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How to End Covid Because It is Already Over
How can we end Covid the public policy disaster? Because Covid the public health disaster is mostly already over and we’re still dying out here.
It is now the third winter of writing about Covid. Topics come and go in journalism; I wrote what I am sure will be my last story about the Afghan war last year, and about the ones in Iraq and Syria, never mind Yemen, a year or two before that. Remember how urgent all that once was, the dictators who were gassing their own people, the Kurds and Yazidis we had to save from genocide at the cost of American lives? Most of it was an exaggeration, much of it an outright lie. The keywords — WMDs — are now shorthand to refer to a decades-long mess that forever harmed our country.
Two winters ago remember the shortages which were going to kill us, the lack of respirators and masks? Remember the urgency with which we erected tent hospitals and dispatched military hospital ships? We shut down schools and stores and lives, two weeks to flatten the curve which in many forms is still going on now three years later. Each variant is announced like a new Marvel supervillain, with new powers. We still are told the source of the virus is unknown but it is clearer and clearer it was created via gain of function research in China funded by the U.S. We were told the vaccines were completely safe even as research suggests those vaccinated might be more susceptible to Omicron than those unvaccinated. Most of it was an exaggeration, much of it an outright lie. The once-conspiracy theories are now shorthand to refer to a mess that forever harmed our country.
Only three years later do we know that as many as half of the hospitalizations “for Covid” turn out to be “with Covid,” admissions for broken arms and liver cancer of people who may also incidentally test positive for Covid. We learn that nearly everyone who died of the virus was elderly and comorbid (only 2.7 percent of Covid deaths in the UK were in people under 65 with no comorbidities; 78 percent who died in American hospitals were obese or significantly overweight) leaving a gaping question about why the society-wide lockdowns even now driving deaths of despair. The Democratic hero governors are gone or no longer nationally important, their populations and tax bases immigrating elsewhere. Our hero teachers are now hated, lazy unionists.
That was then, this is now. Compared with Delta, Omicron infections were half as likely to send people to the hospital. Out of more than 52,000 Omicron cases reviewed, not a single patient went on a ventilator. Covid deaths per capita are higher in New York and New Jersey, among the most locked-down states, than Florida and Texas, among the least. That has to mean something. But we act policy-wise as if it is 2020 again.
I just saw an immediate relative through a bout of Covid. She wondered about a sore throat on Tuesday, had a bit of a cough on Wednesday, spent Thursday on the coach with a fever and then… felt better. She had been fully vaccinated and it worked. After her initial reaction of anger (“I saw life overturned all around me for three years over what turned out to be a bad cold?”) she grew more angry. Did politicians actually know what they were shutting down travel and ending education over? Maybe not two years ago but in 2022 they have no excuse.
In the early days of the AIDs crisis we lost valuable time on theater. In the mid-80’s 60 percent of Americans wanted HIV+ people to carry a card noting their status; one in three said employers should fire employees who had AIDS. Some 21 percent said people with AIDS should be isolated from the rest of society in leper colonies. Pundits demanded gay men stop having “voluntary” sex as a condition for living among the untainted. Politicians encouraged us to worry about using the same public toilet as a gay man, and asked if we could get AIDs from hugging. Only when we dropped all that and focused policy on real science did we start to fight back, to the point where today AIDs is a manageable medical problem, not a crisis.
Tragically, too many felt the more who died of AIDS the better, and played up the deaths as “Judgement Day.” The rest of us, God-fearing, were safe. Homophobia manifested as fear crushed human compassion. It was like hoping the economy went into recession a few years ago, destroying the savings of millions of Americans, so Trump’s chances of reelection would fall. Or the politician hoping the virus infected those at MAGA rallies.
Covid-era politicians bear much responsibility: they exaggerated the efficiency of the vaccine, comparing it to the polio vax, not the yearly influenza vax, in what it is expected to do. Covid is a new way to die, same as we once lived on a planet without AIDs and today we live on a planet with AIDs. The risk of Covid is now part of our daily lives. Surges will happen, a part of life we need to manage, not panic over.
The crisis was overblown from the beginning, kept alive during the election, and then not allowed to whither away once the vaccines were widely available. It represents one of the worst public policy crises of the modern era.
To begin resolving the crisis of public policy, do away with TSA demanding we take off our shoes at the airport. Seriously. We remove footwear today only because some knucklehead failed to explode his shoe bomb 12 years ago. No one was ever harmed with any shoe-borne weapon, or liquid above three ounces for that matter. But we still drag out the airport process doing things that do not matter. Because we still won’t admit our mistakes from the Terror Era and re-assess reality, I’ll be taking off my shoes at the airport until I can no longer travel, cursing as I remind young people so numbed by school lockdown drills to safety theatre that they no longer even care how it all started. Let’s get ahead of all that with Covid.
