Pima County, Arizona issued a new system and phone number for COVID-19 vaccination registration. According to the county health department, staff would be available over the weekend and on the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, January 18, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. My 83 year-old mother dialed the registration line. “Your call is important to us and will be answered in 9 days, 8 hours, 36 minutes. Press ‘1’ if you like to continue. If you continue, we’ll play really crappy music and hope you’ll eventually beat the crap out of your phone. Press ‘2’ to be disconnected right away. Or do nothing and be disconnected regardless.”
My mother asked of the likelihood of receiving the vaccination prior to the 2024 Presidential Election. “Almost 90%,” I calmly stated. Following up, “However, you are more likely to get hit by a meteorite than receiving the vaccine within the next 60 days.” The Christian Science Monitor reported just that, that some unlucky dude got whacked by a meteor in 2016. To be clear though, a professor at Tulane University calculated the odds of getting killed by a meteorite at about 1 in 250,000. That’s better than death by airplane crash (1 in 30,000) or tornado (1 in 60,000). Sorry, I digress.