As my days-in-semi-isolation equal The Mark of the Beast, I decided to steal some words of wisdom from the blog of Kevin Drum…
I think it's time to rein in the testing panic a bit. It's probably also time to rein in the overall COVID panic a bit, but this message is aimed more at the media than at ordinary people.
News coverage of COVID is just beyond belief these days. Newspapers, TV, and the internet are blanketed every day with stories about new COVID records; reports of new CDC recommendations; interviews with people who think the new CDC recommendations are stupid; feature stories about how COVID is affecting _______; op-eds accusing everyone else of being either too strict or too loose about COVID rules; essays about what we've all learned from COVID; news about how things are going in Israel; other news about why we should ignore how things are going in Israel; feelgood clickbait about people who braved COVID to see an old friend; stories about the latest antics from a red-state governor positioning himself for 2024; and of course all the latest statistics in an EZ-to-read dashboard format.
If you are vaxxed and boosted, your current odds of getting COVID are roughly 1 in 500 over the course of a month. If you're under 65, your odds of a serious infection are about 1 in 5,000. Your odds of dying are 1 in 200,000. Calm down.
As with so many matters in this world, it isn't always easy to find that sweet spot between paying too much attention to a problem and paying too little. I think fretting about what the next variant may be, when even the best doctors don't know, is probably too much. Not assuming there's still some danger in mingling with strangers is almost certainly too little. Someplace between those two yard markers is probably right and it's up to each of us to find it.