Going OT.
Risk of the virus spreading and the lethality of the virus should be the key issues in the decision making process.
Politicians will always want to add their two penneth.
In the Sunday Times today, there is an article regarding an IC doctor. She says that 95% of her patients are unvaccinated. That alone should send out the alarms bells. But, some citizens seem to be blinkered and do not care. It's almost as if it is a badge of honour to some of them, but in reality, they could be signing their own death warrants.
A new varient related to Covid was always going to garner concern and panic as the media would be guaranteed to jump on the story immediately and using titles and headlines with key words dedicated to causing alarm.
What is sad is that by throwing that out in the first instance, the key messages and counter balance is lost to the casual viewer as their anxiety is already heightened, thus the amygdala in the brain "hijacks" our emotional response...and what more anxiety causing than a pandemic!
I would counter this concern with regards to the Omicron variant. The name personalizes it, however this was always going to happen as this is how viruses behave. It happens all the time in nature as they want to survive and thrive. Yes they can mutate to something more serious, however they also mutate to become more infective and less severe, as there is no point bumping off your hosts as they will also be eradicated as well.
We also have this every season with Influenza. Flu variants emerge at a speedier ratio of 2:1 when compared with Coronavirus. And every year we track the most likely strain to be dominant in society and vaccinate for it. Some years are worse than others in regards to illness and mortality (kicking the bucket), others are much less severe. We never splash this all over the media and giving it names to personalize it, nor do we suddenly shut society down due to this, and we should not for covid, because as sure as night follows day, we will have a new dominant strain next year of both covid and influenza.
What is great is we know what covid is at a genetic sequencing level, we have genomic sequencing to track any varients, and we have pharmaceutical agencies who can adjust their vaccines to cover for the dominant strain.......just like influenza. This is not to play down the impact of this pandemic, I would never do that, as I would not the H5 N1/Spanish flu pandemic, or the Influenza epidemic of 2013 which we estimate caused 33,000 deaths at an average of 300-400 per day in the UK. But we must learn to live without fear, as to hide away, repeat hugely damaging lockdowns that affect massively both health and the economy is no way to live at all.
I will continue to practice hand washing, mask wearing & vaccine taking approaches (and improve my exercise again)...But we should all live, spend time with friends, families, and fellow rugby and Wasps supporters, and seek out the joys of life in companionship, friendship and love...otherwise we would miss out on spending time with people with GOMS like our own NWW!
Now I am off to worry about how we are going to beat Worcester this weekend!!!!
Always a Wasp
