Pestiferous recrudescence

THOSE who were kind or curious enough to read this column when it started around June last year may recall that I reread Camus' The Plague when we were under the highest restrictions and lockdown. I don't read or speak French and was very impressed by the acuity of the unnamed translator who used two words that were new to me and captured the plague and situation perfectly - "pestiferous" and even more apt, "recrudescence." Speaking of phrases, I have long detested the trite American cliché "between a rock and a hard place" as being extremely unimaginative and undescriptive. All they could compare a rock to is a hard place? Amused that a Danish colleague (we both sit on the board of a global food company) described the lousy choices we faced as choosing between "the plague and cholera." Leave it to the more literary Danes (where Kierkegaard among many other famous artists and philosophers came from) to have a much more apt and pointed saying. I told him I would use that from now on, but perhaps to be more topical I will say it is a choice between "Ebola and Covid."

With the Delta variant, we really are facing a pestiferous recrudescence, a phrase I hoped to retire last year. Yet, like everything else, it is not an equal recrudescence. There are so many varying aspects. Between the highly and lowly vaccinated countries. Between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Between those vaccinated with mRNA and traditional vaccines. Between the fully and partially vaccinated. With regard to handling Covid-19, between the formerly successful countries and the newly successful countries and everyone in between.