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The Pandemic Mouse Maze
It’s the wild west out there
If there is one thing you can count on with the COVID response plan is that there is nothing you can count on. It’s a definite maybe. The entire plan could be bluntly described like this:
There isn’t one.
The entirety of COVID has become just one more thing for the political left and right to argue and fight about it. They could just as easily be talking about climate change, abortion, social welfare spending, military spending, or any other of a wide variety of topics. They still argue about those things too, but COVID seems to be the one that generates the most adrenaline and anger these days.
The state of Wisconsin, where I live, is a perfect microcosm of the entire country’s schizophrenic approach to the pandemic. The Delta variant has not reached here yet in the numbers it has in the southern states, but it is probably safe to say it will before long. The dark red on the map of the United States shows the number of cases slowly spreading northward and is vaguely reminiscent of the spread of communism portrayed in our Weekly Reader when I was in elementary school in the 1960s. It’s the Domino Theory for germs. It’s coming like a hurricane, and we should probably batten down the hatches, but we’re not. In fact, most people are doing the exact opposite.