From this, you can feel the lack of leadership and the loss of focus and good communication cascading out through the populace like a wave of surrender. Masks? Fuck ’em. Gone! Gone. I mean, to be clear, they were gone mostly when the CDC botched that communication early on, but here, now, I go out and I don’t see a mask on a face. Not from anybody. Not even as our cases are triple where they were in this county. Vaccine mandates? Temporarily gone, and probably full gone soon enough, with no seeming plans to introduce them. Testing? Quarantine? Isolation? Contact tracing? Can’t find tests, and the CDC has changed who should get them. Quarantine and isolation is already limited now, and for the most part here, parents and workers are subtly encouraged in schools and in jobs to just… casually not test at all because if you test, you might find it, and then your kids might not be in school (THE HORROR) and you might not get to come in to do your job (OH SHIT) and so maybe, y’know, I dunno, don’t go looking for COVID and you won’t find it. (This, a particularly Trumpy echo.) Contact tracing? Hahaha. Haha. Hahahhahgaaaaaaah yeah nobody is tracing shit anymore. It’s on you if you wanna do that. Good luck…

If you ask them, they will say — to go back to the beginning of this — oh, I hear Omicron is mild. Is it? Is it mild? Maybe. It may be milder. I know a lot of people who have COVID — more now than cumulatively throughout the entire pandemic — and they’re all vaxxed and boosted and experiencing a relatively mild sickness. Of course, when you realize that before now, there was Delta, and vaxxed/boosted people did not catch Delta easily, it starts to feel like it’s weird to call Omicron — which is kicking down the doors of your body’s protections — milder. Is it mild? It’s mild in that it doesn’t seem to lead to as much hospitalization and death, though that’s not the only metric by which we live. A lot of the people I know who have or had Omicron experienced a rough ride, even if it didn’t include an ambulance ride. Hospitalizations have not yet made the epic leap with the case rates, though hospitalizations are usually a couple-few weeks behind, and deaths behind that. And even still, hospitalizations are boiling over (yes, even with kids) and our healthcare system is wobbling toward collapse, and none of this even seems to consider the unknown potential of Omicron to lead to Long COVID, which would be a mass disabling event that would create some of those pesky comorbidities the CDC is so eager to dismiss. Does COVID significantly increase the chance of developing Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes in children? Seems like it does.