Help Us, Omicron, You’re Our Only Hope

I am feeling hopeful for the second time in the past year.

The last time I felt hopeful was in the summer. Vaccines had been released. Sensible other measures were still in place. The test positivity rate was approaching a level that made me feel okay about a lot of customary activities I had forgone for more than a year (like spontaneous trips to the store for a single thing instead of carefully planned expeditions to stock up for a month).

My hopes that time were dashed, because they rested entirely on people working together. Oh, foolish me. The precautions were lifted, people flooded back into restaurants and movies, and utterly predictably, COVID came roaring back. Again.

This time, my new hope stands a fighting chance, because it isn’t pinned on people. It’s pinned on COVID itself. We may have caught a massive break in the form of omicron, which may be the variant that snuffs out all the rest.

We should be so lucky.

It’s highly transmissible, and it seems to be out-competing delta. In that sense, it is its own vaccine. It suppresses the other variants. Early studies show it imparts immunity against other variants, too.

It helps that it’s not particularly virulent. Not that we were likely to muster the energy to fight it even if it was just as destructive as delta, but it makes it really easy to phone it in when hardly anyone is dying. Just look at South Africa’s numbers. Massive caseload, barely a blip in deaths. Omicron is the COVID that finally makes the early deniers right: it’s just the flu! We don’t care that the flu kills a lot of people, so let’s not care about this!*

We’ve proven ourselves incapable of ending the pandemic on our own. Admittedly, COVID is a pretty sneaky foe. It spreads so easily. It kills just few enough people to weaken our resolve to sacrifice for the cause. I guess it’s only fair that COVID should be the one to ride to our rescue.

It has me in a weird place. Whereas I used to watch the numbers and would get discouraged to see the test positivity rate rising or the case count skyrocketing, now I find myself encouraged by how high it’s going. If omicron is the weaker strain, then by all means: spread, spread! I’m watching the count of deaths and am encouraged so far that they don’t rise at a rate proportional to cases. Maybe this really is our ticket out of this mess.

I can’t shake the feeling, though, that this was not the way it should have been. It would be better if it ended, because we kept precautions in place until vaccination rates were high and succeeded in getting vaccines to all countries around the world. You know — controlled our own destiny. Maybe I shouldn’t care. Maybe I should just be grateful I get to go to the store again, but the fact remains: even after COVID is long gone, the bad logic and weaknesses that meant we had to let a virus do our work for us will remain. We may escape the pandemic, but we are still stuck with ourselves.

And if a new strain emerges — if omicron doesn’t snuff out the pandemic — it may be back on us again to find our own way out of this mess.

[*This was always a really dumb argument. We do care about the flu. Remember the annual flu vaccine? We mount a sustained, systematic effort to combat the flu year after ye…oh god, I just realized: will the flu vaccine be our next pointless culture war? Will refusing to get a flu vaccine go from “casual act of negligence” to “badge of callous pride to pwn the libs” now, too? I hope not. Anyway, even if we didn’t care about the flu, using the deaths from one thing to justify not giving a shit about even more deaths from another thing is as valid an argument as saying you’ve driven drunk before and only killed one person, so why should anyone care if you get blitzed and plow through a bunch of kindergarteners standing on the sidewalk waiting for the bus? Well, the first thing was bad. The second thing is badder…oh god, how did so many of us get this stupid? Wait, I’ve just been handed this statement from Cole Beasley: “It’s not that we’re against the vaccine or for anyone getting sick. We’re just against being told what to do.” 🙄 How to tell me you’re a white man without telling me you’re a white man: care more about maintaining control than about being minimally inconvenienced to help others.]