The Homa Files

Why it feels different this time around…
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A couple of months ago – during the last Covid spike – I opined that Covid was an abstract notion for most people since they hadn’t been personally and consequentially touched by it.

As evidence, I cited a broad-scale YouGov survey that found that, despite hundreds of thousands of covid-related death, 2/3’s of Americans didn’t “personally know anyone who had died due to complications from covid-19”.

Sure, people had heard about people getting infected but “they” were either newsworthy celebrities or very distant relationships … distanced by 4 or 5 degrees of separation.

It was like a serious crime epidemic that hadn’t struck “my neighborhood”, let alone “my house”.

For sure that sense has changed …

For openers, we’ve now reached the point where everybody knows somebody who has been infected, and those “somebodies” are closer to home … they’re not a cousin’s neighbor’s son-in-law’s co-worker’s friend … they’re close friends and family … within zero or one degree of separation.

And, there seem to be more “batches” of “theys”, not single isolated cases.

Specifically, entire neighborhoods are getting hit … and once the virus penetrates a household, most family members get sick.

When they get sick, nothing seems to make sense.

Being fully vaccinated is proving to be a porous barrier to infection.

Within households, symptoms vary widely from person to person … seriously symptomatic people are testing negative … asymptomatic people are testing positive (when they can find a test!)

Go figure.

When it hits close to home like this, people seek reliable (and actionable) “what to do” answers … have less tolerance for misdirection, obfuscation and butt-covering bull-bleep.

It becomes evident to all effected that the government’s political-scientists — always assertive, occasionally right – are flying blind … spewing illogical, data-short guidance that confuses rather than clarifies.

As NBC News put it “The rapid spread of the variant has created a level of disruption in many Americans’ lives not seen since the early days of the pandemic. We have gone backwards.”

I think we’ve reached a turning point  … and, that’s a difference time around.

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P.S. Your read that right: NBC News … article is worth reading.

This entry was posted on January 11, 2022 at 7:55 am and is filed under Coronavirus - Covid 19, COVID - Return to Normalcy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.