The science is in, and the time has come. More than 50% of adults in the US are vaccinated and we are definitely hitting the vaccine hesitancy wall. Children down to 12 years of are starting to be vaccinated, with studies on even younger children underway. So the large scale societal movement towards vaccination has been met. This doesn't mean that all is safe, but the bulk of the risk at this point falls on the unvaccinated. The vaccine effectiveness is very high, so that vaccinated people are unlikely to get sick. And their viral loads are significantly smaller when they do get sick (making it far less likely for them to be COVID spreaders). The combination of these two factors mean that it's safe for vaccinated people to begin to re-engage with the world in a mask-less manner.
However, that's only valid for those who are vaccinated. While the overall COVID case rate is falling, we are seeing that the COVID case rate relative to the size of the unvaccinated population is not in a good place. So there's no sense in which the risk is gone, but the large-scale risks (such as overflowing hospitals) has now been mitigated, which is a win for public health. Those who choose not to be vaccinated do increase the risk that an aggressive variant may appear and put us back again, but the size of that population is slowly decreasing and will continue to decrease. We will probably see a spike this Fall as young children enter the classroom (likely without social distancing), but there's not much we can do in the present tense for that other than to keep moving through the approval process for the vaccine for younger children. Fall will have to deal with its own problems when we get there.
So I'm done counting the days since the start of social distancing. I have still bring a mask with me when I go to the store, as some stores may still have mask-wearing policies that I'm completely comfortable to abide by if that's what they choose. I have worn a mask a couple times when I didn't need to because I wasn't sure what the policy was and didn't want to ask before just going in to shop. I spent an afternoon in a friend's house, which is the first time in over a year since I did that. And the woman who was cleaning my house every few months (to keep it from getting extremely dirty) is being brought back later this week to help get things back on track there.
I've spent much of the last couple weeks cranking out some notes for MATH 430 (Linear Algebra 2) in the Fall. That one is at a pretty good place now, so I'm going to launch into working on the research-like course for the data science minors. Some of it will be just an overview of various techniques, but then we'll go into grabbing data sets and doing analyses with the goal of having some sort of presentation by the end of the semester. I think they can get there, but we'll have to see. It's probably going to a course that requires a disproportionate amount of work, but I'm looking forward to that one.
The other two classes I'm teaching are first semester calculus and trigonometry, which I'm not really planning to think about that much for another couple weeks. I've taught trigonometry before and I know the calculus material well, so it's mostly going to be a matter of organization for those classes. I'm really trying to push through as much as I can now so that I can have more time/flexibility at the end of the summer.
I wrapped up my course at UNLV, and so should be officially done with the degree program. It's been 14 years since the last time I graduated, but since this was only four classes I just have a hard time getting excited about it. But that's officially done now, which is the important thing. I presume I'll get some certificate or something in the mail at some point, but I don't even know what to expect and when. I want to take some of that knowledge and apply it towards the ATMI data set that we've been collecting, but I haven't had time to look at it yet. That type of thing is far more important than the formal completion of the program.
The last couple weeks have been spent working on the school's core curriculum outcomes, which has been an interesting process. I've got another two weeks of this coming up in a bit. I don't particularly enjoy the word-smithing part of this, but it's something that has to get done. There are a couple other campus things going on. We're trying to upgrade some classrooms and get ready for incoming faculty, so there's a bit to do there. But that's fine. It feels like it's mostly small stuff.
I've "upgraded" my herb garden setup by taking it apart and just holding on to the LED portion of it. This is giving me quite a bit more room for very little increase in space because I'm not confined to the tiny little cups that the Click-Grow system uses. I need to do a little bit of work to build a light shield to direct more light downward, but that will be all the changes to that. But hopefully, this will let me trade things in and out a bit and just get a little more flexibility in what I'm trying to accomplish, which is currently just having plenty of fresh basil on hand. But I may be able to expand this into something more at some point. We'll see.
Other things: A non-zero amount of piano happened. I need to schedule an appointment with the vet for Thor for just a regular health check-up. I've also got a regular health check-up for myself scheduled. Church shopping has gotten started, but at this point it's fair to say I'm just window-shopping because I'm making very little effort to do anything other than just watch a sermon. I accidentally saved over the previous post, and there doesn't appear to be a method for reverting back to the previous version. So it's just gone. Oh well. I'm sure there's more going on, but I can't really think of it. Life is good.