So let’s start to end the public policy crisis by getting rid of the things we do that have little or no affect. No one has or will catch Covid from an unwashed pen or a paper menu. Plexiglass barriers accomplish nothing. Dirty cloth masks, unsealed around one’s face, are not stopping microscopic viruses. Flashing a cellphone pic of a handwritten vaccine card made out to “McLovin” is not ensuring everyone in the restaurant is vaccinated, especially when we can’t agree if that means one, two, or three shots. Unmasked while seated but masked while standing makes even less sense than shoes-off at the airport. Only four to an elevator but unlimited people shoulder-to-shoulder on buses, subways, and planes is silly. We need to stop calling someone without symptoms and with no effect on their daily lives a “breakthrough infection.” Everything should not be a curveball.
We have to stop focusing on case counts and look at impact. For example, there are a yearly average of over 30 million cases of influenza, but only 34,000 deaths. It is time to acknowledge the difference between infection, which means the virus is simply replicating in one’s body in a struggle the immune system will win in the vaccinated, and infectiousness, which means the virus is replicating in parts of the body in such a way that it could infect other people. Instead we bluntly test, add it all together, and scream Fire!
We must realize it is unhealthy to comply because a) we have become germophobic paranoids or b) it is easier to wear a face diaper than listen to Karen or c) we really have to get to Denver for work and the airline simply will not let us on the plane without a mask and shoe inspection. None of that has anything to do with ending Covid. What it does is leave too many Americans angry, paralyzed with doubt, and ever more distrustful in government. It’s time for a full field view.
We pretend the safety theatre is benign, c’mon, it’s just a mask. We ignore the failure to educate our kids, the teen suicides, the deaths of despair among the body of us as more turn to drugs and alcohol to fill in the dark spaces friendships and socialization used to occupy. In 2021 ER visits for suicide attempts jumped 51 percent for adolescent girls compared to 2019. In any other context all we would be hearing was the media claiming some politician had blood on his hands over that. We are social animals denied the chance to socialize. Like the unadopted puppies at the shelter who soon enough just give up, it is destroying us. The worst part is we are cowed or threatened into participating in our own destruction. We need to stop all the pointless mitigation efforts, acknowledge the damage done, and reclaim our lives.
Unless we take the shot at changing public policy, America will be left as it is now, exploring the edges of what it means to be a failing society. Time to choose.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Fear Itself, Covid Edition
I took a friend of a friend and his wife on a tour of Chinatown the other day. She arrived double-masked and immediately asked if I was vaccinated (I am.) She didn’t say much or eat anything, her husband was the one clearly interested in new foods. The wife, maybe 28 or so, then had a full-on panic attack.We were inside one of the wet markets when the woman shouted “Covid, I have to get out.” She turned pale and broke out in sweat. She pushed her way through the crowd to get outside, full fight-or-flight mode. Outside, gasping for air, she said she suddenly felt she was going to “get Covid and die” in the market. I suggested sips of water but she said she would not remove her mask. The husband apologized. They were educated. No signs they were Fauci fans, QAnon shamen, or addicted to one biased network or another. What I guess we once called regular people.
I felt genuinely sorry. This is what appeared to be an otherwise healthy woman who had lost her mind over an exaggerated fear of Covid. I see people like this, albeit usually with less physical signs of panic, often. They truly are convinced they will die soon. They are shelter dogs seeking to form coalitions of grievance. No safety measures, including the vaccine, can be sufficient when fear transitions into irrational phobia. I’ve talked more than a few friends off virtual Covid ledges. At best both sides of any sub-argument (say, masks) think the other is kidding.
Meanwhile a new neighbor greets me every morning with the latest local case count and policy rumors, the way finance bros reel off the S&P numbers to each other before saying good morning. He has become a Covid enthusiast. The rest of us, we now snap at one another over petty Covid rule infringements — been on a plane recently? The lashing out is then justified by fear, because that means we don’t have any obligation toward self-examination.
A year and a half ago I never would have believed I’d still be writing about Covid. I now have to wonder if ten years from now will people look back at this all the way we remember a particularly rough winter, or will this truly be something that changes us forever. Even at this point our lives have been altered. If you want to blame one politician or another, take that argument outside. It all matters less and less as the events become not politics but our history. Even with so much road still ahead we can say clearly our economy has been devastated. “Cashing a stimulus check” seems to be one of the Top Ten new careers in America, followed closely by “Collecting Unemployment.” Many people depend on free rent aka the eviction moratoriums, paused student loan payments, and the range of food aid. No one seems to know what happens when those programs sunset.
