https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/28/opinions/bari-weiss-bill-maher-done-with-covid-horton/index.html
In all fairness, Weiss is hardly the first person I have heard say they are done with the pandemic. I hear it almost every day from colleagues, resident doctors, nurses and medical students. Some of them are weeping when they say it. Some seem like shadows of themselves and are now under the care of psychiatrists and therapists. Many more are suffering without treatment. They have not had time to watch "Tiger King," or to listen to Spotify. They too would like to change the channel. But they have been too busy intubating, palliating, showing up day after day to do the hard things people do for one another in health care. They are anxious and depressed, without a way to "end it." It is awful. They are done. But many politicians and health care systems exploited the good, decent instincts of health care workers before the pandemic, and that phenomenon will probably never end.
But here's the other side of the argument.
ReplyDeleteCoVID Zero is never going to happen. Omicron's wave did something else - it entrenched the virus as endemic. With Omicron becoming the dominant strain, and until a new worse mutation appears, the pandemic is actually now an endemic. As opposed to every other wave where, as case numbers shot up so did hospitalizations, Omicrons's wave didn't do that. Hospital numbers did not rise nearly as much as the case numbers. And case numbers don't matter. Imagine we have 1 000 000 new cases tomorrow but only 100 hospitalizations. The liberals at CNN will shout "New numbers show pandemic is out of control" but it's not. How many are truly sick?
Omicrons has turned CoVID into a nasty but manageable flu. It's time to switch to long-term strategies, not CoVID Zero fantasies.