“Everybody’s someone has covid right now.”
Photo: Andy Ryan / Getty Images
Yesterday I was standing in line at my local city doctor in Lexington and 79. When I was swept away two hours later, the blue check mafia had worked its way into a complete Omicron meltdown. What was left of the media-holiday-party industrial complex collapsed in a single afternoon.
It started, as these things often do, in group chats. Everyone seemed to know someone who had been tested positive that morning. Suddenly it all spilled out on Twitter. “We call the wave of COVID that is currently ravaging Brooklyn ‘the Media Variant'” tweeted BuzzFeeds Julia Reinstein. Business Insiders Jake Swearingen wrote: “you have about 12 hours left to become covid if you want to stay on trend.” Author Jamie Lauren Keiles: “all who is someone who has covid right now. “
Podcast Lydia Polgreen tried to de-escalate, tweeting, “I do not think it means shutting down again. I think it must mean accepting that getting COVID is just something that is going to happen to all of us, so behave then (and get vaccinated) .But it was too late.In true media fashion, finger pointing soon began.A person tweeted that he must have caught the variant at an LCD Soundsystem show on Thursday, and that he “chose to blame the horrible, overcooked group behind me.” The most insane attempt at Omicron shaming certainly came from Bryan Goldberg’s resurrected Gawker, who posted a so-called “blind post” that simply asked, “Which media company’s very large holiday party resulted in a rash of COVID diagnoses?”
Hmmm, maybe all of them? BuzzFeed had a great one on West 26th Street. As Nate Freeman reported in her Vanity Fair column, the Architectural Digest People partying at Dr. Clark, and Larry Gagosian threw a shindig at his mansion on the Upper East Side. This magazine also had its holiday party last week, right on Union Square.
Media insults, perhaps buzzing with an afternoon hit from Blue Bottle, began to scare everyone. Jake Tapper tweeted a picture of CNN’s Christmas sweater competition, inflicted on this nervous parenthesis: “Everyone is vaccinated and we took off masks for the pictures.” An editor who hosted a holiday dinner last Saturday sent me a message saying “we will probably cancel / reorganize the party when omicron has knocked out the weak ones and only the strong ones are left.” Pete Wells wrote that one of his top ten restaurants in 2021, Contento, in East Harlem, closed “for a few days in an abundance of caution.” Marea also closed the doors. Next morning, the New YorkerCharles Duhigg would like to send an email with this subject line: “CANCELED: Drinks with Journalists: December 16, Brooklyn.” (Though it was always meant to be outdoors.) An afternoon report from the Daily News described how an entire office in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office was quarantined after a holiday party.
“Do not be surprised when you get Omicron,” admonished a new headline in Atlantic Ocean. Okay, I thought, I will not. I mingled a few seats in the queue and started ticking off the last few days’ media party in my head, wondering if my migraine was more than the usual hangover in the middle of the week. On Monday, there was a film premiere at MoMA with an afterparty in the Polo Bar. Tuesday, the Irish Consulate on Park Avenue. And still waiting: Midtown Christmas lunches and leaf parties and what else I would blindly respond to.
But of course I have had to cancel all that. I also had COVID.
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