Is the Pandemic Over?

And if it is, are we ready to accept it?

Photo by shahin khalaji on Unsplash.

“We still have a problem with COVID,” President Joe Biden told 60 Minutes Sunday night when asked about his administration’s battle against COVID19. “We’re still doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over.”

“If you notice, no-one’s wearing masks,” President Biden continued. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape…I think it’s changing.”

Mr. Biden’s remark hit the commentariat and media classes very hard.

“Biden Says the Pandemic is Over,” howled the New York Times amid a general media outcry. “But at Least 400 People Are Dying Daily.”

“The president made the remark in an interview that aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night,” the paper of record stated. “By Monday, the backlash was in full swing.”

The NYT was right about the backlash. But part of the reason behind the uproar over President Biden’s recent declaration of victory over Covid19 may be psychological.

Human beings are funny about certain things- it’s our brains.

Poor Darwin: He was the overachieving kid in class who took attendance and forgot to count himself. Sure, the animal kingdom makes perfect sense. The natural world we see around us everyday is a symphony of harmonious perfection, adaptation and grand design.

Nature’s plan is so perfect, so complete; the adaptations of its creatures so intricate, a not insignificant number of humans- yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever- believe some supernatural force, some divine higher being, some dread hand, Einstein’s Clockmaker, the Prime Mover of the physicist, must be at work.

But one of the most prominent creatures on the planet is not like the others. One denizen of the natural world sticks out like a sore thumb.

It’s us.

These brains of ours are probably the most advanced bit of evolutionary hardware any person living today will ever see. Even in the Information Age, with more computing power in every pocket than NASA had to land on the moon, with A.I. striding along by leaps and bounds, and advanced-learning supercomputers powerful enough to map the human genome, there is nothing to equal the human brain.