Eight Hundred Thousand . . .

The United States is approaching 800,000 deaths since the COVID pandemic began.  We will likely reach a million deaths - still half of the toll from the 1918 pandemic when adjusted for population differences, but still too many - before it's over.

As to when it's over . . . well, there doesn't seem to be much consensus on that.  Most people do seem to agree that it will be over sometime in the New Year, but that could be as early as spring or as early as this time next year.

Some people are counting on Omicron to be the final major variant, as it spreads more rapidly than Delta but has far milder symptoms.  Forgotten in this theory is the fact that the virus that causes COVID - SARS CoV-2 is called a severe acute respiratory syndrome - that's what the SARS acronym stands for!  Omicron  may be mild, but no one's calling it BARS (benign acute respiratory syndrome) or a MARS (mild acute respiratory syndrome), and there are many reasons for that.

One is that an Omicron-infected patient in Britain just died. 

The lesson is that the distinction between a severe COVID variant and a mild COVID variant is the difference between getting nuked and firebombed.

Not very cheery today . . . sorry.