If I could, I would shout from the rooftops, “COVID is still here. COVID is still here. Take care. Take care.”

However, my throat is still scratchy from having acquired COVID at the end of a family vacation in mid-July. Only one member of our group of four was spared, probably because she still had protective antigens from her bad case during Christmas.

Though in isolation with my spouse for days after our return, I heard about friends who had also gotten sick since mid-July. One had been exposed at a wedding. Two at a dinner party. Two at the small business they run. A friend of a friend? On a trip to the U.K. Still another? Site of exposure unclear; illness clear. The most notable COVID victim? The president of the United States.  

People around the globe and in my little circle have not forgotten COVID.  We have not purged it from memory with an antiseptic wipe. The memories of the last few years are too raw and close— with their devastations, griefs, losses, and anxieties. No aliens have beamed collective amnesia down upon us all.  The informative sites from the Yale School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have not gone dark. Pharmacies still stock masks, and for the fortunate, the bitter-tasting relief of Paxlovid.

Yet, many of us seem to have assigned COVID to one room in our mansions and motels of actionable memory. If we have done so, we might simply be exhausted by the subject, or lack access to resources, or have devised personal cost/benefit analyses to deal with COVID, or have succumbed, as everyone does, to magical thinking. Or, perhaps, we have subconsciously begun to believe in theories of herd immunity. As I understand it, if this is the case, we assume that if enough of us have been sick, the virus will lack new victims and will shrink and slink away.

Certainly, a name now given a powerful current variant of the virus diminishes its potency. That name is ‘FLiRT.” Can anyone fear a flirt, an ingenue of a virus, especially if we somehow, in some way, believe our community is too sophisticated to fall for its charms? 

I am no virologist. Nor do I wish to personify SARS-CoV-2 and assign its variants human characteristics. However, the mutations and variants of COVID are hardy, flexible, and hardened against human defenses. So I now carry masks, even if I am only one of a tiny group in the Southold IGA. In September, my family and I will seek out the new vaccine. 

“What a fraud,” declares a man I know, “what a fraud. Lock up Fauci. Give me a break.” I take comfort from the fact, derived from what he tells me, that the Facebook page he nurtures has few followers.

Take care, take care.