If you’ve been paying attention to our Statistics section in the Coronavirus Morning News Brief, you will likely have noticed that the U.S. is experiencing its biggest coronavirus wave since omicron appeared on the scene.
Wastewater levels indicate that approximately two million Americans are getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 each and every day, and the JN.1 omicron sublineage is the culprit.
Thanks to a combination of effective coronavirus home-testing kits – whose results largely go unreported – and the fact that many people who contract Covid-like symptoms don’t even bother to test at all – we are fortunate that wastewater monitoring as it provides a reasonable snapshot of what the national caseload looks like.
Wastewater monitoring can detect viruses spreading from one person to another in a community before anyone will display symptoms, test positive, or feel sick enough to go to a doctor or hospital. It can also detect infections from those who are asymptomatic.
It was just under one year ago that Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for Covid-19 said at an online event that “until no one is at risk, everyone is at risk. Six months earlier, which was September 2022, the director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, optimistically told the world: “We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic – we are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”
With an estimated two million new cases per day in the United States alone, I have news for y’all, and it’s not even close to the first time I’ve said or typed this: “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”
For the curious, this phrase apparently was first uttered many decades ago, perhaps by multiple different people at various times in the twentieth century, but Samuel Goldwyn is said to have explained to a friend how to know when an opera is actually over by saying, “Just remember, it ain’t really over ‘til the fat lady sings.” The first known reference in the media appeared in the Dallas Morning News on March 10, 1976, in a sports-related article quoting Texas Tech sports information director Ralph Carpenter as saying, “the opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings” with reference to a basketball tournament. The Yale Book of Quotations seems to confirm Carpenter as the originator of the phrase, even though he probably wasn’t.
As for me, I had always imagined it was something Groucho Marx would have said.
Nonetheless, the colloquialism “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings” implies that one should not presume or pretend to know the outcome of an event that ostensibly is still in progress.
It’s typically invoked at such time where it appears that said event is possibly nearing its conclusion and meant as a caveat against assuming that the current state of affairs is a foregone conclusion and, hence, irreversible.
The phrase clearly has its origins in opera, where sopranos are known for being plus sized, to put it politely. Some see the phrase’s beginnings in the Wagner opera cycle “Der Ring des Nibelungen” where, in its last part, “Götterdämmerung,” the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, traditionally portrayed by an amply endowed soprano, in her farewell scene – which has a duration of approximately 20 minutes – is about the end of the world, or at least the world of the Norse gods.
This is not to be confused, however, with what Yogi Berra famously said, namely “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.” Berra actually never uttered those exact words and it appears that the then former majority leader of the Connecticut State Senate and future U.S. senator Joe Lieberman, at the time a candidate for state attorney general, summed up the race for that position in 1982 by invoking Berra’s name thusly: “As Yogi Berra said, ‘it ain’t over till it’s over.”
As Mark Twain said, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
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