Only Vaccine Mandates and Masking Can End This

With the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus now ripping through America, especially in the South where folks are neither vaccinated nor take precautions such as wearing masks, it is obvious that the only way out of this pandemic is for government and businesses to mandate vaccinations for their employees and to require mask-wearing indoors.

The Delta variant — which constituted one percent of the COVID cases in the U.S. in May but now is over 90 percent of the cases — is proving both more transmissible and deadlier than the original COVID, especially among young people who formerly had escaped the most virulent effects of the first wave of the virus.

The hospitalization and death rates in the South are reaching cataclysmic proportions — and this is occurring in the summertime, when people are outside and school is just getting underway.

Every private business in America should require their workers to be vaccinated for the safety and well-being of both their employees and their customers.

This also makes good business sense. After all, who wants to fly on an airplane with unvaccinated flight attendants? Or go on a cruise with an unvaccinated crew? Or go to a hospital to be treated by nurses, doctors, and others who are unvaccinated? Or be served at a restaurant by unvaccinated staff leaning over you?

All levels of government — local, state, and federal — also should mandate vaccines, both for the benefit of all of their workers and members of the the public with whom these employees interact.

This also includes students in universities as well as public school students for those age groups for whom the vaccine has been approved. Vaccines of all kinds already are required for enrollment in school and the COVID-19 vax is just another vaccine.

In addition, every business and government office should require masking by employees and customers to protect them from the unvaccinated and to prevent breakthrough transmissions.

The bottom line is simply this: Unless Americans find the will to get tough, get smart, and just suck it up, life never will return to normal.