Control: Goodbye, Covid — For Now

Things seem back to normal.

So far — fingers crossed.

I, Dalton Lewis, noticed that no one seems to wear a mask anymore. Things are normal. Just four months ago I was self-isolating again because some deadly variant of the Covid-19 version of the Coronavirus was rampant through America, killing people and ravaging America. The super duper psycho death virus was killing two thousand Americans or more a day. I hesitated before going to any social activity.

Two years ago we sat in our homes, doing nothing and not leaving our homes except to take walks. We didn’t go out to restaurants because we couldn’t gather. We didn’t go to work. We didn’t go to the movies. We just sat at home, writing or watching television or doing whatever to pass the hours of nothing…

The super psycho death virus has receded for now. We are acting like it is gone. We have — many of us — had two vaccine doses and a booster shot. They helped us to survive the disease if we got it. I remember…

I remember Phillip had a pile of masks. I remember the first time we went out during the pandemic. We went to Buffalo Wild Wings and wore our masks until we went to our seats when we took them off to eat. We ate outside at first, not trusting an inside situation. I remember ordering food through a menu on an app on our phone and not with a physical menu because that would transfer the virus.

I remember not seeing a movie at a movie theater for a year and a half. I remember thinking that movie theaters were places where people went to die. I remember thinking that movies were dead, and movie releases got delayed over and over.

I remember that the government and the public had absolutely no idea how to handle a pandemic and that America mostly failed in its response to said pandemic. We lost hundreds of thousands of people. There were covid parties where people gathered to get the virus from other people. There were gatherings and then people would say, oh, so and so had it. You might have gotten it.

I remember when my friends started to get it. Finnegan got it and said that it was like a cold that kicked your ass. It would make you lose your sense of taste and would knock you down for a couple of days.

I remember the vaccine certainly made me sleep for a day or two.

It’s 2022. It’s the future. We should have had a strong and fast response. Instead it took a year to come up with a partial response — a pair of injections that made it harder for the disease to kill you. That’s the best people could do. It took another year after that for the disease to reduce to reasonable levels.

And what’s reasonable levels? Only 500 people are dying a day. Only. That’s still a lot of people. That’s still a thing. That still matters. I don’t know what acceptable deaths are, but they shouldn’t be anything.

And me? I’m still writing novels. I wrote several books during the pandemic. The most recent, Teenage Nightmare Chronicles, is getting bad reviews, but I still think it’s good: I worked really hard to create a nasty, brilliant horror story.

I might still die from this super duper psycho death virus, but I made it through forty-four years without dying. That’s an accomplishment. Let’s see if I can stay alive going forward.

Thanks, and take care, friends.