COVID-19: When does "Reporting" morph into "Rooting"?

Oh my GAWD it's a Doomsday Variant.

A Doomsday COVID Variant Worse Than Delta and Lambda May Be Coming, Scientists Say

The article under the bold headline goes on to offer a ton of scary predictions.

"COVID might be with us FOREVER!!!!"

"We've UNDERESTIMATED this virus every step of the way!!!"

and finally......

"Is there a variant coming that's going to be like HIV and kill us ALL???"

Let's stop, take a break and look at how these things have gone in the past.

First things first, there are a LOT of respiratory viruses hanging out in the world. The Common Cold, Flu, SARS, MERS, viral pneumonia.  All of them have been around a long time, they are impossible to fully eradicate, and we go about our lives living with them, and coping with them as a society without flipping the freak out every time a new variant comes along. 

The annual flu shot is basically an inoculation against a different strain of flu every year. Eventually, the goal should be to get our response to SARS-CoV-2 to a similar level to seasonal flu. Yes, we are at the beginning of this process and those mean pharmaceutical companies have done yeoman's work getting us to this point: A vaccine that works remarkably well given the time crunch for developing it, and a greater understanding of methods of transmission.

What has NOT changed is the breathless way the media is reporting on it, or how the ruling class is responding.  These are problems.

For the ruling class the problem is that we're still looking at solutions that do not work. Lockdowns, utterly useless, are being contemplated again, as are mask mandates (which might work some) and a renewal of capacity restraints and social distancing requirements (which probably DO work) but the we're getting perilously close to a time where we're going to start locking down parks again, against all common sense, and we're hearing rumors of a 2nd lockdown, which I've said before might be ruinous to the economy and what we (just) remember of our free society.

For the media this is morphing into sheer boosterism. Reporters WANT suffering, they WANT death, and now they are openly rooting for it. Why is this? Clicks and sales. It's no mystery that the media is suffering financially of late, and what better to spur sales than a good old fashioned extinction level event? So what if some freedoms have to be sacrificed in the meantime? We've even had media come out against the First Amendment, as it applies to you, not to them. This is not too terribly surprising since many of them truly feel the FA only really applied to them in the first place, and they're not afraid to carry the ruling classes water to ensure it does.

For now the only advice I can give is to mask up, maintain social distancing, maintain proper hygiene and, if you are so inclined, get vaccinated. Then hope like hell some common sense makes it into this World.

Because, if it does not, we're going to be dealing with this mess for years.  And it's only going to get worse and more restrictive.

Finally, take all of this reporting with a huge grain of salt. Even within the "OH MY GAWD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!" histrionics of the above article this author has to admit that the DOOMSDAY scenario Newsweek is pimping here is extremely unlikely because well....science.

In short, what he's writing is science fiction. A fever dream of something really bad that he saw in the movie Contagion.

Keep that in mind.