Ho ho ho

 

Subject: Ho ho ho.



Ho ho ho, it’s that time of the year again but are we seeing “the last laugh is on us” !!

We are struggling to come to terms with the restrictions to our lives that the strains of Covid 19 are inflicting on us with ever more virulent virus adaptations spreading like wildfire throughout a world which largely it has been impotent to prevent given that our antibody injection effort is now being bypassed by the natures own evolution and adaptation, Omicron. The name represents the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet but it’s significance is in its use in mathematics in which it denotes the asymptotic rate of growth of a function, In the case of the virus, asymptotic denotes a condition where the the disease exists but shows no symptoms.  Highly transmissible, if for no other reason than you don’t know you have it it’s able to skip the formulated structure of a vaccine and makes us very exposed to the long term effects, both physical and economic as the work engine creaks to a stop with all the implications of underfunded social care starting to hit home. The effects on the economic virility of a country since no county is an economic  island, has not been factored in, or if it has the doomsday scenario is kept secret. Isolated self serving insulated communities rather than cities clearly have an advantage where the balance between what you produce and what you consume is crucial and usually is already a fact of life.

Reality can be a bastard. Each week faced with not having won the lottery, is a reality, getting infirmed as you get older, is a reality, being shunned by the girl next door is a reality, and so our new reality concerning the pandemic has to be accepted.

Our assumption that unlimited travel and untethered material consumption was somehow ‘a right’, given we could afford it had taken hold in the West and this assumption will be difficult to displace. Of course for many millions of people across the globe this was never their reality as they struggled to make ends meet. Inevitably  they are the ones most exposed to the effects of a pandemic because their access to medical care is often poor to non existent and whilst in developed countries we mark the progress of the pandemic with data on hospital admissions and deaths specific to  COVID, in the second and third world death is simply an absence of life and no statistics are kept.  People will continue to flood across the divide between the economically viable and the uneconomic but as most of the worlds economies are effected by the pandemic the decernibility, one to the other, will perhaps make the attractiveness of the journey less attractive.

This new world of mask wearing distance keeping has to confine Strictly Come Dancing to a thing of the past, just when I was being asked to admire two men dancing together.

Perhaps there are some benefits to this new life after all !!!