A look at the Center for Disease Control's dashboard shows that 41,426,425 Americans have caught COVID-19. With a bit of quick math and that turns out to be 1 in 8 Americans. A more grim statistic reported today is that since the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 has killed 1 in 500 of our fellow citizens. To put that into perspective, only 1 in 8,600 people died in U.S. auto accidents in 2020.
You probably wouldn't drive to the harbor if you had a 1-in-8 chance of getting into a fender bender, to say nothing of a 1-in-500 chance of not surviving the accident. A March 11 article from Kaiser Health News showed COVID-19 on its way to rivaling heart disease and cancer as leading causes of death. Nothing in the rates of transmission since has altered that projection.
In the early days of the pandemic, COVID-19 seemed to be confined to large urban centers and not a problem for much of the country. It's easy to feel immune when disease hasn't affected your community. Unfortunately, as we can see across the country, that sense of immunity doesn't provide actual protection from contact with the virus. Of course real immunity to COVID-19 is available at no cost, when you get vaccinated. How good is that?
We could recite the benefits of getting vaccinated here, but why not just take a look at our web page, Why Get the Shot? Do you wonder if the vaccine is safe? We'll talk about that in a future blog post, but in the meantime, check our vaccine safety web page. Then find your vaccination with the handy Vaccine Finder and get vaccinated. Don't lose fishing time or worse by taking chances in the COVID-19 lottery. Just get the shot.