Navigating Omicron: Reflections on a Viral Journey

Unexpected Positive Test Before Christmas

Two days before Christmas, I took a home test that confirmed I have Omicron, rather than the bad cold I thought. That cancelled plans with friends, and I was supposed to bring the main dish. Very grateful to be Moderna triple-dosed, so it was breakthrough, not too severe. But it dragged on, forcing me to give up on my traditional New Year’s corned beef and cabbage as well. Coughing and blowing my nose, I wondered where I caught it. Most likely at the gym, where almost no one wore a mask. I have complained, not that it does any good. A bright spot was losing some of the weight I’d gained during the lockdown. Frivolous and silly, I know, but vanity never takes time off. Today, I went to a public test and confirmed I am now COVID negative. Hooray!!

The Lingering Impact: Post-Christmas Tale of Recovery

Over the past couple years, the pandemic has wrecked the whole world’s plans. It’s turned our very human need to be together against us. It’s propelled us toward a very unexpected and unclear future. No surprise then that we haven’t always made the best choices. Gaurav Suri, who studies human decision making, summarized the challenges of a world in flux. “Humans are tuned to making decisions around stability. We are not used to rapid changes in the context around us. And it takes time to adjust.” And I’m hoping part of the adjustment will be acknowledging, even if reluctantly, that we’re all in this together. The great sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, who died the day after Christmas, said empathy is our only hope. Call that enlightened self-interest. And how might it look going forward?

Pandemic’s Global Disruption: Decisions in a World of Flux

We have models for thinking about how we might change together. I start with my battered copy of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). “Paradigm Shift” has become familiar shorthand for how we reinvent ourselves and our sense of the world, when new, disruptive, and contradictory information or tech unsettle existing concepts of how the world works. The pandemic and vaccines both certainly qualify, ready or not. For me, this specific book has its own backstory around life-altering illness. The new friend who loaned it to me back in the early 1980s was soon diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. What do you do when your body starts to turn against you? I didn’t need to imagine; I’d witnessed my aunt’s decline with MS. Facing existential “Who am I now?” questions and with few treatment options back then, my friend applied for disability, and decided to move away to be nearer to her family. We lost contact in the shuffle, and I never had the chance to return the book I still consider shared property.

Models for Change: Paradigm Shifts and Existential Decisions

Thinking about existential decisions, I have no doubt my aunt and my friend would have grabbed with both hands any cure and/or any improved treatment. The virus’s contagiousness expands the scope from treating single patients to attempting to treat the community, the country, the world. Yet huge ambivalences persist around vaccines meant to protect and prevent. Are they too risky, even toxic? Are they products of unproven technology? Are they dangerous to children? Do they even work? Suspicions amplify already existing reluctance and conservatism. Everett Rogers in Diffusion of Innovation (also 1962, 2003) identified the now familiar Early Adopter, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggard spectrum of willingness and readiness to accept new tech and ideas. And, of course, in the pandemic, each decision is not just personal, because it affects all of us. And yet the rhetoric has tended to emphasize individual liberty rather than safeguarding the community. Again, there’s that missing sense that we’re all in this together that I hope we can grow up and into. At first because we have to, but increasingly, when it makes things better, because we want to.

Shared Humanity in a Viral World: Moving Forward with Empathy

Oddly, for me, though the virus was not at all welcome, it actually helped me feel more deeply that we truly are all in this together. That I was one among many with fellow sufferers, none of us immune, and more alike than different. No going back, we’re moving into that different, as yet largely unmapped, future. And we do better when we share. If that all sounds like something we might have learned in kindergarten, it’s probably a good place to start. Think of it as beginner’s mind.