The Brave News

by Aeden Alexander

One year after COVID-19 began to spread in the United States, many wonder how COVID-19’s second consecutive presence during spring break would affect the country now that vaccines are beginning to go into people’s arms.

The numbers don’t lie, as of late March 2021 coronavirus numbers are at an all time low in all states. But this isn’t for any reason, as with the now available vaccines out, almost twenty two percent of the country has been fully vaccinated.

Many schools look to return to on campus learning but spring break might affect reopenings due to the potential of rising cases. Some Bosco students offered to share what they did during spring break to prevent another outbreak.

“Yeah, honestly with everything closed you can’t really do much to begin with, but thankfully since we live in California we have many social distanced options like the beach which is where I spent most my time fishing and having fun,” said junior Jesse Paderez.

But, now that spring break is over it gives us a chance to take a look at how it affected COVID-19 cases. From numbers being at an all time low, there are now hospitals in many states like Florida and California that got hit with a new spike of people testing positive.

At the start of April, 702,000 new positive tests come out due to traveling for spring break vacations. Many warnings were put out suggesting not to travel, but many did not listen. 

Florida, more specifically Miami, took action early and shut down many of their popular spring break spots but this did not affect much as Florida was hit the hardest of all states in positive cases after Spring Break.

California, now being one of the states with a dipping positivity test rate, is not as reopened as Florida to begin with, but even with the small spike in numbers, Governor Gavin Newsom came out and released a statement saying that by June, California looks to be fully opened with protocols like masks and hand sanitizing still in place.

“I’m super excited for the reopening, obviously we didn’t really have last summer so I am pumped especially for baseball too because we can have a full summer of playing and not have to really worry about what will happen in the future,” said junior Jake Ellison.

Spring Break had much less of an affect from a COVID-19 standpoint this year compared to last year, and part of that is due to the new vaccine availability, which are a major reason for recent success in keeping case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths low and declining. Yet, there were also many people took the pandemic much more seriously this year than last year, which was another contributing factor to the lower numbers we are seeing from the CDC.