This piece by Gregg Gonsalves, the codirector of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, is correct in my opinion. We have good reason to be optimistic about COVID. I am hopeful that we’ve “rounded the curve” as Trump would say. Vaccines and the new therapeutics coming online have changed the game immensely. But the last two years should have made us a little bit more humble about what we know and what we don’t know:
We’ve entered a new phase in the Covid-19 pandemic, which we can call bipartisan, unilateral surrender. From liberal and conservative pundits and politicians on both sides of the aisle to the celebrity docs who show up on cable news or in supermarket magazines, we’re being told SARS-CoV-2 is endemic now—which of course has nothing to do with the technical term, but has become popular shorthand for “it’s over.” We’re vaxxed-and-done now and we should be allowed, with no more mask requirements or other efforts to mitigate spread, to resume our pre-pandemic lives with the “urgency of normal.”
I’ve spent two years railing about the irresponsibility and cruelty of many Republicans and their cavalier response to the pandemic, endangering millions with policies destined to simply make people sick: suggesting that vaccination and freedom are incompatible concepts, that grandparents were willing to die for the economy—the whole horrible litany of lies and misinformation churned out by the party and its proxies.
Except the pandemic is not over by a long shot. We’ve been seeing 1,000 deaths a day in the United States for months now; over the past few weeks, as Omicron deaths catch up to the vast number of infections diagnosed weeks earlier, we’ve had far more than that. The last day of January saw over 2,500 deaths in this country. Hospitals are still reeling in many places, and both health care and public health workers on the front line are just burned out and losing their shit. And that word—endemic—which in epidemiological terms connotes a pathogen that has stabilized at a long-term equilibrium in a population—hasn’t really arrived yet, with the pandemic still raging across the globe, even as Omicron numbers start to decline in some places. Then there’s the belief—now popular in the press—that Omicron is the “last” variant of any real concern. We’ll all have been exposed to the virus or vaccinated against it soon enough, and any subsequent strains that may wash over us will be mild, no worse than the flu or the common cold.
I’m not suggesting that we need to be on a state of high alert forever. But we need to shape Covid-19 policies according to the data, not by wishful thinking among people who should know better. To sound the all-clear now or imply that we can in the next few weeks is presumptuous at best. If we want to learn from history, we can simply look at the 20th century’s most fearsome pandemics for guidance. John Barry, the historian of the great influenza of 1918, reminds us that the deadly fourth wave of that catastrophe only occurred in 1920, when millions had already been exposed to the virus, when the lethality of the third wave was subsiding, most people had let down their guard, and no public official was interested in pushing mitigation efforts in the face of the indifference and weariness of a nation. Barry also reminds us that “natural immunity” and vaccination after the influenza pandemics in the late 1950s didn’t stop the virus from cutting a large swath of death in 1960 when it returned with a vengeance. A similar scenario played out in Europe in 1968 and 2009 flu pandemics, when, after a first round of infections and vaccinations, influenza’s second wave crested and washed over the weary continent.
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What we’re seeing now is a combination of what we saw with influenza and with HIV. First, it’s capitulation based on misguided or at least premature hope, frustration, and anger that this has gone on for so long, disrupting our lives. It doesn’t help that America’s political leaders have never really stepped up to address the pandemic with the seriousness of other nations, nor provided the necessary social and economic support to help people survive these past few years. Instead, they have largely left us alone against a virus. While pundits try to spin this as a debate about risk management at an individual level—claiming that some of us are being too cautious as we enter the golden age of endemicity—it’s far more like what happened with HIV: Once people feel like they’re safe enough, the safety of others doesn’t really matter that much.
It really does feel as if some people are moving into an all-American view that it’s every man for himself. And that’s just terrible when you consider how many millions of people in this country are over 60 and have the co-morbidities that make them vulnerable to this virus.
And it’s not as if this country is locked down. In fact, the only restrictions even in this Omicron surge are some places are requiring masks indoors and asking that if you have been exposed that you stay home if you test positive. Is that so onerous? It seems like very basic common sense to me. Everything is open. People are working.
So what exactly is it that the “I’m over it” people want? Well, I have to guess they just don’t want to hear about all the deaths and the strains on the health care system anymore. It’s a bummer, I admit. But not talking about it won’t make it go away.