Liberty

To the editor:

There’s a big problem in “Letters to the Editor.” Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.

Firstly, Sullivan County is 61 out of 62 in terms of poorest health. This has many implications but let’s just focus on children. This means that many of our kids are unhealthy due to homelessness and/or other socio-economic factors in our county. Based on the information from county and state databases, the Covid-19 vaccination rate for children aged five and above, in Sullivan County, is a low 64%. Children under the age of five cannot be vaccinated because no vaccine is available yet.

Secondly, the Omicron variant hit our children hard. There were 4x as many hospitalizations for kids as there were for the Delta variant. 1,000 kids per day were hospitalized since the Omicron peak with 20 deaths per week according to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports since December 2021.

For the week ending 2/17/22, there were three pediatric deaths per day, on average. This is heartbreaking.

Many of our kids, as our adults, are immunocompromised.

The bottom line is that anyone who is eligible for vaccinations should get vaccinated and mitigations that can help protect our kids, our vulnerable adults should be kept in place, such as mask wearing. Many mask mandates are currently being lifted so this will be left up to parents and responsible adults to keep these mitigations in place. Please respect all children, adolescents and adults who will keep wearing their masks and make sure that they are not bullied or harassed for doing so. Any unvaccinated individuals should continue to wear masks in public to protect the rest of us. I am not hearing anything at all about this.

To understand more about this, I find the following “This Week in Virology” YouTube subscription very helpful featuring Dr. Daniel Griffin, MD, PhD, a Primary Care Physician, an Infectious Disease expert/researcher and Vincent Racaniello, PhD, a virologist, Microbiology, Immunology Professor and Researcher at Columbia University: https://youtu.be/BQSXRzBSoks

We are all exhausted. Let’s keep fighting the virus instead of each other.