A Journal of the Plague Decade

 

The amount of empty shelving at the local supermarket has become alarming. Picking up weekly needs has become hit and miss. For a time I was trying to make up the difference by visiting two or three supermarkets a week. But with Omicron raging, and of uncertain potency, I’m not sure it is worth it any longer. My estimate is that the weekly food bill has gone up 30%.

A Depressed World

 

The problem faced by governments now is a good model of what depression is all about. Not a “mental illness,” but a rational reaction to there being no good options available.

The Covid lockdowns are causing increasing economic devastation. The attempt to keep everyone afloat financially through them is causing increasing inflation. Government debt has piled up to the point that governments cannot afford measures to fight inflation. And yet, just as the end seemed again in sight, here we have another wave of the virus, more virulent and, as far as we can tell so far, as deadly. And resistant to the vaccines. If we do nothing, many may die, and we will have just the sort of chaos in the health system we wanted to avoid all along. As if all our effort until now was for nothing—we might as well have gone ahead and let the original virus spread. 

And whatever the governments do, they are going to get blamed for the situation. They will be told they should have done the opposite.

And we have seen hopes dashed repeatedly. We thought we could end it all with the vaccines. Just as we seemed poised to have the virus under control, the Alpha variant popped up; and then the Delta variant. After Omicron, there may be yet another variant, and another wave.

This is just how depression develops—false dawns, hopes repeatedly dashed, and in the end, no good options. Blamed for whatever you do.

This most naturally comes about in a family situation in which a parent has made one or more child the scapegoat.

But here we see it happening naturally. My wife suggested, “It is as if God hates us.” And that is just what it looks like: like the situation of the hated child.

So You Thought It Was Over?

 

Is there really a bat in here?

Two bits of troubling information on Covid. First, confirmation that people who have previously had Covid can be reinfected with the Omicron variant. Second, 80% of a sampling of white-tail deer have or have had Covid. So Covid now has an “animal reservoir” from which to re-emerge forever in new variants, even if we eliminate it in the human population.

Pandora’s box is well and fully open now. 

But as with Pandora’s box, one hope remains: that Omicron will be milder in its effects.