The Year of Living Unreasonably

We learned that if uncertainty required massive response, we could mobilize massive response, including the creation of new vaccines within one year. 

And in 2021, Americans learned that it’s easier to flip the switch on toward top-down control and government dependency than to turn it back off. 

We have vaccines that likely reduce the chances of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 (somewhere between 0.05% and 0.1%) to below the infection fatality rates of the flu (somewhere between 0.1% and 0.2%). We have effective therapeutics, including a new therapeutic pill that will reduce post-COVID-19 diagnosis hospitalization and death by around 90%. 

And we have a new strain of COVID-19. Omicron reportedly infects at 140 times the initial rate of COVID-19, and about 70 times the rate of delta; it hospitalizes, according to South African data, at about 20% the rate of delta. Which means that nearly everyone will get omicron, and that very few people will die.