When does COVID abnormalcy end? When we end it.
When does COVID abnormalcy end? When we end it.
W e can’t obey our way to normalcy. That shouldn’t surprise people as historically unruly as Americans. Obedience is often abnormal for us.
But it remains true in a pandemic. There is no guarantee of getting out of or beyond COVID-19–era mortifications on public life — masks on toddlers, socially distanced funerals — by compliance with public-health wishes. Nobody in the White House, CDC, or the public-health bureaucracy has put a number on shots in arms that get us back to normalcy. They don’t know. And now their minds are too rattled by the Delta-variant wave to speculate. As we’ve seen in the past week, a study of Bear Week in Provincetown, or a study out of Europe, can knock the confidence out of them almost instantly.
Would more vaccines make it easier to relent on us? That’s getting harder to say. Possibly 100 million Americans have acquired some form of natural immunity from COVID-19. Two hundred million Americans, overlapping significantly with the first set, have some level of acquired immunity from the vaccine. If there were a herd immunity that stopped COVID dead in its tracks, we’d be reaching it by now. But it looks like the disease is destined to go endemic — becoming more transmissible, possibly more resistant to vaccines, too — but less deadly as it evolves.
This question is entirely separate from whether the vaccine is advisable for you. My view is, I think, the normal one that it’s urgently necessary for vulnerable people to get it but that it is insane, evil, and innumerate to delay normalcy for children until there’s a pediatric vaccine. But getting vaccines into arms doesn’t guarantee an end to public-health interference.
Just look around the world. Sweden was the bad boy of the Western world during the pandemic, trying fewer interventions and being more resistant to lockdown than any other country. Their vaccination uptake is behind America’s currently, and they have few public-health restrictions now. Israel, by contrast, imposed one of the toughest lockdowns in a democratic society. It has a slightly higher vaccination rate that is the envy of most other nations. Yet Israel is contemplating a new lockdown.
Compliance with lockdown makes lockdown seem more plausible. It was the United Kingdom that taught this most of all. Professor Neil Ferguson was advising the government. The Johnson government threw away its preexisting plans for dealing with a respiratory-virus pandemic — a plan that included protection for the vulnerable but preservation of liberty for the maximum number — in favor of lockdowns. Of lockdowns, “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought . . . and then Italy did it. And we realised we could,” Ferguson said.
This is a question of politics — political culture, the authority of normal life versus the respected authorities in charge of public health. Public-health authorities don’t know how to stop giving you extra-restrictive advice. And they can’t learn how to stop giving it if we don’t learn how to stop asking for it. Or until we start ignoring what they say, and start punishing politicians who translate their guidance into nuisances.
We can’t eat enough medium-well steaks to get the CDC to stop recommending that we not eat medium-rare, let alone steak tartare. If you ask epidemiologists whether human conversation is safe, their minds call up computer animations of people projectile-vomiting red and blue blocks of “droplets” on each other. If you asked public-health authorities for permission to be born and live a life, there’s no way they could just, you know, approve of that in an unqualified way. You just have to remember that you’ll never be in less danger to yourself or others until dead.
They’re waiting for us — the people. The people began locking down and shutting in and buying masks last February, when public-health officials were telling you that masks were racist and that you should attend Chinese New Year parades to show you weren’t afraid. The people began traveling out more — based on the Google traffic data — before the lockdowns were eased. When does it end? When we end it.