‘Pandemic Anxiety’ Has No Future

H ow long will New Mexico’s restaurateurs put up with public-health closures and limits, while they are disappearing from Nevada? How long can Boston Red Sox fans (and owners) watch packed stadiums in Texas, and not long to open up Fenway Park? Questions like these go beyond the United States. Can London, England, really require vaccine passports for dinner reservations, if Miami, Fla., does not?

For the better part of a year, those who “believed the science” tended to believe that states such as Florida and Texas were extending the national COVID nightmare. But now, as millions of vaccines are distributed in the United States every day, you can detect a whiff of anticipation in the air. Texas and Florida are largely open for business, and one can find hints of envy from places that are more closed down, even in the strangest places. Writing for New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog, Adam Platt was checking out the Miami nightlife scene. At first, he was afraid of moving through the unmasked masses in their “petri dish” of a state. But, as the night went on, he reports: “I felt my carefully nurtured pandemic anxiety slowly melting away into something more relaxed, and possibly even hopeful.”

The post-COVID future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.

In a recent article, I mentioned that Ireland, which has had a punishingly long lockdown, has unusually high exposure to what conditions obtain in other nations, through its diaspora on social media. This includes the United States and the United Kingdom, where vaccine distribution is far ahead, and to Australia and New Zealand, which just recently opened up quarantine-free travel with each another.

Ireland’s position is unique, but it’s also true that in a globalized world, we all have a look-in on each other. The inability or simple unwillingness of most Western countries to completely shut down international travel, even from COVID hot spots, testifies to our attachment to a normality that includes plane flights for business and pleasure.

And as vaccine take-up reaches critical levels in countries such as Israel, the United Kingdom, and the United States, everyone will begin comparing whether certain post-COVID infrastructure and mitigation efforts are truly worth the cost and hassle they impose. Israel has instituted its version of a vaccine passport — a green pass. Even there this measure is surrounded by controversy and concern about violations of privacy, or emerging medical apartheid. The United Kingdom is deliberating about a vaccine-passport program, though resistance to it in the Labour Party and among Tory backbenchers could sink it. In Florida and Texas, Republican governors have largely reopened their states for business, have rejected vaccine passports out of hand, and are — for now — still seeing case rates and hospitalizations fall.

So you see European nations still canceling major sporting events because crowds aren’t allowed to gather for them. You see states in the American Northeast allowing only a fraction of capacity, and only with proof of vaccination or a negative test. And states in the South where baseball looks like it did before COVID, save for a few people wearing masks of their own volition.

If the least restrictive and least intrusive localities find success in the vaccine era, it may become rapidly untenable for other jurisdictions or nations to continue wrapping themselves in Plexiglas and other vax-passport technology. Quarantining foreign travelers in COVID hotels is a massive government burden and an even larger impediment to the recovery of business and leisure travel. Will London really tell people flying in from Miami not to eat out because they lack a U.K. vaxpass? Will London tell Londoners who have just flown back from Miami to not spend their money? Not if vaccination take-up remains high, and cases continue to plummet.

Much of the pandemic’s restrictive measures were sustained by real fear, and a huge dose of moral fury at those places deemed “petri dishes.” But now, the turn of the mood is coming. And now our hope is in the petri dishes, the experiments in freedom from fear.