Eighteen months into what we now know as COVID World, it’s difficult to not feel like we’re all the victims of some cosmic bait-and-switch game.
COVID-19 arrived in our lives with little to no warning (well, that’s another story for another day) and was supposed to be no more inconvenient than those visiting in-laws who break the three-night maximum rule.
There would be short-term unpleasantness, sure, but soon enough we’d be back to living our regularly scheduled lives.
Spoiler Alert: The plot is still unwinding and has multiple layers.
“The source of our frustration changed,” said Dr. Richard Walker, interim head of emergency medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
“First, it was these months before the vaccine, that sense of never knowing when it would end, the component of being in constant danger yourself. Even if you were among the most careful, eventually you would get it …
“Then the vaccine comes along,” Walker said, “and there’s a sense of a defined period of time, the cases (are declining) … then we get a variant that’s more contagious and perhaps more dangerous, and we’re right back in the thick of it.”