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Reported cases in Georgia continues to drop, under 2500 now.  I have no noticed behavioral changes around us, anecdotally.

The French restaurant was nearly full Tuesday night, they have reduced indoor seating and it was warm so the outside patio was full.

With our drop in cases around here, I noticed more people wearing masks. I have a downtown office in our town of 5,000. I see people are socializing in bars, so we still have that factor.
I suspect the drop in this area is directly attributable people being acquainted with, or family members of, people dead from COVID-19, which brought about increased mask wearing. Other factors are we are about 8-weeks post-holiday season, and we had high infection rates, and more immunity in our population. The vaccine is only available to essential workers and those over 65, and the roll-out in Iowa has been especially slow, but people I know have been vaccinated.

You may want to check with your primary care doctor.

Obviously you can't get shingles if you've never had chicken pox (varicella). Shingles itself is a late blooming of that virus that never left your system if you had chicken pox.

However I understand that the later in life you get varicella, the more terrible it is. Most of us had it as kids and it's relatively benign for [most] kids. But as you reach adulthood, varicella can be pretty nasty.

Now, I don't know if that means that you should get a varicella vaccine, or you should get a shingles vaccine, or you shouldn't do anything. But it might be worth a discussion at a future annual physical...

Dude.

I had Covid. I can never get ANYTHING else now.

Only after it's been used at a Madison tailgate all day long, in early September.

Well Carlin said locked in a Porta-Potty and lit on fire but that's a little extreme

I am transferring files to new computer, it says it will take more than a day.

Oh, COVID, yeah.

Bad.  China bad.

The whole nation is still griefing for the 5,700 they've lost during the pandemic

I know somebody who had cancer that died from COVID.  This person was otherwise healthy and was out building barbed wire fence a week before they got covid.  I'm sure that their body was weakened from the cancer and treatment and I'm also sure their cause of death is listed as covid.  Makes me wonder about those statistics as well.  

That's great news Joe. I'm glad you are fully vaccinated now.

Have we discuss the difference between dying with Covid and dying from Covid?

Seeing just how disproportionately high the death toll in the U.S. is compared to the rest of the world has had me thinking what, exactly, counts as a Covid death? (US deaths +470K Vs global total of 2.3Mil deaths)

Someone could die of heart failure who also tested positive for Covid, for which maybe heart failure was accelerated by Covid? Vs those who die exclusively from Covid as tracked by specific methods Covid can kill on its own, such as starving the lungs of oxygen? The latter yielding a lower death toll, of course.

Understandably, with all the chaos Covid has caused throughout the global medical system, they can't be blamed for the differences in how each death is counted one way or another.

We've discussed it at length, albeit that was relatively early in this pandemic. 

It seemed like early on, there was a narrative amongst those who were trying to downplay the pandemic that there was a concerted effort to inflate the numbers of COVID deaths by attributing deaths in people who has COVID but clearly died of unrelated causes to COVID. 

Despite the number of people pushing that narrative, I don't think it ever really grew legs and walked. 

Coroners are smart people.

• If someone comes into the ER bleeding out of the gut from a gunshot wound, and it just so happens that they test him for COVID and he's positive, a coroner WOULD NOT put COVID as contributory to the cause of death. 
• If someone comes into the hospital suffering from cough, fever, fatigue, and ALSO has hypertension and congestive heart failure, and tests positive for COVID, and dies of cardiac arrest in the hospital, a coroner WOULD put COVID as contributory factor the cause of death, and it would be counted as a COVID death. Yes, that patient had other problems, but absent a symptomatic COVID infection, there is no reason to believe their death would have been imminent. 

The other reason that the narrative was busted is the excess deaths. Just look at the chart halfway down this page...

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

The CDC tracks deaths. It's seasonal by nature and goes a little higher during the winter months. But they have trend lines and know roughly, in a large country of 330M people, how many people are expected to die each year/week/month. 

You can, in fact, see a blip of excess deaths in the winter of 2017-18, which corresponds with the worst flu season in the last decade. And then you see, starting in Mar 2020, a consistent trend WELL above the line that persists today. If you look at the shape of the graph, that shows an Apr/May peak, a summer mini-peak, and then another major peak around the holidays--exactly what COVID graphs look like.

So the fact of the matter is that a LOT more people died in 2020 than past years. The final numbers aren't available yet, but it's in the same ballpark as the number of people whose deaths are attributed to COVID. 

So whether you try to call it dying from COVID or dying with COVID, the number of deaths is MUCH higher this year in the middle of a pandemic than previous years.