It seems a cruel trick of nature that Omicron – a purportedly highly contagious COVID variant – is arriving just in time for Jesus’ birthday. (Maybe he should postpone it, and throw a combination birth/resurrection party around Easter.) As if we didn’t already have enough to dread this time of year: the unwanted visiting relatives, the rampant materialism, the endless radio barrage of Mannheim Steamroller’s “Deck the Halls,” a musical experience on a par with being intubated in an ICU.
According to Merriam-Webster, citing the World Health Organization (which, with all their missed pandemic calls, sometimes seems to be named ironically), the Omicron moniker comes from the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. The 13th and 14th letters of the alphabet (“nu” and “xi”) were skipped over because “nu” sounds like “new” and “xi” is a common surname – as with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the man who some credit for bringing us the Wuhan-coronavirus. Still, I’m not racist or anything – I’m a fan of all things Greek (gyros, Plato, Telly Savalas, sovereign debt defaults). But I still don’t like the ring of it. “Omicron” sounds too much like a failed tech start-up, or something Elon Musk might name his child.
The tired Circle of Pandemic Life is therefore once again repeating itself. Public-health types offer suggestions to mask-up again, even if you’ve been vaccinated. The Resistance sounds the battle cry of “Masks Forever?!!!!” In fact, just two days ago, “Dr.” Sebastian Gorka (he’s not a medical doctor, but plays one on Twitter), tweeted a clip of Anthony Fauci on CNN, claiming, “Fauci finally admits it, it’s masks FOREVER!” Like a high percentage of Gorka’s claims, this one was bunk, too. (Fauci actually said, “One of the things that’s very clear is that if you have to be in an indoor congregate setting in which you’re unsure of what the vaccination status is of the people around you, wear a mask.” )
Gorka, like many grown men throwing hissy fits these days, seems upset that someone suggests taking precautions in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. It’s one which is now believed to have killed a lot more Americans (787,695, though that number will increase by the time I’m done writing this paragraph) than did the Spanish Flu (believed to be around 675,000), a benchmark The Resistance scoffed at us ever reaching just 21 months ago, when they were still trying to pass COVID off as a bad case of the sniffles.
While we’ve largely gotten used to the astronomical death toll (Americans can acclimate to any calamity, even to Gorka’s embarrassing Relief Factor commercials), it might be worth considering that COVID has now killed more Americans than did the combat deaths in every single war America has ever fought COMBINED, from both World Wars to the Civil War to Vietnam and Korea right down to the invasion of Grenada (666,441 total combat deaths vs. 787,695 COVID deaths). If history doesn’t get your attention, you might be interested to know that COVID has now killed one out of every 420 Americans. Not a bad run for a disease we didn’t even know existed a little over two years ago.
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Source: Matt Labash
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