THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT

So, the Ghost of Christmas present arrived yesterday.

My daughter tested positive for Covid.

She was one of the careful ones.  Triple-vaxed. Face-masked.  Chairwoman of the Board when it came to monitoring and enforcing the family's compliance with Covid protocols.  Last Christmas, she orchestrated a testing and quarantine schedule that had her, her now-fiance and her brother arriving for Thanksgiving and then camping out for the entire month of December.  

She wouldn't allow Covid to kill Christmas.

And for the most part it didn't.

The California relatives could not travel east for the festivities.  But there was a big Zoom session on Christmas morning with everyone as the stockings were emptied and the presents opened.   My 91 year-old mother arrived from New Jersey along with my sister, and all was safe at our Covid free Christmas.

Thanks to Courtney.

This year was supposed to be different.  

We are all fully vaccinated.  

In fact, almost all of us -- and certainly Courtney --  had the  booster shot as well.  

We even  thought we had skirted tragedy earlier in the week.  

My niece, recently returned from a trip with her college friends to Nashville, had to check in to a nearby hotel for two days after learning that one of her travel mates had tested positive.  It was all hands were on deck as we awaited the results of her PCR test, which came back negative on Wednesday evening.

It looked like the virus was camping out elsewhere.

But, alas, it wasn't.

And to make matters worse, it turns out that we are not all that atypical.  

My son informed us earlier in the week that one of his co-workers had been exposed and that he would therefore take a test (it came back negative today). Our best friends told us this morning that they had to cancel their plans for a 10-person Christmas Day feast because their visiting son-in-law just tested positive.  And my colleague at work was set to welcome his son, daughter-in-law and seven-month-old grandson from Los Angeles but they cancelled their trip as Omicron invaded New York.

A big part of the problem here is . . .

Capitalism.

It turns out that capitalism is really good at invention but not particularly good at distribution.  

The government incentivized the creation of vaccines at what amounted to warp speed, and the private sector, especially Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, generated them.  The key thereafter was getting shots into arms across the world.  The original Covid virus mutated and variants emerged.  All of them, however, were seeded in the wake of effective vaccines by the existence of an unvaccinated population.  

Had everyone been vaccinated, neither Delta nor Omicron would have had their way.

But everyone wasn't.

So they have.

It's weird.

My family was all ready to combat Covid to celebrate Christmas last year.  

But vaxed to the max, it got us this year.

Screw it.

Merry Christmas anyway!

Given our ignorance . . . or obstinance . . . 

We can't beat Covid.

But God can.

And He arrives tomorrow.