Random thoughts about the virus that's going to be with us forever

 A couple of the local schools are going back to remote learning only for the coming week. The combination of students testing positive, staff getting sick and calling in, and a distinct lack of substitutes for everything from teachers to janitors to bus drivers pushed the districts into shutting down for the immediate future. They say they're doing remote learning, but that's going to be hard to pull off if they don't have enough teachers to handle in-school classes. Brief closures thanks to a district getting slammed by influenza were not unusual in the past, but of course SARS-COV-2 has put its own distinct spin on things. Instead a closure lasting only a day or two and happening maybe once during a school year, now the closures last for weeks and come and go unpredictably. 

Back in April 2020 the Younger Daughter and I were chatting about likely outcomes for the pandemic. My prediction at the time was that it had already spread too widely to get it under control. COVID-19 was going to end up an endemic disease, one of those things that was around more or less all the time, and about all we could do was take the precautions advised not-quite-two-years ago (masks, social distancing, lots and lots of handwashing and cleansers)(I'm wishing now I owned stock in Purell)(or, more accurately, GOJO -- they invented Purell) and hope the virus eventually burned itself out. You know, sweep through the population, pick off the most vulnerable, and then disappear, kind of like the Spanish flu did back a hundred years ago. If we got lucky, pharmaceutical companies would manage to come up with a vaccine before it reached the point where trucks patrolled neighborhoods asking people to bring out their dead. 

As it turned out, Big Pharma did manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat and introduced vaccines a year ago. The initial reaction was for most people to happily get in line for the jabs. Lots of complaining about not enough vaccine for everyone who wanted it, people having trouble scheduling appointments, it was taking too long for the eligible categories to drop down to where just about any adult could get it. . . That enthusiasm didn't last long. 

The same conspiracy nutjobs who were (and still are) convinced SARS-COV-2 is a hoax, a bizarre way for the medical establishment to inflate its reimbursement rates, bombarded the rest of us with enough weirdness and right-wing propaganda that a sizable percentage of the U.S. population decided that given a choice between dying and getting vaccinated, death sounded good. 

At this point, to be honest, I'm fine with the anti-vaxxers and other Covidiots making that choice. I just wish they weren't cluttering up the hospitals and preventing other people from getting necessary care. You know, they wanted freedom from medical tyranny because they don't trust the doctors or the government. Fine, don't go to the Emergency Room. Do us all a favor and quietly die at home. 

Actually, one of the saddest things about the Covidiots is that even when they're dying from a disease that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in this country they don't want to believe they have it themselves. They and their families scream at doctors and nurses and demand to know what they really have. Bizarre doesn't begin to cover it as a description.

In any case, thanks to the fact we're still nowhere near having enough people vaccinated to really push SARS-COV-2 back into the metaphorical bottle, it appears we all are going to be living with it for a long, long time. As a society we've forgotten there was a time when epidemics swept through communities on a regular basis: cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, typhoid, measles, polio, diphtheria, mumps, plague, chickenpox, and others. Some of those are no longer an issue thanks to improved sanitation, some got eliminated (or close to it) after specific vaccines were invented. With most of them the death rates were higher than the mortality rates for SARS-COV-2. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from that knowledge -- hey, be grateful things aren't worse? -- but I do think seeing fair numbers of the general public routinely masked is going to be with us for the foreseeable future.

And, speaking of masks, the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest messaging on masking and other issues is coming across as more than a bit muddled does not surprise me at all. I have seen the CDC from the inside. The individual scientists, the actual subject matter experts, do amazing work. Having seen them in action I have no doubt that if just one of those way-down-in-the-bureaucratic-food-chain experts was allowed to speak, whatever he or she said would be clear and make sense. It might be phrased in enough technical terminology to have a lay person reaching for a dictionary, but it would make sense. 

Unfortunately, having worked at the CDC as an editor, I know that communications never emerge from someone who is willing to speak plainly. Any and all communications pass through multiple levels of review. At each review, things get murkier. The editors fight the good fight, they try to follow the KISS rule, but the higher up the food chain one goes the less willing the powers-that-be are to speak plainly and unambiguously about anything. Endless hours are spent in meetings and fairly soon KISS gets buried under CYA. Your tax dollars at work.

I have said for years that the traffic jam scene in the credits at the beginning of the first season of The Walking Dead wasn't fiction, it was Atlanta on any Friday afternoon. I have also said many times that if there ever was a zombie apocalypse, we'd be fucked. By the time the upper echelons at the CDC finished holding meetings and trying to decide just who was going to do what, it would be too late. Nothing about SARS-COV-2 has changed my mind. The only reason we're not all dead now is this particular corona virus turned out to be not nearly as nasty as it could have been.