Deltacron and the Forgotten Pandemic of 1918

Knee-jerk reactions have been one of the most damaging hallmarks of the pandemic — with people making rash pronouncements long before all the facts are in. “Barbarians of specialization,” we’ve paraphrased Ortega y Gasset while describing these meddlers in the past. You remember the Surgeon General chiding people for buying masks early in the pandemic… before the government demanded that everyone start wearing them. And we talked about the possibility of hysteria in the early days of the Delta outbreak. Maybe the researchers in Cyprus should have run a few more tests before declaring we have a new strain to worry about. Or maybe they really have found something new… and dismissing their claims outright is putting us in more danger. Because the fact is, there is a chance Delta and Omicron could exchange some DNA — taking on characteristics of both.