We've been invaded by aliens

They're very very small, and they're already inside us

Let’s see if we can figure this out. 

The Fourth of July was, what…three weeks ago?  That’s about right, 24 days ago to be exact.  It was supposed to be a special day, remember?  A day when “we not only mark our independence as a nation but we begin to mark our independence from this virus," as President Biden hopefully predicted in his first prime-time address to the nation back in March.  He also announced that he would order states to make all adults eligible for vaccinations by May 1.  The president warned that “the fight is far from over,” but his speech was a hopeful one.  “America is coming back,” he promised.

How many twists and turns have we gone through since Biden gave that speech?  A half dozen?  A dozen?  If you’re anything like me, you lost count some time ago.  CDC relaxes mask mandate recommendation!  You don’t have to wear a mask outside if you’re vaccinated…or unvaccinated…if you’re alone, or with family members!  Non-vaccinated people should still mask-up at outdoor restaurants and gatherings, however.  New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey signed on to the new CDC guidelines.

Got that?  Clear enough for you?  Guess what:  that was back on April 27, believe it or not.

Of course, we were talking about what you might call sane states paying attention to the new CDC guidelines back in April.  The insane states had all dropped their mask mandates – outdoors, indoors, everywhere – long before that.

Then New York announced that restaurants could open up to 75 percent of capacity!  That was on May 7.  And then New York restaurants could open to 100 percent of capacity!  That was May 19.  Look how fast stuff was happening!  And New York dropped its mask mandate for fully vaccinated people the same day!  Yaaaay!  If you’re fully vaccinated, you don’t have to walk around with your mask on.  You can even go into businesses mask-less!

So now we’re just about up to Memorial Day weekend, and as the president said, we’re back.

Not for long.  July 4th comes around, and what happens?  Well, up in Provincetown on Cape Cod, a whole bunch of largely vaccinated people get together – this is Massachusetts, after all, and it’s Provincetown for crying out loud – and there’s a huge outbreak of the virus.  Two hundred or more come down with the disease at first.  Then it’s 400.  Today the New York Times informs us the count is up to 765 cases linked to the Provincetown 4th of July outbreak, and among the 469 of them who were Massachusetts residents, 74 percent had been fully vaccinated. 

What the basic fuck?

What else does the Times inform us in a two-column, top of the front page headline today?  Well, the CDC is now recommending that fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors in the parts of the country where the virus is “surging.”

Just the other day, I was reporting that COVID cases are up sharply in all 50 states, so the whole damn country seems to be “surging.”  So what parts of the country are they referring to, exactly?  Get this:  in areas where there are more than 50 new infections per 100,000 people over the last seven days, or there have been more than 8 percent positive COVID tests over the same period.

Give me just a minute…I want to check my handy-dandy COVID tracker…I had it right here…what did I do with it…got to be here somewhere…

The Times, which apparently hasn’t misplaced its COVID tracker the way your faithful correspondent has, informs us that everyone in Florida, Arkansas, and Louisiana among other states should be masking up, along with residents of two thirds of the counties in the entire country.

So I guess that means we can use our handy-dandy county-infection-check-list to see if the county we’re in qualifies. 

Do you have any idea what the current COVID test stats are in your county?  Do you even know where you put your masks?

See what I mean?  You couldn’t keep track of this shit if you had a program on your phone pinging you every time the CDC changed its mind, not to mention what the latest state or city guidelines are, or what the hard and fast rules might be.

Are there any hard and fast rules anymore?  I don’t know.  Do you? 

If you’re one of my regular readers, and it’s a safe bet that you are if you’re reading this column, you’re probably fully vaccinated, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably been walking around on the street, at least, without your mask, and probably putting on your mask in stores…or at least in the larger stores, like Kroger or Stop n Shop, or the big box stores like Target.  But you’ve probably dashed into a little neighborhood market for the paper or a quart of milk without your mask…

And now this.

Here’s the deal, folks.  This fucking COVID isn’t a virus as much as it’s an alien invasion, and the CDC and the NIH and all the rest of them know about it as they do about aliens.  Even the experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky are playing catch-up.  Today they’re saying, seemingly out of the blue, that vaccinated people can carry “great amounts” of the new COVID Delta variant in their mouths and nose and throats, and as we saw in Provincetown, they can spread the Delta variant even to other vaccinated people, seemingly as easily as unvaccinated people can spread the virus among themselves.

While it’s true that unvaccinated people account for 98 percent of new infections, and almost the same percentage of hospitalizations and deaths, now the experts tell us that vaccinated people can spread the disease even among each other.  The message seems to be that we may have gotten a little ahead of ourselves and made too many assumptions about our own safety and the safety of those around us.  Thus the CDC’s new guidelines, which amount to a generalized return to masking practically everywhere by everyone.

If the guidelines were to be followed, which is about as likely as an invasion by aliens.  Oooops.  We have been invaded by aliens.  Very very small aliens, and they are everywhere.

I’ve been paying pretty close attention to all this COVID shit for a year and a half, and here’s what I don’t like at all.  So far, the Delta variant appears to be spreading fast in the states with low rates of vaccination and mainly among the unvaccinated.  But now we know it’s also spreading in the states with high rates of vaccination, and it’s spreading among the vaccinated.  The way the “old” COVID mutated into the Delta variant was by spreading among people before they got vaccinated, and it’s gotten worse because of the people who still refuse or otherwise haven’t gotten vaccinated. 

What happens when the Delta variant begins to mutate within vaccinated people?  We know that the virus needs a host in order to reproduce, and variants of the virus emerge because the virus gets into a host which perhaps is somehow resistant to the “old” virus, so the “new” variant mutates in order to get around that resistance and infect the host.  I’m not a doctor, and I’ll admit right here that I haven’t read anything by any expert who says this, but it seems to me inevitable that the Delta variant, if it spreads far enough and widely enough within the vaccinated population, will mutate into a variant that is designed to cope with the resistance engendered by the vaccines at work within the bodies of vaccinated people.  My question is, are we going to get an Epsilon variant of the virus that mutates in order to be able to better infect vaccinated people? 

From what I’ve seen of the virus so far, I don’t put anything past it. The virus is so far ahead of us that we have completely reversed course nationally between July 4 and today in order to cope with the accelerated spread of the Delta variant.  The virus is outwitting the best minds and the top labs of the CDC and the NIH and WHO and all the rest of them. 

Those of us who have been good little citizens and stood in line and gotten our vaccinations – both of them – are suddenly back to wearing masks to protect ourselves, just like we did when masks were all we had for protection.  And now we’re being told that pretty soon we’re going to be standing in line for a booster shot of vaccine, and I saw on MSNBC somebody saying it might be more than one booster shot. 

I think it’s only a matter of time before we’re going to be standing in line for an entirely new vaccine, because this one is not protecting us adequately.  If it was, we wouldn’t be digging out our masks and putting them on again, would we?

Think about it.  The aliens are already here.

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