Do you often reflect on the fact that we live with wires dangling over our heads on almost every street? We can hardly view the sky except for looking past wires. It’s certainly a marker of modern civilization. 

Some research has shown evidence that long-term exposure to high-voltage wires can lead to several health problems with higher rates of certain cancers and mental health issues like depression.

But even our neighborhood wires have subtle effects that are hard to quantify, even if only on the level of distorting our view. 

We learn to live with them on some level, tuning them out, but I occasionally notice how sweet it is to see a street without wires.

I’m not so much complaining as I am pointing out these two polarities of our existence: free unobstructed landscapes where we can experience the natural light and the color freely.

and landscapes that block the sky with a web of wires.

My perspective this am is that in present times we consist of both of these landscapes. They both clearly are part of our existence, part of us. They both offer possibilities. To notice the polarities is my main point.

COVID SIGNAL

Despite our modern capacities with handling and sending information, Covid is becoming harder to track. Reports of positive tests are becoming somewhat irrelevant, or at least mean something different than other phases of the pandemic. Mid pandemic we said recorded positive tests needed to be multiplied by 10x to reflect the actual cases.

We are in a new phase. The variants are highly contagious, the illness is milder, treatment is available for the higher risk populations, restrictions seem relatively overbearing, testing is more available privately, the immunity wall is high. These all contribute to a larger degree of underreporting of cases to tracking agencies. We are losing the signal. It’s estimated that we currently have to multiply actual positive tests by 30x to get a current actual estimate.

Recorded cases locally have leveled off somewhat over the last two weeks, for what it is worth.

It’s important to note that we are not losing the signal on hospitalizations and they are remaining low, despite the high case load. These variants relative to our immune response are milder, no worse than the seasonal flu, I would say. It’s a new phase.

We are carrying over ideas from previous phases which may or may not fit as well. But I suspect we will carry over ideas from earlier phases for the rest of our lives.

These times are complex and are defining us in many ways. We have each other and that’s a lot. Here’s to today’s random acts of kindness. They help keep it all moving in a good direction.