The North Carolina DHHS publishes the CDC’s Covid-19 risk levels by county each week. Each county is color coded for “risk of illness and strain on the health care system”.
- Green: Low
- Yellow – Medium
- Red – High
Below is this week’s chart. My county has been Yellow or Red for as long as I can remember.
But here’s the rub – ever since we were first told to stay home for “2 weeks to flatten the curve” I’ve kept an eye on health care resources in my county. First, because of all the Covid news – especially about hospitals being overrun, lack of ventilators, etc. Second, because in the first summer of the Covid pandemic and then again in second summer during the Delta surge, I needed to have hernia repair surgeries which could be impacted by “a strain on the healthcare system”.
There never was a strain on the healthcare system here as far as I could tell. We did not run out of faculties, beds, staff or resources. There were panic induced shortages of supplies, tests and vaccines but over time these were resolved.
Now we’re in year 3. Year 3! And each week it’s reported that we’re in Code Red.
That’s not helpful. People cannot live under a perpetual high alert level with no foreseeable end.
What happens is everyone starts to ignore the alert threat levels because they become meaningless. It’s like the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Here in Raleigh, we have peaks of valleys of Covid cases/hospitalizations/deaths reported. The Delta and Omicron surges caused peaks. The vaccinations helped reduce them. Holidays and travel caused peaks. Lack of accurate data, testing, and inconsistent reporting lowered them.
It’s become a farce.
Bureaucrats are checking off boxes and governments are covering their a$$es while the rest of us can see that the Emperor Has No Clothes.
We’ve been through this before.
Ever since 9/11 we had high levels of “terrorist threat risk” reported at airports. The TSA continues to search grandmas, check for shoe bombers and perform other security theater 20 years later.
Every few months, the Department of Homeland Security publishes a bulletin that begins with something like this :
“The United States remains in a heightened threat environment, as noted in the previous Bulletin, and several recent attacks have highlighted the dynamic and complex nature of the threat environment. In the coming months, we expect the threat environment to become more dynamic as several high-profile events could be exploited to justify acts of violence against a range of possible targets…”
We’ve been warned about domestic terrorists, monkeypox, heat waves and rainstorms in the past week.
I’m not a conspiracy nut who disbelieves everything the government says, but give me a break.
Life is a risk.
And no matter what we do, we’re all going to die someday.
So, I could do with a few less warnings about every possible bad scenario. Especially when there is absolutely nothing I can do to change the risks.