We're nowhere near the end of the COVID pandemic, and we won't be until we think globally

I found out this week that my best friend in the world has a breakthrough COVID infection. This means that I've also been exposed. I'm not showing any symptoms, and I've been tested. I'm relatively confident that I have probably escaped infection, though there are, of course, no guarantees. Nevertheless, it's been a huge wake-up call.

Before it was clear just how many breakthrough infections were happening, I'd become pretty cavalier about masking in public. It felt like my two doses of Moderna were impenetrable shields. That's clearly not the case, and it took having COVID strike so close to home for that fact to really sink in. I should have known better!

I haven't talked about the pandemic for quite a while, and I've never talked about it here. It just became so pointless. Friends and family were either already in my camp, in which case me grousing about the gross mishandling of the pandemic was preaching to the choir, or they were in the MAGA camp, in which case nothing I said mattered in the least.

Nevertheless, I have some serious concerns. Yes, I'm endlessly annoyed by the enduring politicization of the pandemic. Yes, I wish everyone would get vaccinated and wear a damned mask wherever outbreaks are prevalent and in schools.

However, even if every single person in the US got the vaccine, most of the world remains unvaccinated. This means we are going to see continued waves of variants, many of which will be capable of bypassing the current vaccines. I hope these variants will remain manageable, but regardless, we need to be thinking not just about percentages of vaccinated individuals within our own borders, but globally. Until we do, we're going to be stuck in this mess for a long, long time.