I’ve never seen anything like it. In one day, my favorite bagel place was unexpectedly closed, the owner could not find any flour to make the bagels; my pharmacy announced it would now be closing a half-hour daily for lunch; a nearby Dunkin’ outlet posted a notice that its lobby would be closed for three weeks this month and only drive-thru purchases can be made because of staffing issues.

Since the pandemic began, several of my favorite restaurants have been curtailing hours and days of operations so their employees did not burn out from the stresses and strains of the job. Even raising the hourly pay in many businesses has not persuaded employees to come back into the job market because they no longer want to undergo the intense pressures of some jobs or they are concerned about their health and that of their family members because of the virus.

I was waiting at a bus stop near my home to board a LANTA bus in the northern Lehigh Valley, which never came. I found out later that the route had been canceled because of COVID illnesses among drivers.

Friends flying in from California to the Lehigh Valley International Airport during the holiday period lamented about canceled flights, delays of several hours and other roadblocks that persuaded one of them to declare in frustration, “I’ll never get on a plane again.”

When I was on my way to visit relatives in Summit Hill, I stopped off at the Walmart in Mahoning Township. While I was standing in line, I heard a woman behind me telling a friend that she was beside herself because she could not get some traditional Christmas cookies at a local bakery the week before the holiday because the store couldn’t handle any more orders with the staff it had.

Her friend recounted similar anecdotes about items which she routinely bought at this Walmart that were no longer on the shelves. It was reminiscent, she said, of the hoarding issues that were prevalent in the first months of the pandemic when toilet paper, hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes and other products were absent from store shelves, and when they were present there were signs limiting the number of purchases per customer. This time around, it’s everything from orange juice to garlic to solar panels.

Then, the first woman said something which I believe all of us are thinking these days: “The world has gone mad.”

Between shifting COVID-19 guidance announcements by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other government health agencies, conflicting news stories on how virulent the new omicron variant of the virus is, whether our hospitals are becoming overrun with COVID patients again or maybe not, whether we should be in crowds or shouldn’t be, especially when we were seeing more than 100,000 at football bowl games as recently as this month and other lofty numbers with the NFL playoffs underway.

It’s making my head spin; yours, too, based on what I am hearing from family, friends and acquaintances.

It will be nearly two years since the first COVID case was reported in Pennsylvania – Feb. 23, 2020, to be precise. After doing intense research on the subject and wading through all the conflicting assessments of what this was or wasn’t, I wrote in a column that February that we would still be dealing with COVID in 2022.

I received some emails telling me that I was “nuts”; several others characterized my opinion in less than charitable terms, which I can’t repeat in a family newspaper. They insisted that COVID was “nothing,” that its risks were being overblown, that it would subside in days. Several of my family members and friends laughed at me for such an “outrageous’’ prediction. They figured we might be inconvenienced for a few weeks, maybe a few months at most. Well, guess what, they aren’t laughing anymore.

We Americans were accustomed to walking into a grocery store and buying whatever we needed without giving it a second thought, but now we have been experiencing shortages and price increases on many products for months. It’s a combination of demand exceeding capacity in production and logistics and there is a lack of redundancy in the current supply chain.

We have found out the hard way that many companies keep a small supply of products on hand for economic reasons. Keeping a large inventory cuts into bottom-line profits, and publicly traded companies try to avoid this at all cost to satisfy shareholders who expect growing profits and dividends in return for their investments.

Along with the conflicting advice we are getting from health professionals about COVID-19 protocols and its variants, we also are finding out that some of the “sky is falling” concerns never panned out after all.

For example, before the holidays, we consumers were cautioned that if we didn’t order our presents early we might be out of luck. As it turned out, expected shortages and delays were much less an issue overall than forecast, and we had a record holiday-buying season. So much for doomsday forecasts.

Time to take a deep breath and recalibrate.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.