Maybe A Little Optimism
This lockdown in Sydney is dragging on. As much as I don't quite mind pottering around the house Working on tracks, the general absence of fresh stimulus beyond the available news, TV and the MLB season is getting me down. Sometime around early December they think we'll be back to pretending things are normal. Maybe they really would be like the old normal except Anti-vaxxers will get the Delta strain and drop off and die - and maybe to be a little uncharitable, it's one of those Darwin Award moments when people who can't adapt to the new environment are surely going to face a very Darwinian selection pressure.
I do wonder about that. I have a colleague at my day job who is a nice dude but he's a conspiracy theorist and Anti-vaxxer nut-job. He hates the lockdown but he refuses to get any of the vaccines because he thinks they kill people. I've had to explain to him how vaccines work, how these vaccines work differently, and how much research has gone into them prior to the pandemic to allow them to simply come up with these in a matter of months, and how statistically speaking, one would be much safer to just take the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. No dice. He wants to go without any vaccines.
Even the medical officer in the office has explained to him the risks and as far as I can tell he's not taken on board any of the medical officer's advice. It's a bit perplexing as well as disturbing - I don't want him to die. But if he were to get sick badly, I would get to say "told ya' so" upon his recovery. Naturally I feel very conflicted about that, and admittedly, that's not how one wants things to turn out.
Still, I get the optimism going around. 4 months of lockdown this time around has been bleak. It's like we're all in our own Biosphere 2 experiment where we hole up pretending we're on an extended expedition to Mars, and just like with the Biosphere 2 crew we allow ourselves to cheat and so we go out once a week for groceries. But then the whole world seems less tangible when you're living like this. When we first went into any kind of lockdown in March 2020, nobody had the vaccine. Now we're reaching the point where firmly over 50% of people have had 2 doses and over 75% have had at least 1. Things have changed significantly in 18 months. We now have a fighting chance against this lousy pandemic. If we can just get out of here, like in the Paul McCartney song, we might feel anything is possible. Maybe we should be just a little more optimistic.
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