Two years ago tomorrow, I posted about COVID 19 being declared a pandemic, just four or five months (depending on whom you believe) following the first cases in China. Two years ago today, March 11, 2022, the World Health Organization declared COVID 19 a pandemic. Over six million people have died from the disease worldwide and more still daily. Deaths in this country are nearing one million, a disproportionate percentage brought on by misinformation, stubbornness and plain foolishness.
I wrote about the 1918 Flu Pandemic four years ago, mentioning the quote from George Santayana that “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” On this day 104 years ago, that disease had begun to ravage an Army base in Kansas and was destined to spread around the world, mutate and circle again.
As the New York Times notes today, the world could have done better with COVID. Epidemiologists say that diseases like this tend to mutate toward being more contagious but less deadly over time. The Delta variant was apparently worse in both categories, but Omicron’s even greater ability to spread eventually overtook Delta and did prove less deadly.
As even the cautious have begun to venture out again, the medical world watches and worries about additional variants, predicting that the virus will begin to follow the regular pattern of influenza mutations we have grown used to living with and sometimes dying from.
Of course, Russian threats of escalating its invasion of Ukraine into nuclear war could render such predictions meaningless for all, with nothing more to be said and none to hear. We can and we must rise to be and become, in the words of Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature.”
