People are being too optimistic about the end of COVID-19

• Published date: 04 October 2021
• Author: MICAH HALPERN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Wave after wave, we coped. Most of us, thankfully, masked and socially distanced and kept hand sanitizer by our side. Some were more skeptical about the efficacy of these new behaviors than were others, but by the time the vaccines were introduced into our lives, even many skeptics had been swayed.

And for a short while, we were lulled into thinking that we had found a way out of this dark tunnel, that we would be able to slay the dragon called COVID and resume our lives. And all it would take was a jab. A prick. A vaccination. And then another.

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But then came the new wave – the new variant. And now, 20 months after we first learned the words coronavirus and COVID, we are fighting to stay safe and stay alive and to defeat the Delta variant.

Delta is destructive. It has "punched through" the double dose of Pfizer vaccine which many of us – and almost all of Israel – received. And that is why Israel wisely began its third shot or booster program. Our antibodies wane, just as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett described in his address before the United Nations General Assembly.

Moderna's vaccine has had better success against this new COVID Delta variant than the Pfizer vaccine. There is a simple reason for that difference between vaccines. The Pfizer shot has 30 micrograms of mRNA, while the Moderna shot has 100 micrograms of mRNA.

BUT NOW a new problem has arisen. Those of us who have taken the vaccine, or vaccines, have come to terms with those who have not. We may not agree with anti-vaxxers, but we have learned to live with them (or to separate from them) and to accept their reasons for not being vaccinated. But now a new group has emerged.

They are the COVID Pollyannas.

Pollyanna was a children's novel written in 1913 by Eleanor H. Porter. It was so successful a book that it soon became a series of books and then, in 1960, a movie starring Hayley Mills. Pollyanna, a young orphan, was the eternal optimist. She believed that all adversity can be conquered with a positive attitude.

The word "Pollyannish" made it into the dictionary and is defined as unreasonably or illogically optimistic.

I am encountering people, vaccinated people, who are telling me – actually insisting – that COVID is over and that the Delta variant is a made-up excuse for other illnesses.

When I first encountered this strange reality, my first COVID...