The new strain

It must be owned that I am not too excited to learn about the new strain of COVID from South Africa and it's recent arrival on our shores, not surprisingly in South Carolina, our lesser cousin that has the audacity to refer to itself as Carolina. Yeah right. The low efficacy of the J&J vaccine against this variant does not bode well for reopening and getting back to what we used to think of as Normal.

So, we are back to looking forward to spring and warm weather, which will let us go outside more and hang out with people in the great outdoors. Perhaps we are moving into a period of history when we have a IRL social part of the year and a virtual social part of the year, when we mostly see people on Zoom, using the phone, etc. Certainly we can be happy that we live in the South, where this part of the year lasts longer.

There's a section of the Journal on how COVID will change retirement that's been lingering around my bathroom since November, and I finally picked it up and started reading. One phenomenon it referenced is how many people have gotten healthier during COVID times -- partially to mitigate some the heightened mortality risk associated with underlying conditions like obesity. So doctors are now starting to think in terms of a "biological age" construct, where if you take good care of yourself a healthy 54-year old, say, may be "biologically" equivalent to a median 40-year old.

I started to wonder if there might be a mental health equivalent. Of course, the irony here is that many older people are managing the stress of lockdown better than younger people. So it might be a question of younger- to middle-aged folks learning to be "wise beyond their years." Perhaps with the aid of such tools as blogs.