Remember when...
..."Rona" was a gossip columnist?
...the only vaccines you needed as an adult were for shingles, the flu, and tetanus?
...your only worry about that person sitting way too close to you at the bar was that they might be hitting on you?
Times sure have changed, huh?
They have. Permanently.
In some ways, it's for the better. About 73% of the adults in this country are fully vaccinated against COVID; I don't have the stats for children. And President Biden has done a great job getting the vax rollout done, despite his infamous predecessor having left no plan at all for getting the shots into our arms. Building a plan from scratch that quickly, with no cooperation during the transition? That alone should win Biden a second term, in my book.
And we now can get rapid tests that you can use at home to tell you if you have COVID!
But...
Things are worse, too. Because so many people haven't yet been vaxxed--not only here, but around the world--COVID has had a chance to mutate. We're now up to a variant called Omicron, which is way more contagious than its parent. The vax won't stop it, but it does at least help your body fight it... but the variant is still highly dangerous for older people, even if they are vaxxed! (And the at-home test doesn't always catch the Omicron variant in a timely fashion!)
The pharma folks are working on a booster that will protect against Omicron, but it's one of those impossible races against time that only work out in the movies. Which means that COVID, whatever the mutation, is well on its way to becoming endemic.
In fact, the odds are high that sooner or later, we all, vaxxed and unvaxxed, will get some mutation of COVID.
Welcome to the new normal.
We still have the conspiracy nuts who try to tell everyone that the virus is a government plot (weirdly, they point to the mutations to prove it), that Dr. Fauci helped the Chinese create it, that the vaccine is made out of aborted stem cells, that this or that quack remedy will either prevent or cure COVID....It never ends. Meta and Twitter ban accounts when the misinformation gets too egregious, but those accounts mutate like...well, like a virus.
Also, there are the alt-right politicians who refuse to impose masking, social distancing, and vaccine mandates on their populations, protesting that such measures put too much stress on people and the economy. There is some truth to that, but how difficult is it to find compromises? Remember how I talked about the curbside pickups for take-out food and groceries? Those things are still around. And the vax bill is being picked up by the federal government--I definitely prefer that to them buying a bunch of new weapons or arming the next edition of the contras.
The right-wing politicians point to the learning problems that kids have had due to lack of actual classroom time. Distance learning, it turns out, didn't work as well as we hoped because the kids didn't cope well with the isolation. And most children who catch COVID have mild symptoms. So if the teachers get vaxxed and boostered, we should be okay, right?
Well...yeah. The problem is that when the children come home and bring the 'rona with them without knowing it, the entire family is at risk. The adults, even the vaxxed people, will have to isolate until they can be tested, thus losing time from work. And any close contact with Grandpa could kill him.
It's one of those Gordian knots that can't be solved by cutting it in half like Alexander the Great did. But there are people on both sides in such high dudgeon over the school issue that nobody is working on a solution. Somebody needs to start teasing those tangles apart, and soon.
So what now?
Now, we wait. We do the best we can. We get vaxxed, get boosted, try to avoid the unmasked idiots, and hope that at some future time we'll be able to go to a concert where we can dance with strangers in the aisles and not worry about getting sick. We order takeout instead of going to the restaurant (unless they have an outdoor patio), and at home we try new recipes from YouTube, Reddit, and Insta. We watch live-stream church services instead of attending in person. At work, we mask up with a filter insert, and hope everyone else will keep six feet or more away from us.
And we pray.
