When I find a wine I really like, I buy a case or join their wine club.

George Clooney bets a little bigger.

The news about the delta variant the last day or so is troubling.

• As transmissable / contagious as chicken pox
• At least as deadly as the original strain, perhaps more so
• Definitely able to break through and infect vaccinated folks, though they appear to be 90% less likely to require hospitalization
• And, once infected, even a vaccinated person is highly contagious
• An equal opportunity variant, infecting young and old at similar rates

The US had already begun to celebrate the end of the pandemic (I know I had), and now…not so much. Yesterday I went to the grocery and I was the *only* person there wearing a mask, including the cashiers. And this is liberal CA, not the deep red south.

I’m worried about our extensive travel and family visit schedule coming up, starting in August. We made plans a couple of months ago when it looked like the end was near. Now we’re looking at 200K new cases per day in the coming weeks, focused on larger unvaxxed populations. And *if* we get back to 100-200K new cases per day, we’ll also get back to 2-4K deaths per day. Just doing the math, let’s say 100M Americans are still unvaccinated. If we allow the delta variant to run unchecked, it will kill approximately 1.5% of them, or 1.5M people! That’s an upper bound, but, wow.

It may already be too late to change the course of things much, but we do what we can do. Wear a mask indoors, stay out of high risk situations and evaluate every event with caution.

UPDATE: Nick Carroway over at Juanita Jean’s has a perfect take on this. Go read it.