This is what a pandemic looks like—only with body bags stacked up everywhere, assuming anyone survives to fill them. The Featured Image is a Halloween lawn decoration but nevertheless poignant reminder about what a viral apocalypse is and isn’t. I used iPhone 7 Plus on Oct. 31, 2017, near where Cleveland and Monroe meet in San Diego’s University Heights neighborhood. Vitals: f/1.8, ISO 20, 1/336 sec, 28mm; 12:05 p.m. PDT.
The reminder is necessary with so many people testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2) variant Omicron. Given the strain’s Measles-like communicability and the ridiculous amount of testing, which includes millions of at-home kits, the high numbers of positive infections aren’t surprising. Disruption of essential services and supply chains come from mandates that require the infected to quarantine, even when asymptomatic or mildly ill; citizens aren’t sicker just captive to public health policy. Nor are some overwhelmed hospital emergency rooms surprising, when news reports create climate of fear and primary care physicians or urgent care facilites direct those testing positive, or worried about having COVID-19, to ERs.
As I explained in March 2021, “Fear is the Contagion“. Since the doomsayers started harping about Omicron, supported by boundless SARS-CoV-2 testing that unsurprisingly reveals a largely infected population, widespread mass insanity is everywhere. Stated differently, if SARS-CoV-2 is the virus and COVID-19 the resulting disease, fear is the bug and mass insanity the illness.
What the prognosticators of doom fail to grasp: Omicron is nature’s—or God’s, if you prefer—gift of immunity to us all. The present should be accepted with immense humility, because if the variant really were truly virulent, mortality would be enormous because of the high infection rate. Think the mass casualties of “12 Monkeys” or “Station Eleven“, which both are fantastic TV series, incidentally. Omicron demolishes all the haughty precautions taken against the Novel Coronavirus—from isolation to lockdowns to masking to quarantines to social distancing to (most importantly) vaccination. The SARS-CoV-2 variant relentlessly infects anyone and everyone. Trillions of dollars were spent and billions of lives disrupted over nearly two years. For what? We are powerless. We are saved only by grace of the resulting COVID-19 being mild for most people.
So you take another look at that photo and think how much worse the pandemic could be and how nothing we could do would stop, or even slow, rapid infections. Our medical advances are meaningless before Omicron’s tenacious spread. And if the news media divulged even a smidgen of truth, most of us would be dead. Lucky for lies, eh?