Is anyone else weirdly relieved by the knowledge that we're all definitely going to get Covid?

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I know I sound like a psychopath, but hear me out.

I've always been the type of person who, left unchecked, will sit in my room shouting out the window at strangers that everyone has gone mad except for me. I know that's unhealthy, but for the last year and a half the world's response to the uncertainty of Covid-19 has given plenty of reinforcement to that instinct. Just today I saw that a significant number of people have decided that swallowing cattle de-worming tablets is a reasonable alternative to getting a well-researched vaccine. The Delta variant is raging, filling up hospitals, and burning down the world, and people are out there taking their vacations and posting on Instagram like everything is fine.

I've read enough self-help books to realize that I need to chill out with my judgmental thought patterns and anxious Chicken Little instincts to run screaming prophecies of doom through the streets, but to be honest nothing has given me a weird sort of calm like the increasingly clear knowledge that we're all going to get Covid-19.

I've accepted that reality in recent days after doing some reading about the Delta variant, its infectiousness among vaccinated individuals, and its ability to spread at a much more rapid rate than the world can possibly vaccinate. Prior to Delta, it seemed like an outside possibility that humans could beat Covid. Now, it seems like a certainty that all of us are going to have to deal with the virus. If you haven't reached that degree of certainty yourself, do your own research and all that, but this Atlantic article is a readable rundown of things.

This isn't a nice thing to learn. It's basically like learning that our diagnosis has been confirmed, and we as humans have a new, chronic illness that is going to impact our collective quality of life for the foreseeable future. Individually, there's a chance that it could kill us if we're unlucky or unwell. 

But it does seem like the situation is brutally clear, and the anxiety that comes with uncertainty is gone. 

Given the transmissibility of the Delta variant (and Lamdba variant, but that's a different story), essentially all of us (outside of maybe a few isolated individuals in small pockets of the world) will eventually be exposed to the virus that causes Covid-19, and all of us will have to establish our defenses against it. 

Until recently, I personally had the sense that, given enough collective action, we might have a chance to tamp out Covid eventually. Now, I've personally accepted that's not going to happen. What I'm preparing myself for is a future where waves of Covid variants cycle their way through society on a regular basis for the rest of my life. Most likely, following universal immune exposure both through vaccination and actual infection, successive waves will be less risky than the current ones (which has typically been the pattern with pandemics), and most likely we'll get better at treating and mitigating symptoms. But for me, the uncertain possibility of a Covid-free future is gone. 

This is all terrible news, and it means that the most hopeful previous possibility is off the table, but to me it makes the task before us all a lot more clear: slow the spread of Covid as much as possible so that as many people as possible can access vaccines prior to infection, and so that researchers can develop treatments to minimize mortality. After that, live with it the way we live with every other bit of madness that the world throws at us. That's really all that can be done. 

The only real good news at this stage is that people have achieved something really remarkable, and developed multiple effective vaccines that allow for people who can access them to prime their immune systems so that when we are exposed, we will be less likely to suffer severe consequences. All of us are at risk of getting sick, regardless of vaccination status, but everyone who can access the vaccine, and chooses to do so, can give themselves near certainty that the virus won't kill them if they weren't already on the brink. For other people, some combination of your own immune system and medical intervention is likely to keep you alive, but the risks are significantly higher. 

Listen, I'm not happy about any of this. I'm not glad that we're all going to be exposed to a potentially deadly or debilitating virus. I'm not glad that large masses of humanity are refusing the best possibility of individual and collective defense against it. And I'm definitely not glad that an even larger mass of humanity won't be able to access the same option to be vaccinated. The universe has thrown us a shit storm, as it's wont to do, and we're all living through an era that feels like science fiction. But at least some of the anxiety of uncertainty is gone, and we have a clear sense of what we all need to prepare for.