It’s appropriate that we just entered The Year of The Tiger, since apparently a whole lot of folks need reminding about what “riding a tiger” means.
‘He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount’.
And he damn well should be.
One thing about riding a tiger is that it can be way more dangerous to try to get off before the ride’s over than it is to just hang on.
Much like how in a pandemic it can be way more dangerous to pretend it’s over than it is to keep trying to stop the disease.
That’s the new-cases-per-day chart from my local county’s COVID dashboard.
The Omicron spike there is so big it makes the previous waves almost disappear into the background. That actually makes it kinda hard to read.
This is the same data for the county, but expressed in cases-per-day-per-100k-people and graphed with state and country level numbers too; it’s from the local paper’s coronavirus info page.
It’s pretty obvious where we tried to get off the tiger.
And each time we try, we get mauled a bit until we start trying to deal with the disease again.
See, it turns out that The Secret is nonsense and just pretending that a problem isn’t real doesn’t actually make it go away.
Shocking, I know.
And yes, new cases are declining and the trend is downward but if you actually look at the numbers, new cases-per-day are higher now than at the peak of the Delta wave.
And almost as high as they were at the peak of the “don’t let it spoil the holidays” wave.
So now is absolutely not the time for being “just so over COVID”.
The virus doesn’t care (or even know) that we’re tired of it and don’t want to go on.
And ignoring it will not make it go away.
