The third year
--------------

I wasn't expecting the pandemic to enter a third year but here we
are.

It first started sinking in for me because a colleague made the joke

"What are you doing for your junior year of the pandemic?"

"Ouch," was my wincing reply on the zoom call.

I think the news about omicron has hit me harder than I ever
expected, knocking the wind out of me like a slipped on ice and
fell flat on my back. If you've ever done this you'll know exactly
the combination of breathless disorientation I mean.

No, omicron seems to be less likely to cause immediate pneumonia and
pulmonary collapse than the other variants, including delta, but we
don't know if it's going to cause the kinds of long-term
inflammatory problems we're collectively calling "long covid".

We also, unfortunately, know that omicron comes from a different
family than what produced delta and it has a lot of low-hanging
fruit adaptation-wise that it could pick up to become far more
severe if it gets enough time lounging about in its victims. There's
enough people unvaccinated still in the US that I deeply fear
omicron will gain fitness significantly over the next few months
and, fuck, then what?

I'm supposed to be opening up a community space in the spring. That
just seems somewhere between completely absurd and wickedly
irresponsible right now. I've started telling my coworkers on this
project that our "soft opening" will probably need to be delayed and
that for the first few months we probably just need limited
appointments and remote log-ins.

This isn't where I thought we'd be seven, eight, months ago when it
looked like maybe vaccination would get us across some kind of
finish line.

Instead, I'm seeing more people talk about how we're all going to
get covid anyway so it basically doesn't matter anymore.

I can't accept that but I'm losing my fire to argue.