A Last 2021 Pandemic Post

  The year is almost over, but there is still time for one more blog post, one more to add to the year’s undersized total. 

Once again, despite my dislike of serious topics, I must address the pandemic.  

At the beginning of summer, we naively believed that the pandemic was ending, and for a brief time we all took off our masks at the supermarket; then there came the delta variant.  And now we have the omicron variant, which spreads much faster but is less severe than earlier variants.  

There are two hypotheses about how our society will be affected:

One is is that the omicron variant will infect so many people that our hospitals will be overwhelmed, leaving many important health services unavailable for the foreseeable future.  

The other is that the omicron variant will infect a huge number of people with relatively few fatalities, thus conferring natural immunity on enough people to effectively end the pandemic.  

Or maybe it will do both of these things. 

Or maybe it will do neither. 

Or maybe it will do some things that we haven’t even imagined, like somehow going back in time to infect people in prior years.  

That is how things in general have been going for the last 22 months or so.