As we kick off the last day in February this year, changes around and about the pandemic have been flurrying.

We're not changing too much here, but I thought I'd capture some of the things going on.

Over the weekend, new guidelines for masks and social distancing came out. The guidelines are leaning on smaller areas and their current state of hospital load and the rolling trend of infections. With this new division, instead of entire states following the same mandates, regions of states, including counties or towns, are the boundaries against which the precautions need to be made. The new scale is a simple "red, yellow, green" or "high, medium, low" grade. I live in a medium area, surrounded by low areas.

I struggle with this just a little bit. Because a lot of the media conversation has been about how this is tied to hospital load, and calculus based on "with COVID" or "because COVID" factoring, places, like mine, with larger hospitals and more of them will have different views on infections and impacts than areas without the same.

Sure, there's the rolling infection numbers, too. But the seat-of-pants observation of reduced testing now that the current wave seems to be subsiding, likely because everyone's holidays and delayed gatherings are also subsiding. Surely, at least here, the brutal cold and occasional snowstorm have had an impact on the transmissions. But these also get skewed with population, as many statistics do.

And the vaccines have surely had the positive impact, but likely have increased the "hidden" infections, as people will struggle through their "cold" without being tested and confirming that it's actually COVID. We continue to do weekly testing, but after talking to so many other people realize that we're a bit of an anomaly. So many of our friends haven't done any COVID testing, including the tests sent to everyone in the mail (everyone got those, right?).

I know I started this saying it wouldn't end until everyone had it, or a preventative vaccine. I don't think we're quite there at the give-up point, but I think we're getting there. This is likely to be a flu-like endemic moving forward, where we'll get new or boosted vaccines occasionally. Hopefully the controls and awareness will be in place, and we can avoid catastrophic impact in the future.

Really, as February ends, and we look forward to the second anniversary of the lock-down (which isn't what it was), it's still a lot to consider.

Everyone's healthy.