Lately, I’ve been thinking about the selfishness that has brought us to this point. We’re currently on the cusp of the season three premiere of this godforsaken pandemic with no series finale in sight because we just refuse to do the basic things required to wrap it up already. And they are basic: Wash your hands. Wear your mask. Stay six feet away from others. And, if you’re physically able, get an itty bitty injection, much like you did back when your parents were preparing to enroll you in school.

So simple. But we will not do it. I mean, obviously, some of us will, but not enough of us to finally bring this extended period of insanity to an end.

What’s worse, if Saturday’s press conference is anything to go by, the people empowered to govern in the nation’s best interests aren’t anywhere near ready to do what’s necessary to make much of a difference. Even the public service vaccination not-a-mandate appears to be floundering amid pushback from organisations fully engaged in anti-vax rhetoric and legislation which is apparently still being drafted. (I suppose the fact that the legislation still wasn’t ready a few days before the deadline is the reason for the last-minute reprieve.)

That police had to break up a protest against the (at this point, non-existent) mandate the very next day is just icing on the cake. Of course, 300 people chose to exercise their perceived right to do as they please by gathering in violation of the public health regulations and of course, the same people encouraging public servants to remain unvaccinated saw nothing wrong with it.

So where does that leave us? Well, the healthiest among us should be fine, right? After all, as we keep being told, the highly-contagious Omicron variant is “milder”. Never mind the fact that its highly-contagious nature means more people are ending up in the hospital (because it’s spreading more effectively than ever) and more variants are on the way. Or the fact the death toll is still rising and long COVID is still a barely-understood thing (which is rarely discussed here in sweet T&T). Don’t study how many of us don’t even know whether we’re actually healthy, given that non-communicable diseases top the list of things killing people under 70 each year. It’ll probably be fine.

Those with co-morbidities, though. What about the people who know they’re immuno-compromised and must therefore rely on herd immunity in order to avoid catching a virus that will most likely land them in serious trouble (regardless of how “mild” a variant it might be)? Well, the Prime Minister says we’re now to “prepare to live with the virus”. What that means for people who cannot safely risk exposure in a country pretending it’s never heard of an actual vaccine mandate is anybody’s guess.

This is a place where the Acting Deputy Police Commissioner would seek to reassure citizens about a spiking murder rate by comparing it to larger numbers in previous years. As if each murder is not the loss of a meaningful human life. It’s a place where a community’s MP could feel comfortable telling a community to be patient after more than five months of living with an open pit of sewage (and the responsible body didn’t think to properly secure the massive sinkhole until after someone fell into it, again, five months later). It shouldn’t be surprising that a large number of us don’t much care about the fact that we’re losing people to this virus in double-digit numbers every day.

In a society in which people cared about each other, preparing to live with a deadly virus would mean doing what’s necessary to protect each other from it. A society founded in common sense would recognise that individuals can’t prosper if society collapses. The society we have though, (the one that originated as a colony engaged in violent wealth extraction) seems to believe that living with a deadly virus means accepting that a lot more people are going to die. A disturbing number of us seem to be absolutely fine with that so long as no one we care about is among that number.

This is the bitter irony at the heart of our insane response to this pandemic: were this a deadlier virus, one that killed fully half of the people exposed to it, it might have been easier to convince people to do what is necessary to protect others. If we knew we had a strong chance of losing the people we love most, we might actually stop playing around and take it seriously. As it stands, though, there are people doing the most to give this virus every chance to mutate and spread because they ‘don’t know anyone who got really sick’.

This, even as more than FIVE AND A HALF MILLION people have died from this virus in less than two years. I live in a nation of just under 1.4 million people. Try as I might, I cannot wrap my mind around a loss of human life on that scale. As I sit here typing this, T&T has “only” lost 3,156 people. That might sound small until you realise those lost so far could fill Queen’s Hall four times over. They could fill NAPA more than twice.

The pain caused by their loss is another story. Children have lost their parents and parents have lost their children. Siblings have lost each other. Spouses have been separated. Entire sections of families have been wiped out in days by this virus. It’s plenty deadly enough.

And yet there are still folks running around braying about conspiracies and fake death tolls and demanding an end to the few restrictions we have in place. At this point, I don’t know what to say to them. Mainly because I retired from trying to reason with anti-vaxxers after a single interaction convinced me that it is not possible to reach a person who has made up their mind to ignore what is right in front of their face.

As we watch our government continue to refuse to do the very obvious thing required to get us out of this mess, I can only hope they don’t end up with a personal reason to take this seriously. The cynical part of me can’t see them seeing sense otherwise, but I’m not the kind of person who could wish the kind of losses they’re encouraging on anyone. More than that, though, my thoughts are with those of us who have to figure out how to survive in a society that clearly does not care if we live or die.

Living with COVID is one thing. Living with the knowledge that your government, your employer, your neighbour would gladly sacrifice your life in exchange for a return to “normalcy” is another.