Quote:
Originally Posted by atisketatasket
I think we're at the point where "normal" is what we make of it and it might have to be redefined. I feel pretty normal right now, except for 1) teaching rooms full of masked students and 2) getting called a ridiculous number of times for random COVID testing at my university (I'm up to 5 this semester, in a 15-week semester where they randomly call 28% of the campus population/week).
I'm not going to worry about the new variant yet. It was only found on Tuesday. It seems more transmissible so far, but that doesn't mean more lethal than the original COVID, and it's not yet known how well the vaccines work against it. No one seems seriously ill from the new one (yet), and the idea behind mRNA vaccines is that they can be adapted pretty easily, within months if need be.
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I agree on the normal being what you make of it thing. I've already come to accept that Covid is likely not ever going to completely go away. And hopefully it will become more like the flu, where it is around seasonally and is dangerous for some people and unpleasant to catch, and maybe we have to get a vaccine every year, but there are hopefully better ways of treating it.
I'm hoping that even if the new one is more transmissible, the vaccines will still be generally effective in preventing hospitalization and death. And we also now have new antivirals heading for approval (though Merck just said theirs is less effective than they originally thought).
But it's still a case of, as I was just talking about with H, can't we just get a little break here, where D just got vaccinated, couldn't we have had a little bit of time to feel good about that before having to wonder what will happen with this new variant? (He's the one who said that, too.) I know we can choose to feel good about it because, as he also said, if nothing else, it's still protecting her from the other variants. And I'll try to do that (especially until we know more about how transmissible and deadly this variant truly is). But it's still just really discouraging and disheartening.