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| Blackwell's Island - Hopper, 1928 |
The numbers have come down, and with it the barriers are slowly falling. Mask mandates and working from home decisions are falling, one by one. There are no church bells ringing - this is not a war declared won. It is merely a war declared over. A draw, if we are lucky. A resurgence if we are not.
And the reasons for declaring this cease-fire are good enough, but not great. We don't have maximum vaccination, but we have enough in our region to staunch the outbreaks. Those who are vaccinated seem to be having milder symptoms, but are still getting "Breakthrough" Covid. The stories have shifted from "Public anti-vaxer who then dies horribly" to "Famous person, vaccinated, who tests positive and secludes for about a week". A lot of those reports, ironically enough, have declared Coivd is like having the flu, something the nutjobs were claiming at the beginning of all this. It might be the worst flu of your life, but still .... the flu. And yeah, the flu can kill people.
But we are no longer overloading ERs and storing bodies in refrigerator trucks or buried in mass graves. We still have people super-spreading (most recent, someone attending GDC, a big game developers' conference, after they tested as positive with the disease). We still have people catching it and yeah, dying from it. But the numbers are almost in the manageable state, and we really, really want to forget about it.
So the mask mandates are elapsing and not being renewed. Compliance varies from situation to situation. My grocery store is about 50-50 right now. My friendly comic shop has dropped mask requirements and resumed evening gaming events. Theaters are definitely still requiring masks for the audiences. My favorite rib joint has done away with them entirely. On the other hand, the airline industry is completely fouled up because it doesn't have enough staff in the face of folk calling in sick.
Me? I'm still comfortable with masks, so I keep using them for the moment. If the workers where I go shopping are masked, I'm going to help out by wearing a mask. If not, I'm still going to go with masking becuase they are not horribly uncomfortable (speaking as someone who spent many winters in Wisconsin, and used to something called scarfs). I have a mask in my jacket pocket. And a spare mask in my zippered jacket pocket. And one in the car. And a door mask. And a desk mask, still in its original plastic bag. Just to be sure.
As I write this, the numbers are slowly bumping back up again. They are talking about a new variant. Omicron XE, which sounds like it was named by Microsoft's marketing department. There are articles on long-term effects of Covid. And the Feds have approved a second booster for us late-middle-aged folks. It does not feel like it is truly over, but I really, really want to be done with it this time.
But if it is not, well, we know what we have to do.