Education has effectively disappeared for large numbers of kids and despair grows menacingly. A statistic which should set off alarm bells across the nation barely made the scientific journals as suicide attempts by teen girls increased 26 percent during summer 2020 and 50 percent during winter of 2021. We have forgotten the critical role in-person school plays in children and teens’ emotional development. All that rough and tumble adolescent socialization is there for a reason, along with sports and extracurriculars. They make kids normal and when you take them away from already fragile developing minds, kids want to destroy themselves. But we still do not ask if shutdowns actually deter Covid and we never ask what the secondary effects are.
Economic inequality grows. The power of government exploded to reshape how we live, shop, work, and eat, all handed on-the-fly to a near-endless range of actors, from the president to store clerks. None of this was voted on, challenged, reviewed, studied, or even discussed. For people who spent the last four years finding totalitarianism under every rock, they seemed to miss it when it became obvious — a sense of things being out of control is what every wanna-be authoritarian lives to exploit. Americans cleaved into those who welcomed the nannyism as unfortunate but warmly necessary and those who did not. Things went topsy-turvy: once upon a time in a free society the burden of proof was on those who would restrict freedom and not on those who resist such restrictions.
In the face of new dependence on government to eat and to keep a roof over one’s head, and with a core element of growing up stripped away from kids, and with the constant death harping from the media, how can we expect anyone to snap back? As with the pandemic of PTSD-driven soldier suicides after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have little to look forward to but the same thing coming for the rest of us.
It sounds over-dramatic to claim some sort of national-level PTSD is metastasizing among us, but if you understand PTSD as a psycho-physical reaction to a perceived life-threatening event it makes some sense. In the early days of Covid, The New York Times set the tone, calling this a “land of denial and death.” Many of us are now convinced our vote is a literal life-or-death decision because the wrong party will kill us through their flawed Covid policies. We are convinced our unmasked neighbor is trying to kill us. We are convinced our government is trying to kill us with an untested vaccine. We are convinced the schools are trying to kill our kids. We are convinced the same teachers we are ready to trust with our children are lazy, lying bastards who don’t care enough about education to go back into the classroom. Who wouldn’t have PTSD faced with this onslaught?
Anyone trying to think this through drowns in cognitive dissonance. One concert is a superspreader event while another is not depending on whether the bands are mostly country or hip hop. One protest is a superspreader event but another larger one is not. Disney is OK but Sturgis is not. The vaccine is safe but a significant number of medical professionals won’t get it. The vaccine works but vaccinated people still experience breakthrough cases. The vaccine works but vaccinated people still need to social distance. The disease is airborne but you have to prep gym surfaces like you will do surgery on them. European tourists are too dangerous to welcome to the U.S. but Guatemalans on the border are OK.
It is unsafe to gather in parks but OK to gather on airplanes. It is safe to be unmasked eating at a table but unsafe to stand unmasked at the bar. A two foot plexi shield protects us from an airborne disease riding warm currents to the ceiling of the room before descending. It is necessary for nearly everyone to get vaccinated but leaders won’t mandate that. Masks and school and travel can be mandated but not vaccines. Vaccines for smallpox, polio, and hepatitis can be mandated but not Covid. Crossing an invisible state line changes all the rules. There are states with layers of restrictions and states with none at all but everyone isn’t dead in either one.
We know it all can’t be true but in one place it is true, while next door it is untrue. Alice herself could not make sense of it no matter how many mushrooms she ate.
How can anyone retain their mind when the narrative for the last 18 months has been a largely false series of proclaimed death wishes: we aren’t doing enough testing so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough ICU space so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough ventilators so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough masks so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough nurses so we’re gonna die, we aren’t locked down enough so we’re gonna die, we don’t have enough vaccines so we’re gonna die, people won’t take the vaccine so we’re gonna die, there’s now a new stronger form of Covid coming so we’re gonna die. How do we keep faith when life is a video game where every time we surmount a challenge we are told something new has arisen to kill us?
No other nation on earth is fighting two wars, one against the virus and the other against itself. Other countries have Covid. But they don’t seem to have lost their collective minds to where they can no longer tell the real dangers from the shadows, or judge the right amount of caution from a panic that levies the consequences of living higher than those of dying.
At this point my question about the woman in the Chinese wet market having a panic attack has to change. The real question is not why she lost it, it is why the rest of us haven’t yet. I honestly do not know how this all ends.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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