I thought I was finished with Covid. My last essay was May 7 and it was essentially a victory lap for science and the new Administration in the development and distribution of tremendously effective vaccines against the public health scourge of the century. Shots were going into arms at a rapid rate and we were looking forward to rejoining society for a carefree, social summer. Aahh, not so fast!

What I failed to take into account in my projections was the incredible stupidity of 25% of our population. I did not foresee that 70 million Americans would obstinately refuse to protect themselves, their families, and their communities from a highly infectious, devastating virus. For no good reason – just because. Nor did I predict the breadth and depth of misinformation spread by despicable people through social media and conservative television and radio outlets. Nevertheless, that misinformation and those idiots are the reasons that we find our entire country once again facing distancing, masking, cancellations, and fear from new variants of our old nemesis. I want to talk about the variants in this article, but first let’s take a quick look at where we stand.

Approximately 60% of the eligible US population is fully vaccinated for Covid. The number looks better for those 65 years of age and older with 80% of that vulnerable segment of the population vaccinated. If you are interested in the proportion of the population with at least one shot of vaccine, add about 10% to those numbers (70% for the entire eligible population and 80% for the over 65 group). Those numbers do not look too bad considering where we were in early March, but our immunization rate is way down from where it should be for the US to successfully manage this virus. Only about 350,000 people are vaccinated each day now (700,000 shots per day divided by 2) which is a little more than 0.1% increase in the vaccinated proportion of our population every 24 hours. Continuing at that rate, we will have to wait until about Thanksgiving to achieve 70% vaccination for the US eligible population. Considering the worldwide, continuous development of new, and possibly more dangerous, variants of Covid, that timetable will just not be good enough.

Let’s talk a little about the Covid variants. Mostly what I have recently observed is that people are extremely confused by the variants and that the media has not done an adequate job of providing a basic understanding of how variants may be a threat to what the US is trying to achieve in the Covid battle. Naturally, the more mysterious Covid variants are to people, the greater they fear them and the more they despair. Should we be frightened of Covid variants? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, it entirely depends on the variant. Variants must be quickly identified and continually monitored by our public health system so that we can adequately respond to those we deem as threats. Since this virus has an unlimited capacity to change and mutate, the number of variants is almost endless. However, most of these variants have no public health significance and tend to die out without impacting the human population. Generally, there are three traits that the scientific community assesses in the Covid variants to determine their threat.

Contagiousness – How easily does this edition of the virus spread from person to person? Is this new variant more contagious that the Covid virus that our population is currently experiencing? Put simply, if the answers to those 2 questions are: very easily and yes, then it is likely that over time this new variant will become the dominant Covid virus in your population. We saw this in the Delta variant which didn’t exist in the Spring and now accounts for over 80% of new Covid infections in the US.

Virulence – Does this new variant cause more severe disease for infected people? Does the variant attack multiple systems in the human body? Does this Covid cause more long-term health issues? Does the variant cause more hospitalizations and more ICU care in younger populations? There are so many health ramifications when assessing the virulence of a virus variant. Essentially, to get a handle on the virulence you can just ask how much damage does this variant do to the human body and how much damage to the population? Pretty simple.

Resistance – Are our vaccines effective in protecting our population against this variant? To what degree? Obviously, since the US has effective vaccines against the current Covid variants, a positive answer to this first question on any new variants will determine whether our society can continue our return to normalcy.

In a simple way, the above 3 viral traits are all that you really need to know about any new variants of Covid as they are discovered and trumpeted out by the press. When you are listening to an account of a new variant or reading an article from a reliable news source, look for the answers to these questions. Obviously, there may be some gap between when a variant is first identified and when the preliminary answer to the above questions may be known. During that time, remain calm and let’s just see what we can find out.

What would be a nightmare scenario for the US? Take the contagiousness and virulence of the Delta variant and make it highly resistant to our vaccines. Combine that virus with the obstinance of our Republican gubernatorial leadership in many states and we would be in deep trouble.

Looks like I’m back for awhile. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Stay safe. Stay informed. Get the shot. God damn it – get the shot.

p.s.: lambda?