Wow, I officially live in a disaster zone! At least according to the statistical gurus over at reactive media incorporated, but I really haven't noticed that the world has come to an end. Our extremely rural, podunk, nobody ever heard of it before county made the national list of top ten most infected counties for this ridiculous virus. I know many people who have had it, one guy died in the nursing home, a couple have been hospitalized, but school is still in session and people aren't dropping dead left and right like the media assures us is the case. One thing they don't mention in the scare statistic is that we are a minuscule region, 3000 people in the entire county, so when one person gets infected or die, statistically that is a huge percentage! One out of a thousand is a much higher percentage than 1 in 100,000, so even one case dramatically spikes the numbers. If we have a ten percent infection rate, that is 300 people, versus a region with 100,000 people would need 10,000 cases to equal that, which is hard to imagine. We have a local hospital and have been doing massive testing drives, which means we are testing a large percentage of our population on a regular basis versus larger areas where it is inconvenient to test huge numbers of people. We are also a close knit community which easily does back tracing since we all know each other and if someone gets sick everyone goes to get tested. But none of that matters as long as the statistics are scary and get a reaction. We didn't even know we lived at ground zero until a friend asked how bad things were after seeing our county on the list! Who knew?
Should we be stupid, no. Should we be panicked, no. Why are we destroying lives over something, that even at ground zero, isn't that much more deadly than influenza? We have had as many covid-related suicides in this county as we have had covid-deaths, and several more attempts that were unsuccessful but that doesn't make the news. Let's destroy lives and the economy and our social infrastructure over this?! What happens when something really nasty comes along? Can you imagine our current society and government enduring a world war or the Great Depression or another Spanish flu (which covid is nothing like!!!). But maybe that's the problem, this is all about feeling like we are in control of everything, life, death, creation, weather, everything, and when we aren't, we panic. But we weren't meant to be in control. It's a lie as old as creation: 'did God really say?' Yes, yes He did, and we did die, at least spiritually and certainly physically, but maybe if we can control this virus it will prove we don't need Him, but the mess we are enduring is as painful and embarrassing as our exodus from Eden, and equally of our own creation. But there is a cure, no it isn't a vaccine, but rather a baby, a helpless, shivering infant born to an unwed mother in the darkness two millennia ago. When the wisdom of the world proves folly, perhaps it is time to remember the folly of Heaven. Merry Christmas!
