The Washington Post Editorial Board says what we are all thinking:
Remember the promise of normalcy by July Fourth? How can it be that now — after Thanksgiving, after so much sacrifice and waiting, after the arrival of vaccines, after months of sweaty masks, distancing and isolation — that another wave of pandemic infection is upon us? In Europe, lockdowns are returning. In some hot spots such as Minnesota and Michigan, hospital wards are again overflowing. A worrying new variant is raising alarms. What happened?
World health authorities are calling the new COVID-19 variant omicron because, I guess, omigod seemed like poor marketing.
Things are better now than in the first pandemic wave, the Board is quick to point out. Existing vaccines may prove effective against the new strain (TBD), face masks are (nearly) everywhere, hospital systems have recovered from the worst, and — no solace for the 800,000 U.S. dead — the economy has largely recovered.
But the pandemic is the unwelcome guest who won’t leave. The delta variant, for reasons still unclear, surges at different places over time. A few months ago, it was rampaging in Florida and the South; now it is in the Upper Midwest. Delta’s behavior is hard to figure. It can set off a precipitous surge, then decline almost as suddenly, as happened in India. Or it can zoom up to a plateau, and stay there, as in Britain. “It is not fitting into a neat bow-tied package of seasonality and predictability,” says epidemiologist Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota.
[…]
In the United States, the pandemic is being fueled by the unvaccinated: 47 million adults and 12 million eligible teenagers. New daily cases nationwide have been on the upswing for three weeks. Michigan, which had as few as 102 new daily cases at one point in the summer, now has a seven-day average of more than 7,000. At Spectrum Health, a system of 14 hospitals and other health-care facilities in western Michigan, 86 percent of the hospitalized covid patients and 90 percent of those in intensive care units are unvaccinated, many with underlying conditions as well.
Just don’t celebrate the deaths of the obstreperous unvaccinated, okay? New York Times:
“They were making comments that he should have died, that he deserved to die,” said [Nick Bledsoe’s] father, Hal Bledsoe. “It hurt.”
These and many other losses fill a host of websites that claim to be educational, but are fueled by schadenfreude at the deaths of the unvaccinated whose social media posts included Trump memes and conservative conspiracy theories. An exhortation on one such site reads: “Everyone listed on this site helped spread Covid-19 misinformation and then paid the price for their views. Share to stop others from making the same mistake.”
It happens time and time again:
The stories are often remarkably similar: Anti-government memes and posts dismissing the coronavirus or vaccines give way to announcements about feeling sick and testing positive for the virus. Then there are often requests for prayers. Sometimes there are selfies taken while hooked up to breathing machines and fearful updates about imminent intubation. Most end with loved ones sharing R.I.P. posts. Many include links to GoFundMe campaigns created to defray funeral costs.
A lot of the beliefs about vaccines and microchips and Ivermectin, etc., are lunatic ones. Pointing that out is fine. Countering disinformation with accurate information. But recognize it is a lead-a-horse effort.
She believes Dr. Fauci is the Prince of Darkness, I heard about a “Do your research” relative. It’s worrisome. But the last thing to wish for or celebrate is someone’s death from their own delusions. There is enough cruelty to go around right now.