On the menu today: The furious online reaction to an Atlantic article proposing to “open everything” illuminates the fact that a loud minority of those who exercise influence over pandemic policies are trapped in a fearful, risk-averse mindset. State and local governments may not be shutting down large events, but the Omicron variant still is. And the mitigation measures in place that are “allowing” business to remain open feel more and more like the TSA’s “security theater” at airports. The only thing rising faster than people’s impatience with pandemic restrictions is inflation.
Moving to a Post-Covid Mentality
There are probably very few Americans who enjoyed or took any pleasure from the Covid-19 pandemic. But there are probably quite a few Americans who, having spent more than two years in a constant watchdog mode against a foe that is invisible to the naked eye, now cannot break out of those thinking patterns.
As noted yesterday, new Covid-19 cases are down 70 percent from mid January. We’re coming out of the Omicron wave, and between vaccinations, boosters, past infections, and the roughly 30 million cases since Thanksgiving, unvaccinated Americans with no protection have to be exceptionally few and far between. As of this morning, 87.3 percent of American adults have at least one shot of a Covid vaccine, which is 75 percent of the total population. Those who remain unvaccinated and who are at high risk of serious complications from an infection have chosen that risk.
As a society, we are probably about as protected as we’re ever going to get.
And yet, when the Atlantic — “Terrified of Covid-19 and Kevin Williamson since 2018” — ran an article entitled, “Open Everything,” the social-media reaction was volcanic:
“This is eugenics and morally indefensible.” “An abundance of caution can and does save lives. The upheaval of the pandemic is a deadly annoyance, but also a much overdue reset of some knee-jerk social habits. The problem remains that unrestricted opening invites the unvaxxed to spread their toxins everywhere.” “A few years is not forever. This is stupid. It’s like you totally ignored Omicron was the worst wave yet. Opening everything like pre-Covid every time a wave starts to subside just keeps us on a cycle of new variants and waves of more infections and death.” “Sure we could save lives and our policy of giving up has resulted in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, but hey . . . what if we gave up even harder?”
For the past two years, the pandemic has been this massive, universally shared experience. Covid-19 was an instant conversation starter — if any stranger could actually understand what you were saying through your mask, standing six feet away. Did you hear about that neighbor who caught it? Have you had it? How bad was it? Are you vaccinated? Which vaccine did you get? Did you have any reactions? Are you back in the office yet? How’s business? When do you think they’ll reopen schools? How are your kids doing with distance learning? What do they think of hybrid schooling? How do they feel about wearing masks? Have you been on a plane yet? Have you eaten out yet? What was it like?
A lot of our discussions boiled down to, “What are the rules?” and “What do you think of the rules?”
For some Americans, being the best at following the rules has become their identity. If you take away the rules . . . what makes them special? What makes them unique and good and better than other people? It is easy for the rest of us to scoff, and maybe these folks have earned some scoffing. But in these folks’ minds, they’re being good role models for everyone else. They see themselves as the most responsible, the most caring, the ones who have proven most committed and willing to make sacrifices for the good of everyone. Being the most masked, the most socially distanced, and the most careful is what reassures each one that they are a good person. And for some people, it has become an obsession.
Some of these people are indeed little social dictators, eager to police the decisions of complete strangers. But a lot of these people are scared, and they’re stuck in a sort of repetitive thought pattern: If I am not careful, people will die. If the people around me are not careful, people will die. If the people around me do not follow the rules as well as I do, people will die.
For those of us who don’t derive our sense of identity from always making sure that everyone around us is wearing a mask up to CDC standards, this whole pandemic has been a miserable, life-interrupting trial that we can’t wait to get in our rear-view mirror. We’ve got lives to lead!
This near-complete disruption of our daily lives in March 2020 represented something traumatic on a wide variety of levels — from losing a loved one to just being physically separated from them and not being able to hold their hand or hug them when they’re lonely. Businesses shut down, schools were shut for more than a year in some places. Weddings, anniversaries, baptisms, parties, vacations, family reunions, conferences — all the social interactions and connections and good times that help make life worth living — were put on hold indefinitely. We kept kids off playgrounds! We now know there is “little to support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 passes from one person to another through contaminated surface.”
