This morning I walked my old route through the neighborhood for the first time in over six months. I wanted to see how the island was faring during this recent upsurge in the Covid pandemic, something I did regularly this past year.<\/p>\n
The island\u2019s premier hotel, the King and Prince Beach & Golf Resort, was going full out with guests enjoying its many amenities. Last year during the early months of the pandemic there was a pall over the place with virtually no cars out front or in the parking lots. Today there were lots of people on the beach or headed that way. It seemed to be business as usual.<\/p>\n
This past week I\u2019ve been out and about the island to the supermarkets and pharmacies. Shoppers were, for the most part, wearing masks in sharp contrast to last year. I\u2019ve checked out the shops, restaurants and bars during business hours and found most open, also different from last year. A few have closed for short periods in response to employees testing positive for the virus.<\/p>\n
The schools on the island and in the county have closed for several weeks in face of the uptick in infections, many among young children. Talking with parents, I found only frustration and uncertainty given that students are confronted with long days in front of computers at home. Mostly, there is a real concern about how much learning will take place.<\/p>\n
My take-away is that people are ambivalent about what to do. On the one hand, they are masking up more when shopping, but on the other they are resuming their routines of going out to bars and restaurants. In general, I sense that people are simply tired of not living their lives as usual, but, at the same time, conscious of the threat from the new Delta variant and what they see as the reality of the pandemic going on for the near future.<\/p>\n
The problem is that the announcement of the end of the pandemic this past July 4th was not the end. Declining infections and deaths encouraged us to think that the worst was over and we started to return to normal. We appear to be stuck half-way between caution and the good life.<\/p>\n
I suspect this picture mirrors what is happening across the nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I walked my old route through the neighborhood for the first time in over six months. I wanted to see how the island was faring during this recent upsurge in the Covid pandemic, something I did regularly this past year. The island\u2019s premier hotel, the King and Prince Beach & Golf Resort, was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-robert-fischer"],"yoast_head":"\n