You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension — a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into…
Yep, seems like reading the news, lately, has become a regular trip into the Twilight Zone. A friend sent an email yesterday, that included a link to a news article about the Great Salt Lake in Utah. He introduced the link with this comment:
“Tell me again how we are not in a crisis?”
Meaning, in this case, a water crisis. America’s largest inland sea west of the Mississippi… drying up…
Or is it?
But before we get into the weird story about the Great Salt Lake, let’s first touch on news about the Delta variant… in a land of both shadow and substance.
Reportedly, the COVID-19 Delta variant swept through India this past winter and spring, with health effects in stark contrast to the Indian experience during most of 2020. The first case of COVID-19 was detected in India — a country with a population about 1.4 billion people — on March 12, 2020. By the end of September 2020, the country had seen about 97,000 deaths attributed to COVID. (Ministry of Health & Family Welfare data.)
By comparison, the United States confirmed its first COVID case on January 21, 2020. But with a population only a quarter of India’s population, the US had surpassed 200,000 COVID deaths on September 22. Our per capita death rate in the US was thus about eight times as high as India’s.
I have yet to come across a coherent explanation as to how one of the wealthiest nations in the world — with an estimated Gross Domestic Product of about $63,000 per capita (per man, woman and child) — could suffer a death rate eight times that of one of the world’s poorest countries, India, with a GDP of about $6,000 per capita.
But the opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings.
Reportedly due to the arrival of the Delta variant, India was slammed by COVID between November 1 and July 1, with 300,000 additional fatalities.
Between November 1 and July 1, the United States reportedly experienced 370,000 additional COVID deaths, with nearly all of those fatalities resulting from the “less contagious” variants — Alpha, Beta, Gamma — meaning that our per capita death rate during those months was only about five times as high as India’s. A noticeable improvement?
Part of the Twilight Zone effect is: we don’t know if any of these numbers are accurate.
Then we get this July 28 story from the UK, where nearly all cases are now attributable to the Delta variant. According to the Washington Post:
This is a puzzler. Coronavirus cases are plummeting in Britain. They were supposed to soar. Scientists aren’t sure why they haven’t.
The daily number of new infections recorded in the country fell for seven days in a row before a slight uptick Wednesday, when the country reported 27,734 cases. That’s still almost half of where the caseload was a week ago.
The trajectory of the virus in Britain is something the world is watching closely and anxiously, as a test of how the delta variant behaves in a society with relatively high vaccination rates. And now people are asking if this could be the first real-world evidence that the pandemic in Britain is sputtering out — after three national lockdowns and almost 130,000 deaths.
Public health experts, alongside the government, predicted that cases would be rising in Britain at this point, perhaps even exponentially…
What’s going on? The Delta variant was supposed to be hammering the UK.
Hmmm… let’s see… Schools are closed for summer break, so children are presumably not spreading the virus as much. Test-and-trace might be working. Could be that people have simply stopped getting tested — because if they test positive, even if they are fully vaccinated, they are asked to quarantine for 10 days.
Or… could it be… the UK has reached an ‘immunity threshold’? More than 70 percent of UK adults are fully vaccinated, and 88 percent have had at least a first dose — one of the best vaccine uptakes in the world. And among those who remain unvaccinated, many have had a COVID infection and recovered.
Britain could be approaching “population immunity, with people immune either from vaccinations or natural infection,” said Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia.
Does he mean, “herd immunity”? Interesting theory.
But… cases aren’t increasing in India at the moment, either, and that country has a vaccination rate (two doses) of only 7%. Back in May, the Indian Health Ministry was reporting 400,000 new cases daily. Last week, the rate was down to 40,000 per day.
None of this makes sense. It’s almost like COVID is playing a practical joke on all of us. Granted, it’s a deadly practical joke, but still…
…Or is it the news media that’s playing the joke?
As John Lennon once wrote, “I read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who’d made the grade; And though the news was rather sad, well, I just had to laugh…”