinated that we'll be able to continue with more normal things. Expect an update in a few weeks when we hit the year mark of when the Pandemic really started to impact our lives.