Okay, this omicron meltdown is officially hysteria in my book. The doctor who discovered it has described the symptoms she's seen in patients with this particular variant of Covid as "extremely mild", as in no one, not one single person with omicron, has yet been hospitalized as a result, it would appear, unless there's new info on that that I've missed. Cases thereof so far reportedly have not even included so much as a cough or a sore throat. And over this we are seeing travel bans and the shuttering of whole economies again? Seriously? That makes me think we'll never be out of this mode. There will always be new variants, folks. This one seems less consequential than even the original alpha strain, to say nothing of delta. So far I'm not even the least bit worried about the new omicron variant. I feel that I can live with being in circulation. I can live with a chance of experiencing "extremely mild symptoms", especially given my vaccination status. At some point moving on with life is called for.
Let me circle back to the zero hospitalizations point. While I am certainly no medical expert, my understanding has been that the point of everything from masking to vaccination to...*grumble grumble*...lockdowns has been to prevent hospitals from filling up such that people can no longer get in for any other kind of life-threatening emergency like strokes or cancer. If the omicron variant doesn't add to hospitalizations...maybe it's not worth shutting down economies over, you know? That's my thinking anyway.
When it came to earlier strains of Covid, the more I read about them, the more worried I became. With this one, it's the other way around: the more I read about omicron, the less concerned I am about it. I'm way more scared of more shortages and further price increases resulting from more supply chain disruptions than I am of the omicron variant. The cost of living here in the U.S. is up 6.2% over the last year alone (the fastest inflation rate in 31 years), while my income is up 0% and my stimulus money is now long since exhausted. I am, in other words, way more afraid of how countries are reacting to omicron than I am of this virus strain itself.
Matter-of-factly, I feel that I've been a pretty damn good soldier about all this. I mean okay, I've splurged and been undisciplined in some respects, like returning to movie theaters early on, as soon as they reopened in August of last year because I felt like I needed the outlet mentally-emotionally, even if it was just old movies playing and nobody was there but me, stuff like that. I'm human. But I have also gotten all three of my shots early on for the same virus in the span of well under a year and still have to mask at work anyway. This panic over what sure the hell so far looks like a very mild variant just makes me feel like there's no end to this regime in sight after more than a year and a half; like we'll never psychologically recover from Covid and be able to fully move on with our lives. I'll tell you what, if my workplace masking obligations aren't lifted by the spring when the weather starts to warm up and people resultantly start spending less time indoors and more time outdoors again, I'm officially going to cross over to the other side and start joining some of those anti-masking protests.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 02 December 2021
