Disability & Special Needs Ministry
June 2021
All are gifted, needed, and treasured!
“Welcome to the Twenty-Fourth (24th) edition of the Gulf States Conference (GSC) “Disability, Special Needs, & Possibilities Ministry Newsletter”. The format of remaining issues will focus not only on “secular” disability matters but also on an endeavor to provide “Spiritual” input to endure these turbulent times.
Because the COVID-19 virus continues to rage, we will cover a variety of subjects on coping with the stress and strain of quarantine mandates. If there is a specific topic you’d like to see addressed, please contact our office at your convenience.
This issue will include some of my favorite and encouraging Bible passages in the New International Version (NIV). I pray some will benefit you as well.
It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees. Psalm 119:71 (NIV)
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and uphold me with thy free spirit. Psalms 51:12 (KJV)
The silver-haired head is a crown of glory IF it is found in the way of righteousness. Proverbs 16:31 (NKJV)
THE PANDEMIC MAY NOW BE IN PERMANENT RETREAT IN THE U.S.
In the United States, there is now an excellent chance that the retreat is permanent. Victory over Covid has not yet arrived, but it is growing close. After almost a year and a half of sickness, death, grieving, and isolation, the progress is cause for genuine joy.
More than 60 percent of American adults have received at least one vaccine shot, and the share is growing by about two percentage points per week. Among unvaccinated people, a substantial number have already had Covid and therefore have some natural immunity. “The virus is running out of places to be communicable,” Andy Slavitt, one of President Biden’s top Covid advisers, told me.
The share of Covid tests coming back positive has fallen below 3 percent for the first time since widespread testing began, and the number of hospitalized patients has fallen to the lowest point in 11 months, Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Translational Institute noted. For the first time since March 5 of last year, San Francisco General Hospital yesterday had no Covid patients — “a truly momentous day,” Dr. Vivek Jain said.
There are still important caveats. Covid remains especially dangerous in communities with low vaccination rates, as Slavitt noted, including much of the Southeast; these communities may suffer through future outbreaks. And about 600 Americans continue to die from the disease every day.
But the sharp decline in cases over the past month virtually guarantees that deaths will fall over the next month. The pandemic appears to be in an exponential-decay phase, as this helpful Times essay by Zoë McLaren explains. “Every case of Covid-19 that is prevented cuts off transmission chains, which prevents many more cases down the line,” she writes.
This isn’t merely a theoretical prediction. In Britain, one of the few countries to have given a shot to a greater share of the population than the U.S., deaths are down more than 99 percent from their peak.
HOPE OVER FEAR
When the C.D.C. reversed its Covid-19 guidelines last month and said that vaccinated Americans rarely needed to wear masks, it caused both anxiety and uncertainty.
Many people worried that the change would cause unvaccinated people to shed their masks and create a surge of new cases. On the flip side, a more optimistic outcome also seemed possible: that the potential to live mostly mask-free would inspire some vaccine-hesitant Americans to get their shots.
Almost three weeks after the change, we can begin to get some answers by looking at the data. So far, it suggests that the optimists were better prognosticators than the pessimists.
CASES KEEP FALLING
First, new Covid cases have continued to decline at virtually the same rate as during the month before the C.D.C. announcement, which came on May 13:
Overall, daily new cases have fallen by almost 75 percent since mid-April and by more than 90 percent from the peak in January.
A crucial point is that the loosened guidelines probably did not cause many people to change their behavior in ways that created new risks. Vaccinated people went maskless more often, but they are extremely unlikely to get the virus. And even before the C.D.C. change, many unvaccinated Americans were already not wearing masks, particularly in Republican-leaning communities.
The only newly worrisome scenarios involve unvaccinated people who had been wearing masks and decided to stop doing so after the C.D.C.’s new policy. Surely, some Americans fall into this category. But there don’t seem to be enough of them to increase the spread of the virus.
SHOTS HAVE STOPPED FALLING
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, announced the new mask recommendations at 2:17 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, May 13. Almost immediately, the number of visits to vaccines.gov — a website where people can research their local vaccination options — spiked, CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen has reported.
Traffic to the website rose even higher later that afternoon after President Biden celebrated the change and encouraged Americans to get vaccinated so they could remove their masks. In the days that followed, traffic to vaccines.gov remained higher than it had been before the announcement.
More importantly, the vaccination trends also changed after Walensky’s announcement. For the previous month, the number of daily shots in the U.S. had been falling, as the country began to run out of adults who were eager to be vaccinated. With a few days of the mask announcement, the decline leveled off.
The chart here looks at the trends only among Americans 16 and up. The total number of daily vaccinations — including 12- to 15-year-olds, who became eligible the same week as Walensky’s mask announcement — has risen in the past few weeks.
SAVE YOUR HOUSEPLANTS!
By Melissa Kirsch
Welcome. Winters are hard on the Hoya carnosa hanging in my bathroom window. Sometime in October, the radiator heat sputters on, the sun gets stingy and the plant’s wax-leaved vines begin to shrivel and fall off. By April, the plant is spiky and parched, the leaves luster-free and a little bit dusty. I remove the dead foliage and start over, coaxing the plant back to health. By July it’s usually a living thing again.
Margaret Roach’s In the Garden column this week asks and answers the question many of us are asking of the droopy or crispy specimens on the windowsill: “Can This Houseplant Be Saved?” Roach consulted Darryl Cheng of @houseplantjournal, an Instagram account that dispenses plant wisdom like “Accept that your plants are always growing and changing” and “Don’t fall into the trap of believing you have total control in maintaining perfection” to more than 600,000 followers. Some foliage can be saved. For others, it’s farewell — as Cheng describes it, “a retirement party where the send off message is: thank you for photosynthesis!”
We’re all trying to figure out how to bloom again. Glynnis MacNicol reconsidered Nora Ephron’s essay collection “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” published 15 years ago, and, after 14 months of scrutinizing her neck on video calls, is feeling pretty great about hers. “One of the skills I’ve acquired since turning 40,” she writes, “is the ability to recognize there will likely always be a gap between seeing a photo of myself and appreciating it. That gap, I’ve realized, is the time it takes me to overcome all the ways I’ve been taught to value myself in the world. The older I get, the more I understand that delay as evidence of a sort of theft.”
As Tala Schlossberg tells us in her latest video for Opinion, the weight-loss industry is counting on people’s post-quarantine dissatisfaction with their bodies to hawk appetite suppressants and fad diets. Jennifer Weiner wrote a guest essay on this topic a couple of weeks ago, concluding (about the pandemic) that “each of us should cherish the body that got us through it, rather than punish it for failing to fit into last year’s skinny jeans.”
It’s been quite a year. Our bodies and minds, the leaves and flowers of our organisms, need tending and tenderness. Take a gratitude photo. Hug someone you haven’t been able to for a while. Make a dentist appointment. (If you haven’t been since 2019, or earlier, I can’t recommend this enough.) Plan your June reading. (I pre-ordered Zakiya Dalila Harris’s “The Other Black Girl,” billed thusly: “If Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out’ were a workplace novel.”) Plan a vacation. (Or just see how one travel writer spent the pandemic living in a modified SUV.)
Credits
The New York Times | Sources: State and local health agencies and hospitals
The New York Times | Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Published by
George Hamilton
Assistant Disability Ministry Director
Gulf States Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
H. 256-883-7751
C. 850-543-1398
Disabilities & Special Needs Ministry Goals
Email: gsc-disability@gscsda.org
Website: https://gscsda.org/disability-ministries
Location: 10633 Atlanta Highway, Montgomery, AL, USA
Phone: 3342727493