95 days ago when the cancellation of this year's Comic-Con International was announced, an acquaintance of mine wrote me to ask me to use my "formidable clout" — that's in quotes because I have so little — to get them to reverse what he called a boneheaded decision. "This virus thing" — that's in quotes because he phrased it that way, not me — was an overblown panic. COVID-19 was no worse than the common flu and it would probably be gone in a month or so, maybe sooner.
Cutting-and-pasting from his e-mail: "By the first day of Spring, everyone will be laughing at the idiots who thought this was a real thing." Boy, I wish we were. It still says on my calendar that tomorrow morning, I drive down to San Diego, check into the hotel and then attend Preview Night.
In case you want to see what the exhibit hall at the convention center looks like at the moment, it probably looks a lot like the photo on this article. I don't see any cosplayers there unless they're dressing up as homeless folks with nowhere else to go.
I continue to stick to my stock answer when anyone asks me when I think this will all be over: "I don't know." And I often add, "And anyone who says they do doesn't." It isn't just that we don't know when Medical Science will have a solid, trustworthy vaccine for the coronavirus. We don't know how long it will take to make it available to everyone who wants it and we don't know how many people will refuse to take it the same way they refuse to vaccinate their kids for measles. If you think some people are hysterical that they aren't allowed into Costco without a mask, wait'll the day they can't get in without Proof of Vaccination. YouTube will be overwhelmed.
I am glad the folks at Comic-Con shut it down when they did. It was never going to happen and they accepted that reality way before my above-quoted correspondent. I'm not even sure he sees it that way now. A line from this blog that gets quoted a lot is my description of someone — I forget who was the first — as believing that never admitting you're wrong is the same thing as always being right. We seem to have an epidemic of that, too.