What I think I know

Cases in Larimer County are up.  Wastewater monitoring shows an increase in positive samples, or if you don't attach much significance to the actual raw numbers, a lack of a decrease.  Hospitalizations are way, way down.  So either this latest variant is puny and weak, or we have yet to see it reach hospitalization levels.  Or more people are getting vaccinated, and those increases in vaccination indicate newly converted believers, rather than scared people going back for a fourth jab (seems unlikely, but let's be generous about the human race and how they react to overwhelming evidence).

If you want to believe we are under one million deaths, you can run to the Johns Hopkins map

If you believe all numbers are too low and we are underreporting as a nation (since some states stopped testing, and some states weren't as rigorous about determining or reporting cause of death), you should keep relying on the Worldometers chart.

But ultimately, know that nothing is going to be done differently in Estes Park over the next few months (we are getting warmer, and tourists are coming to spend their money, after all) regarding indoor mask mandates or vaccination mandates until the VEP, CofC, and EDC collapse into the ground, meaning never, or unless half our population is dead or has fled. 

Positivity locally has crept back over 5%, so 1 in 20 people you see in the Safeway are infected, but let's not kid ourselves - Testing is not being done at the level is used to be done, reporting from positive self-tests is non-existent, and everyone except the medical profession and a few stick-in-the-muds are moving on from this, whether the virus has decided to retire or stop mutating or not.  The deniers have said all along this was the flu, and now they twist the facts again to support their beliefs - they are turning this into the flu.  The flu of 1918, but whatever, we as a community are at greater risk of hospitalization or death while they fiddle.  I don't personally enjoy watching some moron pull down their pants and take a crap on science (like we were betting on a chicken at the Duck Races) or worse, pleasuring themselves, but it's the world we now live in, thanks to those with no education or education in an unrelated field being allowed to run the show. 

I do know this is not over, and we just force this pandemic into up-and-down waves as we tighten (sort of), relax, and then pretend to tighten again, rather than just taking our medicine and stomping this thing into the ground.  But nobody ever claimed our education system placed us the worldwide top 10.