COVID-19 Outbreak Information Updates (Reboot) [over 150.000,000 US cases (est.), 6,422,520 US hospitilizations, 1,148,691 US deaths.]

Very interesting article
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If the pandemic were a movie, it wouldn’t make any sense. Even putting aside the suffering and monotony that would make up the film’s “action,” the narrative structure of COVID—defined by its false endings, exhausting duration, and inscrutable villain, a virus—would be unwatchable. The most generous thing that Monisha Pasupathi, a psychology professor at the University of Utah who studies life narratives, said to me about the pandemic’s cinematic potential was that, well, “there’s always that contingent of film historians” who have a taste for the avant-garde.

Two years of living with the coronavirus has been spirit-depleting for obvious reasons, but this weariness has been compounded by the fact that the pandemic has defied our attempts to snap it into a satisfying story framework. Mark Freeman, a psychology professor at the College of the Holy Cross, told me that he’s been thinking of this condition as “narrative fatigue”—“an exhaustion born not only out of the relentlessness of the pandemic but the relentlessness of the ever-changing narratives that have accompanied it.”

The coronavirus’s volatile arc has thwarted a basic human impulse to storify reality—instinctively, people tend to try to make sense of events in the world and in their lives by mapping them onto a narrative. If we struggle to do that, researchers who study the psychology of narratives told me, a number of unpleasant consequences might result: stress, anxiety, depression, a sense of fatalism, and, as one expert put it, “feeling kind of crummy.”

A particularly deflating stretch of the pandemic’s story came in 2021, after vaccines were made widely available. They initially seemed like the salvation that people fantasized they would be—President Joe Biden celebrated “independence” from the virus in a Fourth of July speech, and “hot vax summer” was something that people actually said. The Delta variant, of course, eviscerated that optimism and produced a feeling of narrative whiplash. Wasn’t the story supposed to be over, or at least at an intermission?

What has made the pandemic’s story even more exasperating is that Americans haven’t even been able to agree on its basic facts; many people have been falsely asserting that the pandemic is a hoax and that the vaccines are harmful. Americans’ divergent beliefs work against telling a collective story, according to Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Other collective tragedies haven’t had this kind of dissonance. During World War II, a national narrative was easier to construct, he told me: “Nobody was arguing that it wasn’t happening.”

A story can be more psychologically satisfying when it has a diabolical antagonist to root against, yet the pandemic denied us that as well—the virus is not willful and has no motives. Instead, as Melanie Green, a communication professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, pointed out to me, many people have resorted to casting a different enemy themselves: Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, the entire nation of China. Green also sees this vacuum of villainy as having contributed to pandemic conspiracy theories, which are basically just convenient stories about whom to be mad at.............

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/o...e-something-it-isn-t/ar-AAUTHEQ?ocid=msedgntp