The Shift

Is Covid really waning? It seems so.

Back in the early days of Covid, I took screenshots of the numbers that shut us down as a country. The numbers weren’t alarming – not compared to what they were during Delta and Omicron. Now, the numbers are truly encouraging. In Florida, for instance, our numbers for March 23 were a little over 5,000. What a difference from the a one-day high of 21,000 back in January 2022.

Today, March 9, those numbers were t 1609 according to Worldometer.

These days, I hear a lot of talk about how great it was to see the Canadian Freedom convoy, making a stand about freedom of choice when it comes to your body. You shouldn’t be mandated to do anything. Yet, there’s a huge element of hypocrisy in all this: what about the freedom of women to choose abortion over giving birth? When I’ve mentioned this fact to people who talk about freedom to choose what goes on with your own body, the reactions are mixed.

Abortion isn’t the same thing.

Abortion is murder.

The freedom should be uniform across the board.

My primary argument is that a pandemic is a public health crisis. So you take measures that protect your fellow humans. That seems simple enough. But it has become so politicized it now approaches satire.

Most of my family has had Covid in one variant or another. Rob was first, in March 2020, around the same time that WHO declared Covid a pandemic. We thought he had the flu. He was sick for about 3 weeks. The only reason we knew it was Covid is that in late April, during routine blood work, it was discovered he had antibodies.

My sister, Mary, and her kids and in laws were next – but not her husband. This was all pre-vaccine. Then it was friends, acquaintances.

Once the vaccines were available, we got them – Pfizer for Rob and me, Moderna for Megan. My sister’s family was a mix of the two. I still wore my masks everywhere in public – except at the dog park or when we were eating outside at a restaurant.

Around Thanksgiving, my sister  called and said she’d tested positive for Covid again. Mild symptoms. By day 5, she was back in her gym classes again.

Just before Christmas, Megan tested positive and was sick and didn’t make it home for Xmas. At this point, she hadn’t been boosted. But she made it home for New Year’s!

In January, after we returned from Orlando, where we’d helped Megan move, I woke up one night with terrible aches and pains and a fever, and tested positive the next morning. My bout with Covid? One night bad, the next four days fairly ordinary, maybe a slight congestion.

I attribute my mild case to vaccines and the booster.

Today, Rob and I went for our annual eye checkup. One of our doctor’s technicians caught Covid this past summer and was so sick she was out of work for a month.I figure she’s in her 40s. I asked if she’d been vaxxed since then and she shook her head. “I choose not to. I’ve got antibodies now.”

Yeah. I get it. Emergency vaccine authorizations and all that. Masks. Mandates. Lockdowns. But even once the vaccines were fully approved by the FDA, the conspiracy theories flourished. And even with the cases waning, the divisiveness continues.
We’re in the midst of something big and the pandemic was its trigger. Our collective humanity is caught in a paradigm shift. Trump was a facilitator, the divisiveness is a catalyst. Now there’s a war in Ukraine with Putin putting his nukes on high alert.

The big question is, well, pretty simple. Where do we end up? As a collective? As individuals?

We write about this paradigm shift in an upcoming book, The Shift: Reports from the Mystical Underground, which will be available this year.