Beware The Runny Nose!

COVID hysteria has hit new highs (plumbed new depths, too) in recent days as a runny nose has become cause for alarm and quarantine.

Just today our area had its first measurable snowfall of the winter, and while temperatures have been warmer than usual for the most part this season, there have been some very cold days and nights.

For anyone who might be reading this in the tropics and has little firsthand knowledge of cold weather, it can cause one’s nose to run, a euphemism for when nostrils drip mucus.

Cold, dry air irritates the moist nasal linings, causing mucus glands to go into overdrive to compensate and some excess mucus tends to get expelled through your honker. It’s nothing that a tissue, or your coat sleeve, can’t handle. I’m just kidding about the coat sleeve.

The runny nose phenomenon was generally accepted as nature at work, at least pre-COVID. I recall that I took the SAT as a senior in high school with a severe cold, causing me to ram tissues up my nose to staunch the flow. Even at that, some excess mucus made it to the test sheet.

I scored quite well, but looking back I can’t be sure if it was me, or mucus filling in the correct answer bubbles.

These days, I’d have been barred from taking the test, denied my college entry certification, and sent home to stay in my room for days if not weeks.

Already this week, a neighbor was sent home from the hospital where she works because – horrors – her nose was running. A COVID test had to be taken and she was left to sit at home awaiting the results.

Supposedly if someone is detected with a runny nose there and doesn’t self-report it, they are open to vague punishment.

Turns out her runny nose was just a runny nose.

Meanwhile, one granddaughter was told at preschool she really should stay home if she has a runny nose. A four-year-old kid can have a runny nose on a cold day. Imagine that!

There were members of my extended family who as children had runny noses about 200 days a year. They sure would have missed a lot of school.

But how can we expect rational, informed thought from the lower echelons when a Supreme Court Justice, pondering whether or not Joe Biden can force COVID vaccines on people, misstated both statistics on the Omicron variation of COVID and flew in the face of just about all medical opinion when she said it is as deadly as the Delta variation?

Yes, critics say this woman is on the court largely to fill two affirmative action categories. But give us a break. Anyone paying even scant attention knows the consensus in the medical field is that Omicron is highly contagious, but not highly dangerous. Just two days ago WebMD reported Omicron hospitalizations run at about one-third of the Delta numbers.

And to present erroneous statistics to back up the fallacy that they are equals as health threats speaks to just how low our legal system has sunk.

The lesson here is that Covidiots and Maskholes are everywhere. So, if you have a runny nose, for God’s sake be sure to disguise that symptom lest you are required, ala Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” to be branded not with A for adulterer, but with RN (Runny Nose) and ostracized from polite company.

You’ve been warned.