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Endgame. It’s a term often associated with chess, but more generally it refers to the final stages of some ongoing process. When I think of endgame, I’m asking myself, after all is said and done, how are things likely to turn out.
While I will leave the chess end game to the Bobby Fischer’s and Garry Kasparov’s of the world, I’ve been thinking about end game in two disparate domains. The first is Ukraine, and I will leave that for another post. The second is COVID, about which I will take this space to rant.
I recall a trip to Hawaii in Feb of 2020. There was talk on the news of some new virus in China, but nobody knew how quickly or how widely it would spread. I saw whole groups of Asian flight attendants walking through my hotel wearing surgical masks, and I recall thinking that they were being ridiculously over-cautious.
Fast forward to Fauci and Trump, to Omicron and Delta, to Pfizer and Moderna. I was in the supermarket the other day and saw whole groups of shoppers not wearing surgical masks, and I recall thinking that they were being ridiculously under-cautious.
So now I read that we’ve got the XBB variant, which is supposed to be more transmissible than the last variant, which was more transmissible than the previous one, which was more transmissible… (I think you get it).
The Spanish flu of a century ago played itself out. Polio and smallpox and diphtheria all had their endgame. But the recent outbreak in China threatens to encourage more variants than we can shake a stick at, each one likely more transmissible than the last, but hopefully not more serious or more deadly.
Yes, I know that viruses mutate—it’s what they do. But how much different is this virus than anything else we’ve ever dealt with? Is COVID different in this way compared to the SARS virus that we encountered in 2003? Is there not an approach to immunity that involves a way of protecting the human system that is itself immune to endless variations of the virus?
Or maybe we can just drink Lysol and irradiate our inner workings?
I’m not a biological scientist nor do I get my COVID information from primary sources, but I follow the latest developments in the press pretty closely. Each time I await word on a means of making COVID disappear or at least reducing its threat to the level of the “common” flu (which is itself a virus that doesn’t seem to mutate weekly). Nonetheless, I’ve yet to hear a respected source say with any degree of certainty how this will end or when.
I am very cautious. And I am pretty patient. But I’m not getting any younger and I’d like to hope that my lifeline will be considerably longer than that of COVID. Am I not reading the right sources? Am I missing something important that is known or has been said?
My optimistic side constantly reminds me that throughout the world in university, hospital, and corporate labs, teams of well-funded scientists are imagining and testing creative and novel approaches to prevention and treatment. These things take time, I say. Just wait a bit longer. And then the cynic in me barges in with a simple question: Breakthrough, anyone?
I’ve traded rooks and bishops and queens with the virus, but to little advantage. And I still don’t get it: What is the endgame here?
