Our second cold COVID-19 winter

The world is suffering through the end of the second year of the novel coronavirus pandemic. In the United States, scientists developed vaccines that were getting widespread distribution as 2021 began. That was needed good news after months of widespread lockdowns that stifled everyday life and wreaked havoc on the economy, schooling and the healthcare system.

Alas, in most countries around the world, the pandemic rages on. In the United States 2021 ended with daily record numbers of new cases of COVID-19. Public health professionals adapted to the more contagious omicron variant by shifting the focus from the number of and rate of infections to hospitalizations. The critical metric is now hospital capacity because there is not any capacity.

In Washington state, infected people have flooded hospitals, filling them and causing Gov. Jay Inslee to halt elective surgeries for 30 days last week. New cases and hospitalizations are at record highs.

The numbers represent real people, people you know, as Washington state passed 1 million cases and 10,000 dead. Welcome to 2022. As of last week 71.1% of residents five and older are fully vaccinated, but there are more cases and more deaths than in 2020.

More healthcare workers are getting infected, sick, burnt out and quitting. The omicron variant may quickly crash, but its demise only leaves us more worn out then before. Almost certainly new variants will emerge.

The coronavirus’ success in spreading is not a failure of Inslee’s, President Biden’s, federal, state or local healthcare professionals leadership or decisions. Everything they have advocated as public health measures – distancing socially, staying out of crowds and wearing masks – were proven pandemic spread minimizing approaches 100 years ago in slowing the 1917-1919 three-year flu pandemic. There was no vaccine to save the population then.

In 1920 the U.S population was 106 million. Radio, the age’s only social media, was in its infancy. TV and the internet were not even fantasies. How did that pandemic end? Was it herd immunity – such a high percentage of the population was infected and had antibodies that the dwindled host population, your neighbors, was so small that the source for continued infection and mutation became too few and far between for virus reproduction? Was it a much more limited spread of falsehoods – lies?

Another possibility is that the population – your neighbors – pulled together in cooperation and mutual aid, the old common purpose, all for one, one for all pledging of our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

We are not joined together in common cause now, we, the people. We do not have unanimity and we are not universally aligned. The one way the novel coronavirus may bring us, as a society, together is the seeming inevitability that everyone will become infected. Vaccinated or not, asymptomatic or not, mild infection or not, masked or not, it seems that the mere fact of being out in public places people at risk till they – we, you, me, us – get sick.

The novel coronavirus will continue to change. That is what mutations and variants are. The virus does not think, does not have emotions, is not happy to have hosts welcoming it into their lungs but like other parasites seizes on opportunity.

The one drumbeat that leads us out of the pandemic is universal vaccination. That is a tune that a sizable faction of our neighbors will not learn, okay or sing. Without their cooperation and participation the country and the world remains stuck in a real life Groundhog Day. There is only one way to get to a happy ending. It requires people to consciously change heartfelt positions and ideological beliefs.

While fear and anger abound, there is not yet enough pain reaching enough of us. Love is a possibility, but there is too much resistance to that, too.