I was thinking of doing a “year in review” post around this time, but let’s face it, we all know how crappy a year it has been and my bet is that most of us don’t need a reminder about it all. Besides that, there is little use looking backwards when the future is what we should be concerned about.
In my last post I called on you all to keep calm and keep prepping…don’t panic. That still holds true, and although the Omicron variant has proven to be a bigger issue than most predicted, the don’t panic attitude still holds true. Panicking won’t help anyone. What I did NOT say was to relax and not be concerned. That would actually be worse than panicking.
The Omicron variant promisses to be the dominant issue for the new year, as well as a serious pain in the rear for the end of this one. Already, some Canadian provinces are tightening restrictions for the holiday season. More will follow. Every day a few cases are found in new regions. With the ability to double every 3 or 4 days, the Omicron variant may already be unstoppable. I have serious doubts that we could vaccinate our way out of this even if we wanted to.
It’s times like this that 3 words keep repeating themselves in my head. EVERY NEEDFUL THING. As in the LDS mantra of having a year’s supply of EVERY NEEDFUL THING. When this new variant really takes off, we will undoubtedly see shortages. Shortages of what is the only real question. For crying out loud, we were seeing shortages of frigging toilet paper when this whole thing started almost 2 years ago. Of all the things we could have predicted running low on, I don;t think anyone predicted butt wipe to be top of the list. Therefore those 3 words ring in my head once again…EVERY NEEDFUL THING.
There is going to be a lot of difficult time coming up soon. Lockdowns, shortages, closures, it’s all coming back. With an economy already on shakey ground, this round is working it’s way up to be a huge whollop to everyone. There will be businesses that get shut down and never reopen. There will be jobs lost that will never come back. Any progress made over the past months as we thought we were getting things under control will be lost. This isn’t over…not by a long shot.
I remember when this whole thing started, a friend of mine and fellow prepper saying that it wasn’t Covid 19 that concerned them, but Covid 21 was the real concern. This has always been a race to get it under control before it became something that we couldn’t control. Well, so far, we blew it big time! RNA based organisms like this do not replicate perfectly. Every time they reproduce themselves there are minor variations. Most times, these variations have little to no impact, but every once in a while a variation occures that makes the virus more virulant, more resistant to vaccines, or more deadly. If you let this virus get out of control and replicate itself billions of times per week, the chances of a major variation go up exponentially. This is what we face now. Omicron may not be the most deadly variant we have seen to date, but make no mistake, it has the potential to kill a lot of people just from the sheer number of people that it can infect.
Keeping that in mind, with the number of cases going up so quickly, just how long will we have to wait for yet another significant variant to pop out of the woodwork and just what will it be? Will the next one be the killer virus we wanted to avoid? Only time will tell at this point. The only thing that is absolutely clear is that mankind needs to get this under control and quick. So keep prepping without panicking and make sure you have ample supplies of EVERY NEEDFUL THING.