Calm down about the Delta variant

There is no good reason for the US to keep its ‘essential’ travel restrictions in place

delta variant
Jen Psaki (Getty)
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The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700.

Find yourself in a motorcycle accident suffering the inconvenience of losing your cerebellum and all that other gooey stuff spread like jam over the interstate? Don’t worry. The medics will find an intact nostril and will determine that you tested ‘positive for COVID’….

The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700.

Find yourself in a motorcycle accident suffering the inconvenience of losing your cerebellum and all that other gooey stuff spread like jam over the interstate? Don’t worry. The medics will find an intact nostril and will determine that you tested ‘positive for COVID’. What remains of you will be transported to a hospital where management will file a claim and get 15 percent more on their government reimbursement because you ‘died from’, or at least with COVID.

There are exceptions, of course. I am told that St George Floyd, for example, tested positive for COVID but too late — not too late because he had expired but too late because a racism, racism, racism narrative intervened and took priority.

I thought we’d be well beyond the the Wuhan flu by now. Yes, it probably came from a Chinese virology lab, one where ‘gain-of-function’ (i.e., bio-weaponization) research, generously funded by St Anthony Fauci’s NIH, was taking place, but you’re not supposed to say that. The Chinese don’t like it to have it bruited about publicly. So I won’t say it.

But I thought we would be beyond it because, after all, it is a seasonal respiratory virus that ebbs and flows and it is definitely on the ebb now. But what about (cue scary music), what about the Delta variant? They should have called it the Andromeda Strain for all the carefully cultivated and deliberately fanned panic its advent has occasioned.

Here’s a biology lesson. Viruses mutate. They can’t help it. It’s in their nature. Perhaps the so-called Delta variant is ‘more communicable’. So what? It is also markedly less deadly.

But, but, but: there is a great surge in people ‘testing positive’ for COVID. Again, so what? ‘Testing positive’ signifies — nothing. It really is a tale told by an idiot, many idiots. What if the people who run our lives, who bark at you on public transport to put on a face-diaper, who pontificate from state capitals about who can eat in restaurants, go to the theater, travel on airplanes — what if they started testing for your ordinary run-of-the-mill coronaviruses, the ones that are responsible for the common cold? Want to bet that there would be an awful lot of positives?

It’s Rahm Emanuel time now and forever: never let a good crisis go waste, he advised, and rest assured, they — the alphabet-soup pod-people who we put in charge of our lives — they have run with it big time. A couple of days ago, the White House (how long before they change the insulting name of that edifice) announced that because of the ‘Delta variant’ they would not be lifting travel restrictions ‘at this point’. They hope, of course, that they can maintain, and perhaps stiffen, the restriction indefinitely, maybe forever. After all, as the White House press secretary demanded a week or two back, ‘Why do you need to have that information?’

For the time being, then, the US will continue to restrict ‘non-essential travel for non-US citizens from several countries around the world, including from the United Kingdom, the European Union, Brazil, South Africa, China’. But what about ‘travelers’ across our southern border? Is it essential that tens of thousands of aliens be allowed to pour over our southern border, to be transported free and for nothing all across the fruited plain to suck up any unclaimed welfare benefits, while possibly infecting the locals with COVID? I merely ask.

As I have said before, my dream job is to be the chap who decides whose travel, whose job, whose business, whose livelihood is essential. Of course, that task, deciding what is essential and what is not is absolutely essential, falls to all the politicians and their phalanx of busybody bureaucrats enforcing the diktats that keep us little folk in line — for our own good, it goes without saying (it certainly does).

It is not true, at least as far as I know, that Jen Psaki was an employee of the East German Stasi, though possibly that was her dream as a little girl. If things keep going as they have been, she may get her chance right here at home.