How many times a week do actors and actresses and other working folk on set have Q-tips rammed in their faces looking for COVID-19, do you think? I can’t imagine Hollywood making it part of their official cultural line—come here in search of fame, fortune, free nasal swabs—but you know it happens.
Datametrex AI (DM.V) signed into four service agreements to provide COVID-19 tests for four different television series today, according to a press release.
In all likelihood, COVID-19 is going to be a mainstay in our lives for the rest of our lives. It won’t mean we’ll have to stay home and hoard toilet paper, but it will be there in the list of seasonal illnesses we can be vaccinated against. It’ll be another shot we can get at the clinic—influenza A/B and COVID-19 together as a package—except instead of the core virus we all hid from last year, it’ll be a variant. It’s always a variant with the flu.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is essentially a jumped-up influenza virus, and influenza has been around for millennia. The earliest suspected date is 6,000 years ago in China followed by Ancient Greece, which supposedly had a pandemic in the 5th Century BC, but the earliest actual recorded history for the flu is in Europe in the 12th Century AD.
The original virus is probably waiting to be unearthed in some millennium old unmarked grave, embedded in a Chinese glacier, flash frozen in time, like a macabre artifact from an earlier age.
I’m more prone to believing it’s 6,000 years old and quite possibly older, and that it’s changed and mutated and developed and adapted as we have. You can’t really call virus a species as it doesn’t have the characteristics, but as organisms, we’ve effectively co-evolved. We get a flu pandemic every few years according to the CDC, and we had been overdue for something like COVID-19 for decades.
For now, though, your favourite shows will go on with their production schedules because of Datametrex. They’re continuing to support Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal film crews by providing COVID-19 testing kits for actors, crews and production support staff to prevent cluster outbreaks.
The latest mutation is the Delta variant, of course, and it’s mutated to increase the contagion factor. It was originally identified in India in October, 2020, and it’s presently doing the rounds, causing the most anxiety it can and helping to move these COVID-19 tests.
“The COVID-19 testing market is an important business sector for Datametrex, and we look to continue supporting the film industry with kits and now with the Delta variant of the virus being ‘the fastest and fittest,’ according to the World Health Organization, it is the right time to step up testing to keep everyone healthy and working,” said Marshall Gunter, chief executive officer of Datametrex.
The fear and worry in the back of everyone’s mind is that the Delta variant will lead to more health and safety restrictions on a global level. For the film industry, the question is whether there’s going to be global restrictions keeping productions from filming. The World Health Organization called this one the fastest and fittest, and it’ll keep that title until the next variant comes.
Rochelle Walensky, the director for the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, stated the Delta variant makes up 83% of all the sequenced COVID-19 cases in the United States, ans has become the dominant strain in the country. The city of Los Angeles put their masks back on because of the Delta variant, recommending that its citizens wear them in all public places regardless of their vaccination status.
But I swear to God if the order comes down and I have to hang out in my house for another six to eight months I’m going too… do it without complaint and make the most of it, because not to do it would be to put people in unnecessary danger, and while that may not be how it’s done in the streets—it’s how I roll. As long as my favourite shows are still being made.
Here’s Reza, if you’d prefer to watch.
—Joseph Morton
