Lest we forget…
In spite of my best efforts I got Covid once last May. Despite being trebly vaccinated and always masked in public and becoming an inveterate hand washer I was not quite able to elude it. It was thankfully a light stint that didn’t even stop me from my daily runs, and it was gone in a little more than a week. But I doubled down on my prevention protocols and I still mask up in public today. These days, judging from the maskless hoards out there, I am largely alone in my scrupulous Covid prevention efforts.
That’s because it’s not the crowds I look to, it’s the science. I will remove my N-95 mask just as soon as science tells me it’s safe to do so, and not a minute before. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about crowds it’s that they’re frequently wrong. I’ve also noticed that places where science prevails, such as doctor’s offices, they still insist that patients wear masks.
While the people blissfully go about as if the pandemic is over, the science is telling us something startlingly different. We are in for another wave of Covid. This time around it will have learned to bypass all our carefully cultivated immunities.
The process is known as “convergent evolution.” The mutations, as you may recall, were known as alpha, beta, gamma and omicron. The path of the pandemic has changed since Omicron hit in late 2021 and early 2022. Instead of big evolutionary leaps the Omicron lineage has splintered into scores of different subvariants. Those subvariants are separately evolving into immune-evasive new variants, each different from the other, all over the world.
What this could mean is we might shortly be back to square one with Covid, with an effectively brand new pathogen already installed worldwide for which we have no natural immunity and no vaccine. We may have forgotten about Covid, but Covid has not forgotten about us.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, yes? And speaking of sharks, what’s going on is similar to what went on with sharks and dolphins. Even though sharks and dolphins have no recent common ancestors, both animals have similarly shaped bodies. That is a large-scale example of convergent evolution. Covid is doing the same on a smaller scale at a much faster rate of speed. These splintered omicron variants all over the world are converging into a single superbug that could sneak by our immunity systems and vaccines.
As if the world news wasn’t bad enough, now we must deal with this. But deal we shall. If history has shown us anything we are a hearty and resilient species. Even so, I don’t know about you, but since 2016 I’ve felt as if the world was cursed in a way I never experienced before. It’s one thing after another. Like the old spuriously identified Chinese curse or Moses and the 10 plagues of Egypt, we truly live in interesting times. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.