(ATLANTA, GA)–Dr. Inger Damon with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced earlier today that recent computer models warn of a new surge of COVID-19 variants, and that if it were real and still existed, the town of Mayberry would have already been wiped out by the dreaded disease.

Dr. Damon warns that the new variants are more highly contagious than previous strains and could accelerate the spread across larger areas of the country, and that due to the likelihood that its residents were mostly far-right nationalists and highly suspicious of the news media, every Mayberry citizen, including sheriff Andy Taylor, would be infected by now.

“The new variants don’t appear to be deadlier, but due to the higher transmission rates could very well overwhelm our hospital systems,” Dr. Damon explained, “And it is easy to imagine Barney Fife as QAnon conspiracy theorist, whose fascist ideologies would be widely circulated by Floyd the Barber. It’s doubtful a single Mayberry resident would ever don a mask.”

Dr. Damon said it is believed that vaccines would be effective even as the virus continues to mutate, but that even someone as young as Opie Taylor would suffer long-term damage in the aftermath of the pandemic, and likely harbor a rage that would manifest itself in a rambling on-line manifesto that would culminate in a school shooting or small scale bombing of a government property.

“As long as the public continues to observe the CDC guidelines, I believe we can contain these new variants,” she said, “Unlike Gomer Pyle, who models show would ignorantly explain why face masks don’t work without virtue of evidence or common sense, and Aunt Bea, who would have managed to hide her white supremacist heritage while quietly passing on her beliefs to her nephew and the rest of the town, which would have made them foster a resentment toward the government and a belief that the whole thing is a hoax.”