The following is loose speculation based on a dimly understood anecdote, so make of that what you will.
I do have a hunch - as plenty of others do - that we may be in the midst of a new silent Covid wave, which is likely made up of one or multiple of the new Omicron variants. Part of this has to do with the talk of spiking Covid levels in the wastewater in multiple cities, which is really the only decent data collection we have anymore in the US in particular - though this happening elsewhere - which has abdicated its responsibility for public health in light of the pandemic. Couple this with anecdotal accounts of hearing about all sorts of people catching Covid (including myself) in our communities here and elsewhere, and I personally noticed last weekend here in Washington that the cold and flu shelves were totally cleared off of product.
Now, the latest wave of variants have been described as particularly "immune evasive." Reinfections have certainly been a problem for a while, but I personally experienced two distinct onsets a week apart, which could certainly be two different bugs or a single "reactivation" or any other number of scenarios. Which got me thinking.
That's a hell of an evolutionary path: a virus that's this contagious and on top of it immune evasive, bouncing off of previous hosts like echoes, in what is already a virus-permissive or even virus-encouraging society full of densely packed hosts with rapid and large scale transportation.
We don't even have to be talking about reinfection. Just given the current rate of variants being produced and then bouncing around and competing at these levels of contagion, combined with the society's permissiveness producing wave after wave, the viruses transforming themselves after departing from their high water marks of propagation, there is more than enough steam to keep things moving. In light of this, a particular image comes to my mind.
It is an image that has haunted me since sitting in on a cow slaughter a couple years ago; not necessarily the slaughter itself, which was more fascinating and eye-opening than anything, but something specific to it. It was curious that the butcher was using a little .22 rifle to kill the cows. There were plenty of ways to do it of course, but he preferred that particular method. I wondered: .22? Why not a larger caliber like a .45 or .44 magnum and just be done with it?
The answer I got was this: what the .22 bullet tends to do is that after it enters the skull it tumbles around, inflicting the damage it needs to without exiting, dropping the animal nearly instantly, which was the intent anyway, which appeared to be the case from what I saw. The caliber is much more precise due to the low kickback, and it manages to do the job that a larger caliber would do anyway, and probably more neatly.
And I can't help but think of Covid, with its particular mix of contagiousness and virulence, perpetually bouncing around and doing the damage it can while maintaining its momentum and its generative capacity.
