As the chaos spurred by the Omicron variant multiplies and our leaders retreat into insignificance, The Tyee’s Andrew Nikiforuk provides a brief guide to what ordinary citizens and communities can do to avoid getting sick, infecting others, or becoming another patient in an overcrowded hospital staffed by doctors and nurses exhausted by failed policies that pretended “we can live with the virus.”

Are you tired of COVID? I fucking am. But as a longtime science writer and the author of two books on pandemics, I have to report what you probably don’t want to hear. We have entered the grimmest phase of this pandemic. And contrary to what our politicians say, there is only one way to deal with a rapidly mutating virus that demonstrates the real power of exponential growth: Go hard. Act early. And go to zero.