For a long ordeal of a year, we endured, knowing that the vaccines were on the way and that we would soon be able to get “back to normal.” During the transition, our new president pleaded with Americans to just be patient a little bit longer. “Just 100 days to mask, not forever. One hundred days.”
But it turned out to be a bait-and-switch of sorts. Quite a few steps that were supposed to get us “back to normal” turned into middling half-steps that moved us to something moderately less bad. “If you are fully vaccinated, you no longer need to wear a mask,” President Biden told us on May 13. Within a few months, it became clear that the vaccinated would still have to wear a mask, because those creating the masking policies didn’t trust the unvaccinated; they decreed everyone had to wear a mask, regardless of vaccination status — inadvertently undermining the arguments for vaccination.
Then the growing rate of “breakthrough infections” demonstrated that the early claims the vaccines would “prevent 95 percent of cases of the disease” were wild exaggerations. The vaccines mitigated the severity of Covid-19 — which was good and important! — but they didn’t prevent infections entirely.
Biden’s campaign-trail notion of “shutting down the virus” proved to be an insanely unrealistic, overoptimistic promise from a man who didn’t really understand what he was talking about and who assumed the federal government’s public-health experts had some magic wand in a vault they were just waiting to use.
Unfortunately, the president kept forgetting to update his talking points. In October, when touting vaccine mandates at health-care facilities, Biden declared that, “If you seek care at a health-care facility, you should have the certainty that the pro- — the people providing that care are protected from Covid and cannot spread it to you.” Except vaccinated people can still catch the virus and still spread it others. Then in December, while defending his mandates, Biden asked, “How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone else?” Again, if vaccination halted anyone from getting or transferring the virus, this pandemic would have ended a while ago.
And then the Omicron variant came along, which was simultaneously better and worse. Omicron was better in that it was less severe, worse in the sense that it was much, much more contagious and roughly 30 million Americans have caught Covid-19 since Thanksgiving. The additional contagiousness meant that the virus was going to work its way to the most vulnerable — there’s also been an ugly spike in our daily new death rate since early January — and millions of Americans were all going to get sick simultaneously, creating new problems when piled atop a labor shortage and supply-chain crisis.
People are adamantly demanding a return to normal life now because they’ve seen promises of a return to normal life get broken for the past year.
The NBC News reporter who describes himself as being on the “dystopia beat” argues that “everything is open.” He is loosely correct in the sense that American society is much more open than it was in March 2020 or even March 2021, but life isn’t back to “normal” and the virus is not “shut down,” as President Biden foolishly promised on the campaign trail in 2020. There are fewer instances of state and local governments’ stepping in and telling people they cannot do things, but so far this year, the Omicron variant itself is effectively playing that role, forcing organizers of events to shut down, postpone, or restrict participants.
Event-planning businesses say they’re still struggling. Collegiate athletic events are still being canceled because of outbreaks on the teams — at Coastal Carolina, Minnesota, Wichita State, Wyoming, Ohio State, University of Wisconsin Green-Bay and other schools. Omicron has forced a lot of cancellations so far this year — science conferences, live theater performances, local festivals, charity walks, mixed-martial-arts competitions, piano recitals, symphony-orchestra performances, cruises, the USA swimming meets, even state-legislature meetings. A whole bunch of concerts are canceled, families have postponed weddings several times, and catching Covid-19 overseas could leave you unable to return to the U.S. for more than a week. In New York, “The Winter Show” is now rescheduled for April.
And even places that are “open,” such as restaurants in Washington, D.C., require proof of vaccination AND your ID because the city is so worried about fraudulent cards. Was I willing to do it when my family went to the Smithsonian a few weekends ago? Sure. But it feels like a brief but ridiculous hassle, pointless Covid-19 security theater imposed upon us by a mayor who ignores her own mandates.
People wonder why Americans are declaring they’re “done” with the pandemic. The first clue is that this ailment is called Covid-19 and it’s now “22”!
ADDENDUM: We all expected bad inflation numbers, but . . . sheesh:
Inflation increased at the fastest rate in 40 years over the last twelve months, outpacing projections, the U.S. Department of Labor announced Thursday. The consumer price index (CPI) — a major measure of inflation covering a variety of consumer goods — surged 0.6 percent over the last month and 7.5 percent over the last twelve months ending in January. That represents the largest annual spike since February 1982, when inflation hit 7.62 percent.