COVID is not over but the return to non-COVID life conflicts with changing realities about the virus
By Josh Resnek
In China right now authorities there are demanding mass testing and quarantining of those found to have COVID or Omicron to reduce the possibility of the virus spreading like wild fire throughout the most highly populated nation on the face of the earth.
For the first time since the onset of the pandemic, China’s government demanding harsh restrictions to keep the virus under control is being challenged by the people.
The people plead they cannot any longer survive the economic and social disruption.
Chinese officials closed the Shanghai Disneyland at the end of March. It remains closed.
Cases of COVID and Omicron have soared in Shanghai, a city of about 20 million.
With more than 1 1⁄2 billion people, China is rightfully petrified of the COVID virus and its proven ability to shut down the economy. China wants to stand as the bulwark against the virus.
Through its Draconian efforts to shut off and to shut down a city like Shanghai, the government is showing it means business when it comes to throttling the virus.
Here in America, and in cities like Everett across the nation, COVID cases are rising again.
Due to the mass inoculation of much of American society, the effects of the virus are not so severe as they were during the height of the pandemic.
Not as many are on ventilators. Not as many are extremely sick and not as many are dying.
This does not mean the crisis is over.
Americans across the nation have turned the COVID crisis into an economic and political game, turning a blind eye to the harsh realities of the continued presence of the virus and juxtaposing the need to control the virus with the desire to return the economy and our lives to a new normal.
Most major restrictions have been scrapped here and across the nation.
Positivity rates have been rising steadily locally and throughout the nation as a result, according to the CDC.
Above all else, confusion reigns about how to move forward.
Indecision has replaced restrictions.
Much of the population is left to its own about how to mitigate the virus and how to protect themselves from it.
Science has taken a back seat to politics and economics.
America appears to have come to the point where rising numbers of cases will be treated as though it is not part of a pandemic, but rather, COVID will now be considered another health risk the nation needs to learn to live with.
That being said, everything about how we live and work has been changed dramatically by the Pandemic.
The pleasant and simple notion that we can congregate among one another and breath all over one another and become infected as a society without needing to make dramatic changes is history.
China understands this better than we do.
How ironic that China is where the virus began.