My wife and I are among the ever-shrinking group of people – sorry, President Biden, you’re no longer part of the club – who have never had COVID-19.
We’d like to think this is because we’re superior human beings but let’s be honest, it’s a combination getting all our shots ASAP, being careful, and dumb luck.
There’s a good chance at least one of us will fall off the pandemic-dodging wagon soon because we’re about to take a long-delayed trip that includes airplane flights and there’s a lot of contagion out there.
In most of the world including New Hampshire, the SARS-CoV2 virus continues to evolve in ways that frustrate our efforts at containment.
As I write this, there are 120 people in New Hampshire hospitals with COVID-19, according to the state hospital association. About one-quarter of them are being actively treated for COVID and the rest are less sick or recuperating, but still bad enough to be kept in a hospital bed.
That hospitalization number has risen by 50% in a little over a week and is now the highest since mid-May. It’s also more than twice as high as it was in July 2021 or even July 2020 (although data was a little sketchy back then).
Happily, the number of COVID-caused deaths is not rising – it’s been about two a day for months – but it’s not falling, either. In the past two pandemic summers we’ve had a break during outdoor weather but that isn’t happening in 2022.
Frankly, I don’t know what to expect any more.
The virus keeps mutating in ways that thwart our immune systems, even many that have been strengthened by vaccines or prior infection, and there’s no reason to expect this will stop. Humanity could stay ahead of the changes if we cooperated to tackle the problem intelligently but apparently that’s not going to happen.
Sometimes I think that COVID will be here forever, flaring up every now and then to sicken and kill more people and disrupt the global economy, and sometimes I think it will just fade away like the Spanish Flu did a century ago. Your guess is as good as mine.
One thing that’s becoming clear is that I’m may well be wearing a mask in public indoor spaces or crowded outdoor spaces for the rest of my life. That’s not how I pictured the Golden Years unfolding, but at least I’m not in a hospital bed.