It’s astonishing and terrifying in equal measure to watch our cases go up, and our restrictions go down, and cases in schools going up, and THEIR restrictions loosening too. And county health department is like, “Well, the vaccines will take care of it. Anyway, bars are open!”

With COVID we are routinely the Hare mocking the Tortoise. We think ahhhhahaha we have basically already beaten you, you foolish virus, time to take a fucking nap over here on this rock — meanwhile the COVID Turtle is trundling along, slow and steady. And winning the race.

Then you hear stories about how COVID survivors have lingering mental illness and you talk to friends who months and months later still don’t have smell or taste back like they should, but hey, fuck it, pandemic is BASICALLY already over, BASICALLY, even as cases rise and rise.

In our county they’re recommending a “modified quarantine” where if you’re exposed directly and acutely to someone with COVID, you don’t need to quarantine *until you have symptoms* — it’s like saying I’m driving a “modified car,” that I “modified” by “crashing it into a tree.”

Point is, we are not done with this disease and this disease is not done with us.

I don’t mean this to sound hopeless — people are getting vaxxed in record numbers. And the vaccines work. We will get there. Sooner than I imagined, even.!I just wish so much policy and attitude hasn’t centered a kind of high school “senioritis.” We haven’t won the game yet.