On the U.S. surviving the pandemic

 

It's pretty much over, I guess

I recall the first time I landed in a large connecting airport at the height of the pandemic, sometime in February 2021.  It was just plain empty, and I half wondered if the place was closing up for some reason, but the time was only 10am!  It was the strangest thing I'd encountered lately, since airports are usually filled with bustling people, sipping their lattes and eating high-priced junk food.

Being the government bureaucratic clone that I am, I will indeed travel again in February to Washington D.C.; and, as I understand it, airport travel has pretty much rebounded to 80% of its pre-pandemic levels.  Yet it appears there are still hundreds of people that die of COVID in the U.S. everyday, but the medical system can now handle the numbers of cases as it would any other acute disease. (I was most fortunate to have not come-down with a case of it myself, at least that I know of.)  Data from the New York Times shows that over the last five days, the U.S. has averaged about 36 thousand new cases a day, likely due to both colder weather and the Thanksgiving holiday.

My guess is that our current conditions count as the pandemic being "over", though I doubt such things have any sort of scientific benchmark as establishing when such things are officially over.  The situation is similar to the seasonal flu, which always returns, but in a slightly different strain.  COVID is likely to do the same thing for some time to come, though it has been so well studied that I would not be surprised if researchers get a vaccine that can completely eliminate it.  I do hear tell that science is close to having a "universal" flu mRNA vaccine which protects against the 20 known influenza strains.  We'll see, but after surviving both an economic recession, a pandemic, a subsequent full blown economic shut down, and now the highest inflation rate since I was 17, I'm certainly done with all these once-in-a-lifetime events.  

I recently heard of an old saying that I'd somewhat re-derived for myself some years ago: "Pray for boring days."

O.

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Addenda: I note it's been over two years since I last posted on this blog.  Is blogging still even "a thing?"