Reflections on Omicron

 

Things feel very strange now -- terrifying and hopeful at the same time.  Terrifying that we are about to have the biggest wave of COVID yet, one that will dwarf all others, though it is expected to be brief.  Hopeful in that for the first time there is an effective treatment that may finally remove the danger of overloading the healthcare system.  Hopeful in that the US Army may come forward with a super-vaccine effective against all variants (though for how long remains to be seen).  Terrifying in that the treatment will take several months to be widely available.  We don't have months.  The Omicron wave will be receding before effective treatment, let along an effective vaccine, becomes widely available.  In the meantime, we are trying to put out a forest fire with an eyedropper.  

So, hell for the next month or so. And then, dare we hope for a return to normalcy?  Can normalcy return after the wave of hell?  Did it feel like this last November, when Pfizer announced its vaccine even as we braced for a long, dark winter?

Two strange quotes haunt me, quotes about hope and joy after terror.

One comes from the epilogue of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio broadcast.  We hear the catastrophic of Martian appearing everywhere, the army overrun, New York overcome by mysterious black smoke, and one last radio broadcaster asking is there anyone there.  Then a handful of survivors in an post-apocalyptic landscape, scrounging about until they find the Martian have succumbed to earth disease they had no resistance to.  And then, somehow, everything goes back to normal and the narrator gives the epilogue:

Strange to watch children playing in the streets. Strange to watch young people strolling on the green where the new spring grass heals the last black scars of the bruised earth. Strange to watch the sight seers enter the museum where the disassembled part of a Martian marching are kept on public view.

Very strange indeed.  How everything went from total destruction to as if nothing had happened is never explained.  (Listen to the broadcast, by the way.  It is most satisfyingly creepy.  In particular, the prologue about people going on about their lives, unaware of the looming catastrophe feels way too real when I look back on the beginning of 2020).

 The other quote is from the long-forgotten movie 2010: The Year We Made Contact, a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2010 is a Cold War movie, about a joint US-Soviet expedition to Jupiter to find out what happened to the rocket ship that was lost in 2001.  Cold War tensions rise, both in the expedition and on earth, and WWIII seems eminent when Jupiter is transformed into a new sun, and this miracle inspires world peace.  (The problems a new sun would cause are unaddressed).  Yes, the whole framework seems laughable in retrospect, but the filmography makes it uplifting, especially the astronaut's message to his son, "Your children will be born in a world of two suns. They will never know a sky without them. You can tell them that you remember when there was a pitch black sky with no bright star, and people feared the night."

If this new vaccine and new treatment truly mean we can return to life as it was before the pandemic, that is the sort of message we should tell our children to tell their children.