Editing 2563: Throat and Nasal Passages

| titletext = I always felt like what the 'you are now aware of your tongue' thing neeeded in order to be truly enjoyable was an element of mortal peril.

This comic is another in a [[:Category:COVID-19|series of comics]] related to the {{w|2019–20 coronavirus outbreak|2020 COVID-19 pandemic}}.  

[[Randall]] has even before the corona pandemic complained about sore throat caused by the cold, more than once, so every year during the cold/flu season, he has been forced to think about his throat and nasal passages, as they become sore and stuffed. But during the last two years he has been thinking about them much more, also when he has not been ill because of the pandemic.  

In the graph a black solid line displays how much he has been thinking about this since 2000 and up until 2022. The first 20 years the graph oscillate up and down once every year, and every spike represents the cold and flu season, so autumn and winter causes the spike, spring and summer makes it drop. There is basically a spike for every year, although some years it looks a bit different. But all in all the peaks seem low. That is when compared to how much time he has thought about it since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out around March 2020. Each summer since there has been a dip, but not anywhere close to the tops of the previous years, and around New Year 2022 (2 days before the release of this comic, the first in 2022, and the first year in a long time without a New Year comic), the graph peaks (likely due to the {{w|SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant|Omicron variant}}). The peaks in 2020 and 2021 (2022) are about 6 times higher than those the year before 2020. So if the Y-axis begins at zero, this is how much more he thinks of his throat now than during the times when he actually had a cold.

There seems to be no way of knowing if Randall has had covid-19, but from his comics it seems safe to assume he is fully vaccinated. But at the moment of release the Omicron variant of covid-19 seems to ignore vaccines for about 50% of those vaccinated. Although it seems those vaccinated usually gets a milder case.

In the title text Randall references the trick known as "You are now aware of your tongue", which is a self-fulfilling prophecy because it will make anyone hearing it involuntarily think and be aware of their tongue and, as long as they don't try to catch the moment they stop being aware of it, won't stop being aware. A similar technique{{Actual citation needed}} can be used to make people breathe consciously, which then makes it impossible to start breathing automatically and unconsciously again, which would usually have been the case before. Randall sarcastically remarks that the tongue trick needed an element of mortal peril to be truly enjoyable, his actual opinion is probably the opposite, that it was annoying before and that it only became worse now that it contains the danger of death.

:[A graph with two curves, one solid and curvy, and one dotted and straight. The y-axis is unlabelled and has no unit of measurement attached to it. The x-axis seems to stand for years, though it is not explicitly marked as such. It is marked with lines at regular intervals and every fifth mark is a little bit longer, below every tenth one is also a year. The line graph starts with the year 2000 and ends with 2022.]

:Along the x-axis:

:[Above the graph to the left is the following legend:]

:─ How much Time I have spent thinking about my throat and nasal passages, over time

:::::Cold/Flu Season

The dotted line is always just above the x-axis.

{{comic discussion}}