They’re talking about “spiking” levels of the new XBB variants in the wastewater analysis, and lamenting that hospitalization rates are as high as they were in December, but then take great care to assure us that absolute rates are staying down and that really there’s nothing to worry about. No need to mention that dread-word “wave” at any rate.
They say this at the same time that limited data coming out
on the new variants suggest they are immensely contagious – even more so than
the original extremely contagious Omicron strain they branched from, which is
saying a lot – and that experts are throwing up their hands in the resignation
that most of the country is just going to catch this thing.
Given that a lot of the visible real time data has
completely evaporated due to the public abandonment of testing and tracking –
which, we should remember, was already inadequate enough in terms of its actual
practice and disposal and distribution of resources – it has become much more
difficult to gain a clear idea of what exactly is going on.
However there are a couple of salient bits of information
that we already have, that like a bat using echolocation, we could put together
ad-hoc to form some sort of alternative picture. As mentioned, we know how
contagious the new variants are, and we know how quickly they are achieving
dominance, which could be coupled with the understanding of how rapid people
move around in the modern world, and how any initial resistance to that
movement has been aggressively removed, so that we can continue to feed the
economy of course.
We have the wastewater data too. And we know that the state
of public health policy has, if anything, deteriorated from its already sorry
state, and that the populace on the whole have thrown caution to the wind and
given up completely on masking, though it is not like a lot of people had a
choice in the matter, given overwhelming public pressure to do so. Remember,
economies need to eat too.
We also know that repeated infections happen, and can
increase the odds of Long Covid and the cropping up of other problems, and that
these particular strains are even better at evading previous immunities from
infections and vaccinations. Slap on
that data from the not-so-distant past, in which the previous Omicron wave was
the deadliest, not because the strain itself was particularly virulent, but
because of how easily it was spread, reaching the greatest number of people.
Despite the obvious problems with this thinking – this sort
of thing classically leading to conspiracy theory for instance – it is
certainly better than nothing. Not to trash the bats too; they seem to do just
fine. And anyway, this thinking could be undertaken with skill, just as the
gathering of empirical data can be botched and abused.
Not a pretty picture all in all, but a workable one at
least.
The point of all of this? You don’t have to be as fixated on
Covid as I am, or to believe it is as destructive as it is as I do, to still be
a little unnerved at the growing disconnection of our society’s relation to
observable reality, a growing disconnection that comes with the growing
willingness to ignore or spin away problems both small and large. And even the
smaller problems tend to get larger over time if they aren’t dealt with.
