Relax? Don't Do It!

I thought we'd been spared.

It looked there was light at the end of the COVID tunnel.  Despite a rise in infections in the West and a tandem increase in RSV and flu infections, COVID infection rates in late 2022 were still below what they had been in late 2021, the RSV spike among children was due to a lack of exposure to earlier respiratory viruses (and was likely to peak soon and fall off as a result), and the flu spike was likely to follow that same trajectory.  Certainly, I thought, the pandemic would finally fizzle out by this coming spring.  

Then the Commies running the so-called People's Republic of China ruined everything.

China is relaxing and in some cases ending its zero-COVID restrictions and allowing the virus to spread all over the country like runny jelly on toast.  As a result, there have been 250 million COVID infections in China - 18 percent of the country's population - although the government has officially reported only 63,000 cases in the past couple of weeks.  Effective immediately, the government won't be reporting new cases at all.  Meanwhile, Chinese hospitals and crematoria can't keep up with the spike in cases and deaths.

So what does that have to do with the rest of the world? Not only will the Chinese stop testing foreign nationals entering the country, it will start allowing - in a controlled manner, the Chinese government has cryptically explained - Chinese citizens to start traveling outside the country.

Unless other countries rigidly test Chinese travelers entering their domains, we can expect the horrors of 2020 to happen all over again.

And even if prior infections and vaccinations in North America and Europe blunt the spread of the lastest COVID wave now hitting China - the largest wave anywhere since March 2020 - the case and death numbers will still be high . . . particularly in the United States, where right-wing science skeptics still won't get vaccinated.

In other words, don't look at a bright side to all this because there isn't one.

I've been unable to go to many places since the pandemic started nearly three years ago because, even when restrictions were lifted in the United States, I've still had to wear face coverings and engage in some social distancing in indoor public spaces, and as I am uncomfortable going places under these circumstances,  I don't really go anywhere I don't have to other than meetings of the stamp collector's club I belong to.  Many annual events I've regularly attended have been scaled back or canceled altogether.  I still won't attend any events that haven't been cancelled if they're indoors.  But I thought we might be getting toward the end of the pandemic by April 2023 at the earliest.  Hey, Donald Trump wasn't necessarily lying back in 2020 when he said that SARS CoV-2 would go away by April; he just never said what year. 😃

The Chinese have seen to it - all for the sake of  the mighty yuan (and avoiding public unrest that could cause the government to collapse and the army to side with the people) - that this pandemic will go on indefinitely.  And they'll largely escape blame because ,well, we need their supply chains to function.  And the World Health Organization has inexplicably treated China with kid gloves, taking Xi Jinping's propaganda at face value and letting efforts to find the source of COVID atrophy.  The Chinese, of course, are safe in the knowledge that no one in the West will attack them for fear of being labelled racist.

 I am so confident that I will never travel abroad now thanks to all of this that I'm thinking of using my passport - with pages as empty as a monograph book of Irish erotic art - for kindling.  I've gone back to finding the alternative way of seeing Europe - scrolling through landscapes on Google Earth.  Yesterday I virtually visited Holland.

I disagree with most of what the Republicans stand for, but if the House Republican majority in the new Congress makes good on plans to investigate the origins of COVID, I'll be egging them on enthusiastically.

Since I can't go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or see the latest movies in the theaters, I'll have nothing else to do.