mr piers pokemon, your vibes please

So I started thinking about how Mew could possibly learn every TM, HM, and Move Tutor move; and one thing led to another.

If you stopped masking, it’s time to start again, today. I’m not asking you to stay home, just to mask as well as possible, and do hand hygiene.

In multiple communities all over the USA and Canada, every pediatric hospital bed is full, mostly with babies and toddlers who have severe respiratory infections. It seems to be a combination of flu, RSV and COVID, sometimes more than one at a time in the same child.

We can sort out why this happened later. Right now, there’s an emergency that should be front page news, and isn’t, and the best way to stop it is to reduce the circulation of all respiratory viruses in our communities by masking everyone who can mask, before babies start dying because there isn’t enough care to go around.

Get your current flu shot and bivalent COVID booster if you haven’t already, but also please mask now.

COVID somehow convinced waaaaay too many adults that children are more resistant to disease than adults.

They are NOT.

While there are a handful of diseases that are easier for kids to endure without long-term consequences than adults, mostly, diseases that make adults feel tired and fevered and stuffy-headed can be deadly for kids.

And once the mask mandates faded (because, apparently, we’re all too tired of COVID to keep protecting our communities from it), everyone seems to have forgotten that for most illnesses, kids catch them first and feel them worst.

Googling for [children respiratory crisis] on the News tab gets a terrifying array of articles. “[Location] hospitals are swamped.”