I am reminded of the line from the ads for the sequel to “Jaws” — Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

Just as all of us thought it was safe to unmask and stand closer to each other than six feet and stop washing our hands like we were obsessive -compulsives and return to pre-pandemic life, the COVID19 virus mutated once again into a more transmissible, and possibly deadlier, version of itself: the Omicron Variant  (Sounds like the title to a SciFi movie). This fiendish bug seems to have a consciousness all its own, deliberately evading human attempts to crush it once and for all.

Leslie and I are fully vaccinated, and have had our booster shots. But is Omicron capable of defeating the vaccines? No one knows; nor is anyone likely to know for weeks. We are psychologically at a point I’d call reasonable resignation — we’ve done all we can do to stay healthy, if we end up infected anyway, ascribe it to God’s will or fate or destiny.

We flew to Miami for Thanksgiving, on a full flight that could have been a super-spreader event but wasn’t.  Younger son Marc and daughter-in-law Erin have put on a holiday feast at their Coral Gables house for the past ten years, a tradition broken only once. That was last year, when the pandemic was at its worst. Twenty people gathered there this year, and the whole crowd ate, drank, watched football, and was generally as merry as in the days before the plague. But it was a COVID Thanksgiving. Elder son Geoff, a libertarian and anti-vaxxer, submitted to a COVID test administered by me, with a kit I’d purchased at CVS. He tested negative.

Omicron, by the way, is the 15th letter in the 24-letter Greek alphabet, between Xi and Pi. I’m not sure how the new Variant skipped 11 places from the its previous incarnation,, Delta, the 4th letter. What happened to Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, etc.? I assume there is some logic, some method to the epidemiological naming process. Let me know if you know what it is.

Meanwhile, trusting in God, fate or destiny, Omicron be damned, we are driving out to Arizona tomorrow and will spend Christmas with my sister in Phoenix. That’s all the news I have from this side of Lake Woebegone.

 

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