We were discussing COVID at the Pico hacienda yesterday. My older daughter just spent time in isolation at Ft Bliss, having tested positive for the Wuhan Flu as she’s getting ready to deploy to Kuwait. She has been vaccinated and boosted. My wife, vaccinated and twice boosted, my younger daughter, vaccinated and boosted, and I, vaccinated and boosted, guessed that we had probably had it, and had certainly been exposed, but never tested, because we were never sick. SSG Pico said that it felt like allergies to her, and my wife, untested, has had a few allergy symptoms, but the pollen has been very high in the Bluegrass State. Mrs Pico’s sister, who is vaccinated and double boosted, did feel sick, and thinks she had it, but was never tested. She did feel ill fewer than 14 days after her second booster shot, so there’s that. If I had it, I was asymptomatic.

We noted in the discussion that, with at-home testing, fewer people are going to get tested, and if someone did test positive at home, he was not necessarily going to report it to anyone, so the positive test numbers are essentially useless.

In January, acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” Remember: this was during the first Xi Omicron variant, before there was any real spread of the BA.2 Xi Omicron variant, which is, supposedly, even more infectious.

But note: even with the BA.2 Xi Omicron variant spreading, hospitalizations and deaths are still low, even if they have ticked up slightly, yet the CDC reported that, as of April 12, only 62% of our total population are ‘fully vaccinated.’ While vaccinations are supposed to greatly reduce WuFlu symptoms for those who contract it, one has to ask: why aren’t the 38% who are not vaccinated dropping like flies?

My guess — and it is a guess — is that many of the unvaccinated were previously exposed, and developed their own immunity. In a situation where Dr Fauxi told us that everyone was going to contract the virus, that’s the only reasonable explanation.

We have been told that Xi Omicron variant, while more easily transmitted, didn’t make people as sick. That raises the obvious question: did the virus itself mutate into something less virulent, or does it seem less virulent because most people already have some resistance to it?

Now, as William Teach has reported, the White House is once again pushing, though not trying to mandate, indoor masking, and the Philadelphia School District is once again requiring face masks, even though children appear to be the least vulnerable to the virus, even though many are not vaccinated.

Mr Teach included a Tweet from Ian Miller showing Joe Biden coming down the stairs from Air Force One in South Korea, dutifully wearing a mask, but taking it off as soon as he got to the bottom of the stairs and was greeted by Republic of Korea officials. It shows a Secret Service man in the doorway of the aircraft, masked up, but let’s face it: everyone in the President’s entourage is tested, tested frequently, and if anyone had the WuFlu, he’d never have been on the plane in the first place.

It was all for show: the President left the very controlled environment of Air Force One, masked, and then, as he was interacting with people in an environment over which he had no control — though he probably had assurances — the mask came off. It was the theater of the absurd.

At this point, masks are useless. They haven’t stopped the transmission of the virus, seemingly neither stopping the transmission from an infected person nor prevented an uninfected person from contracting it. The WuFlu is going to be with us, period, probably forever. It’s not that we need to learn to live with it; we’ve already done that! It’s time to just admit it.