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31 Dec 2022

Shhhh—It's Almost Over

Well, 2022 is almost over. Just a few more hours to go, here in the Eastern Time Zone of the USA, and then we can officially move into whatever fresh hell 2023 holds for us.

I’ve never been much of a “New Year’s Resolutions” kind of guy—I feel like setting a bunch of lofty goals for yourself in the depths of the winter, before you’ve even finished digesting all those Christmas cookies, is just setting yourself up for some serious disappointment later, but I don’t mind taking the year’s end as an opportunity to look back on the year we just survived and saying “well, we did it.”

And 2022 was a pretty weird goddamn year.

Let’s be honest, every year since 2016 has felt unpleasantly historic, like someone collectively cursed us to live in “interesting times” forever and ever, or maybe whoever’s running the simulated Universe in which we exist took an extended lunch break and just kinda forgot to come back.

But 2022 seemed… slightly different.

Part of it was probably the feeling—justified or not, and I know a lot of people are drawing breath right now to scream that it is definitely not justified—that COVID-19 was moving from an acute crisis to something more chronic in nature; a “new normal”, you might say, if you wanted to say the sort of things that might get you run over by a diesel pickup truck in large swaths of red-state America.

But I think it’s hard to dispute that if COVID-19 had shown up back in late 2019 or early 2020 with the mortality rate that it has now, with vaccines and antivirals and our more-complete understanding of its nature, we probably never would have treated it as the crisis that it was. Again—rightly or wrongly, as cavalier and cruel as that may make us, which is not really the point—it just wouldn’t have triggered the public’s willingness to take extraordinary measures.

Over the last few years we have essentially determined experimentally just how much death it takes to get Americans—well, most Americans, others not so much—to pull together and take basic public health precautions. In retrospect, the magic number seems to be about 5 and 10 deaths per million population per day, with a strong and ominious upward trend over time. That’s about when the US seemed to take COVID seriously, and below which we seem unwilling to really give a collective shit.

At least we know for next time what it’s going to take.