The End of the Pandemic is Here
It’s just not evenly distributed yet…
It ended not with a bang. Nor a whimper. But rather a sort of banging whimper. I recognize that this is dangerous to say, but this does feel like the end of the pandemic. Or, at least, the end of society going out of its way to deal with COVID. It’s a combination of both us having had enough and having done enough.
We hope we’re on the right end of that spectrum. Only time will tell. But regardless, this is happening. You’ve seen it for a bit in the UK. Now Denmark is following suit. Other countries are quickly aligning. Basically, the countries hit hardest by the Omicron variant earliest are now the first to effectively declare an end to the pandemic. The United States is likely a few weeks behind — well, parts of it — there’s a couple more layers of nuance here, but the same general consensus is starting to dawn here too.
You hear it in anecdotes talking to people in other parts of the country. New York had a bad Omicron surge, and now that it’s over, the population is over the virus. The same happened in Northeast Ohio, where I was born and my family lives. The “Over It” pandemic is now sweeping the nation.
And those people aren’t wrong. The reality is that we’re a full two years into this now. We can’t do this forever. The variants have kept coming and will keep coming. But we have the tools now to fight them. And they’re fighting themselves. As you might expect, a level of more transmissibility is trading off with potency. We’re better at fighting the viruses ability to kill us and it’s worse at killing us. That’s great.
Yet it’s also not perfect. In particular, in parts of the US where vaccine/booster uptake is low, the virus is killing more people than ever before because again, there is more virus than ever before. And less deadly or not, sheer numbers are at play here. But in normal human societies where people aren’t politically brainwashed and get vaccinated out of the very real self-interest of staying alive if nothing else, death is now an outlier.
As morbid as it is to say, this situation will resolve itself one way or another.
Yes, there remains the immunocompromised and those with conditions which make catching COVID particularly problematic. But it’s mainly the unvaccinated who have been and are now putting those people at risk. And it’s just not clear what else we can do beyond obliterating society. I know this is hard to acknowledge, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. At some point we have to get back to living life, and it feels like now is that point.
In particular, the under-5s are about to have some level of access to a vaccine as well if their parents choose to have them get it (I recognize this is also a nuanced debate). And that’s probably the ultimate and final straw.
At the same time, it’s going to take time to get back to normal. Because we’ve all been living under this chaos cloud for two years. Individuals are going to recognize and start acting as if this is over before society as a whole does. And part of that is because it’s going to take the various regulatory bodies months to do what is obvious right now in rolling back many of the restrictions.
It’s hard to lay down your arms, especially after years of perpetual battle. Many will have some form of PTSD — both people and organizations made up of people. This will be exacerbated by many on the anti-vax or anti-mask (or both) sides trying to take victory laps as we roll back restrictions.¹ They will completely fail to recognize that their selfishness did little beyond prolong this entire thing, but their vocal faux declarations of “told you!” will nevertheless cause some on the other side to dig in. It’s going to be a shitshow for a while still, I fear.
And so we need to get the ball rolling now. To start breaking the mental chains. First up: stop pushing and emphasizing the charts showcasing case numbers. I’ve been talking about this for over six months. And we’re still here.
Such data is now misleading at best and fear-mongering at worst. The reality is that not only have we largely decoupled death from cases (again, at least in places where people both have access to and get the vaccine), but worse, these charts don’t capture anywhere near the number of actual cases because so many are found via at-home tests, most of which aren’t counted in the tally. That is to say that as bad as the case counts may look, there is far, far more cases of COVID out there, which are not being counted in such data.
That’s good news in a way, because it’s harder to undercount hospitalization, and basically impossible to undercount death. This means those two numbers, which already look better in much of the world, are actually likely far better than they even appear, relatively speaking.
We need to remove the case counts from the front page of The New York Times. We don’t showcase and keep an ever-updating tally of the number of cases of flu each year. If we did, it would be terrifying as well. But we don’t because what really matters is tracking the people getting truly sick or worse, dying. Let’s focus on those numbers and trying to keep pushing to get those down.
Over the weekend, I highlighted Tomas Pueyo’s latest post on the topic of COVID in my newsletter. If you’ve heard Pueyo’s name, it was likely because you read his seminal post on the virus just as the pandemic was starting, The Hammer and the Dance. In it, he more or less outlined how the next several months would play out. And they did. Now he’s back to call an end to the pandemic, but with a word of caution about our likely inability to move on — and in large part because the governments are going to both move too slowly to allow things to go back to normal and because they’ll likely issue many more conflicting messages over the next several weeks and months. Again, we need to start talking about and recognizing this now.
We are coming out of this. Not in the most graceful way, but in a human one. The virus will still remain. People will still get sick. But they’ll also get better nearly always at this point. And even quickly and seamlessly most of the time.² We have learned to live with COVID even if we don’t want to fully admit it yet. The admission is coming because it has to… It’s time.
¹ The mask mandates in particular are going to be tricky in places. Some private businesses will want to stick with them for a while, I imagine. And certainly some individuals will still want to wear them indefinitely. Both seem fine and shouldn’t be stigmatized. I’m still a bit torn how I’ll personally go about this. I imagine I will continue to wear a mask in places like airports for quite some time — largely because I know a significant amount of times that I’ve been sick with a cold (thankfully, not COVID) in my life, is a result of air travel. But time will undoubtedly wear this down as well eventually.
² And yes, there’s the fear and risk of Long COVID. But we should have some faith that science is going to figure this out eventually as well.
