ISOLATION DIARIES PART 81: SELF-AWARE

It does seem sometimes, as though the virus is intelligently responding to our ongoing progress towards eradicating it.

What is that? Some sort of evolutionary response? How does it know we're developing vaccines? How could it know that our social-distancing and lockdown measures are actually impeding its ability to replicate?

Overall, the infection and death rates are plummeting - enough of course, for the government here to have introduced the Five Dates plan. However, in just over 50 specific areas of the UK, we're told, the infection rate is actually going up again. In addition, the government seem to be hunting down every single case of the Brazilian variant they can find, and that, all by itself, is worrying.

Meanwhile, in Europe, there's a potential surge coming, and even in the United States, they're preparing for their fourth wave, despite inoculating millions of vulnerable Americans.

Is the virus fighting back? Are there variants that are replicating like typos through a document-set, gradually outrunning the ability of the vaccines to keep up? Why does it seem that every day of good news is followed by a pushback of worrying headlines? Or, is this whole war against an invisible enemy simply being engineered by what we might call ‘sinister forces’?

What I think is that there are always sinister forces looking to exploit most situations - not just wars and pandemics. Someone somewhere's making lots of money, someone else just wants to be Loki, and still others are shooting for power as though the notion of inequality was just a made-up concept.

Well. I don't think the virus is self-aware, and actually, I'm not sure it can possibly be adapting in response to us - I think it's just mutating anyway, regardless of the pesky humans on the planet, and disconnected from the notions of conspiracy theorists. That is, I'm told, what viruses do - everything they can to survive, just like us.

Hopefully, with time, it'll start mutating into a less destructive copy, and the vaccines and boosters of the future will keep it under control.

The Five Dates

Back To School Day: 6 days
Back To Sixes Day: 27 days
Haircut Day: 41 days
Big Travel Day: 76 days
Liberation Day: 111 days