Dark winter

"I can taste the tin of the sky ― the real tin thing. / Winter dawn is the color of metal, / The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. / All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations ― / An assembly-line of cut throats…" ― from "Waking in Winter" by Sylvia Plath

By Deauwand Myers

Winter has always been my favorite time of year: the cashmere, the leather jackets, the vast fields of snow, even Christmas. Not this year. The recalcitrant nature of the coronavirus has made life for billions of people miserable. The statistics are startling.

As of the publishing of this article, in my native country of the United States, a veritable conflagration of COVID-19 rages unabated from coast to coast at a breathtaking pace, with close to 13,400,000 cases and nearly 270,000 deaths. Sixteen hundred Americans are dying from the virus every day. Shocking.

Worse, these are all lagging indicators. Because of the holidays, and family and friends gathering in close quarters, and the attendant travel to and from Thanksgiving gatherings, we will undoubtedly see a surge on top of a surge in the coming weeks. And then, there's Christmas.

The cascading effects of a huge uptick in the spread of this pandemic, especially in places where there's high numbers of cases, cannot be overstated. Besides the economic carnage COVID-19 has inflicted and will continue to inflict, hospitals in the United States are already at or near capacity. This means that people with other ailments may not be able to be treated in a timely fashion. Medical professionals throughout the nation are physically and mentally exhausted, and the healthcare infrastructure of America may, in some regions of the country, collapse.

Some of this is the mere selfishness and entitlement within a percentage of Americans who traveled during Thanksgiving, even though the medical community begged them not to. These are the same people who want to gather in groups without masks for dinners, parties, and worship services. This brand of foolishness is not uniquely American, many democratic countries experience this kind of public health rebellion, albeit in much smaller numbers and not with the backing of the federal judiciary, like in the United States.

But what's maddening isn't the horror show going on in America. I mean to say, for a variety of reasons, this was very predictable. What's increasingly frustrating is that even in countries, democratic or otherwise, adhering to strict public health guidelines (no or restricted traveling, no large gatherings, social distancing, masks, the modulated closing of schools, restaurants, bars, and other venues, rapid and massive virus testing and tracing, and the prohibition of international travel into the country), the virus still persists.

China, which basically locked down much of the country, has experienced recent outbreaks of COVID-19. Parts of Europe have similarly endured new cases. Australia has seen new instances. Japan has had its biggest surge of the disease since recording cases. Surprisingly, even Korea, like Taiwan, lauded for its fairly quick federal response at the outset of the pandemic, with rapid testing and drive through exams, is experiencing new cases.

Besides Taiwan and New Zealand, there are not many developed countries free from this dreaded disease. The question then becomes: Why? Scientists, epidemiologists, and medical doctors are also at a loss as to why countries deploying all the best practices in mitigating the virus and its community spread go from a surge to a dip to no cases, only to have a flare up of cases in a sudden and unpredictable fashion.

One theory is that the virus survives in droplets and on surfaces longer than expected. The simplest answer may be the most sage: we simply have not tested everyone who is infected.

For a country as geographically large and populous as the U.S. (over 330 million people), this makes a lot of sense. But Korea, with a much smaller land mass to cover and a population around 50 million, testing nearly everyone is not an impossibility.

The problem is also this: One can be tested and read as negative because the infection is new and thus undetectable.

People are tired of coronavirus and all the restrictions and frankly, the misery it has caused with our governments' attempts to mitigate its spread. Virus fatigue is real and understandable.

You may be tired of the virus, but the virus is not tired of you. Until these new vaccines are approved for widespread distribution and are available in large enough doses to crush the virus, as the world did with smallpox, mumps, and measles, we're going to have to stay vigilant. This includes our governments and how, when, and where they deploy regulations in pursuit of mitigation.

Sadly, because flu season is coinciding with the pandemic, it will be a dark winter.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.