When it comes to the pandemic, nobody is in charge. Never before in my life have I seen the authorities acting like such clueless wimps. This reminds me of those horror movies in which the police, parents, principal, camp director, and other authority figures deny the existence of Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, or some other mass murderer in hiding.
When it comes to assessing the threat level, you’re on your own. The pandemic won’t end simply because people declare it to be over. Not only is the pandemic still going on, there’s a new surge that isn’t officially captured. The wastewater viral loads are increasing markedly in most of the US and just recently peaked in the Northeast at a level several times higher than that of the March low.
Even after the current surge fades away, the world is on track for new ones sooner or later. There are still unvaccinated people out there, and their numbers don’t seem to be shrinking much. The unboosted people aren’t rushing to get boosted. It will be some time before newer and better vaccines become available.
“Natural immunity” doesn’t work. If it did, the pandemic would have been over a year ago, and each of the surges since then would never have happened. And unlike normal cold and flu outbreaks of the past, COVID-19 doesn’t just mysteriously disappear without explanation.
Face masks do work. Masking up is preferable to physical distancing. In my multi-step reopening process, dropping physical distancing comes ahead of not masking up. If you hate masking up, the solution is to switch to a different mask (that works better for you) or to find some hack that gives you good protection without the discomfort and inconvenience that you hate. To be fair, the need to mask up encourages physical distancing for myself by prompting me to question how essential it is that I go there.
There’s still no dialogue about Vitamin D, selenium, or consuming a healthier diet. At first, I assumed that the authorities wanted to keep the message simple enough to be printed on a bumper sticker and were afraid of confusing people with too much information or giving people an excuse to disregard the need for physical distancing and masking up. But it’s all too clear that people won’t even look for any excuse to drop the official precautions.
Some lessons for life in general:
- Don’t use the “everyone else does/does not” excuse. It’s clear that the world is full of sheep.
- Don’t use the “nobody told me to do it/not do it” excuse. Sometimes, the authorities are clueless or are too wimpy to do their jobs.
- Even a broken clock is correct twice a day. Joe Rogan is an example. He’s a blooming idiot, but I’m not going to quit my Vitamin D supplementation just to spite him. I wouldn’t be independent if I insisted on doing the opposite of everything he does.