On Sunday in an interview on “60 Minutes,” President Biden said the pandemic is over. In apparently unscripted remarks, he added that we still have a problem with Covid, that much has changed in our society and our communities, that a lot of uncertainty remains. But the pandemic is over.
Many Americans would agree. Pandemic restrictions have all but disappeared across the country. Regulations limiting capacity were the first to go, followed by vaccination requirements and, finally, mask mandates. When New York Governor Kathy Hochul lifted the mask requirement for the NYC transit system a few weeks ago, she was merely formalizing what had already been the de facto policy for a majority of riders for at least several months. Elsewhere, people have decided that they’re done, they’re over it; they might get Covid but probably won’t get seriously ill and are willing to roll the dice on long Covid. In my daily life, the only place where any kind of pandemic restrictions are still enforced is the food coop where I buy my groceries, which requires a mask to shop and proof of vaccination to work a shift.
Nearly three years in, the pandemic may look different from earlier times, but is not over. The US is averaging over 400 deaths a day and we’re recording tens of thousands of new daily infections, surely an undercount as many people are testing at home or not at all. Test positivity rates in NYC have remained steady at 9 or 10% for months. While vaccines excel at staving off serious illness and death, they’ve turned out to be much less effective at preventing infection, particularly with the new variants. Confusing messaging around booster shots—whether they’re necessary, for whom, and when to get them—has led to low levels of uptake, only 33% for the first one. Now we have a bivalent booster that provides increased protection against BA.5, but the messaging around it has been similarly confusing and not well publicized. Meanwhile, slow distribution, in addition to substantial vaccine hesitancy, has left much of the world outside of the US, Canada, and Western Europe unvaccinated. The virus is still disrupting people’s lives and its future remains unpredictable.
At this point, government officials and public health authorities (outside of, perhaps, China, which continues to pursue a zero-Covid strategy despite the massive disruptions to social and economic life) have thrown up their hands and abdicated responsibility for keeping their populations safe. They have relegated decision-making to the individual, leaving it to each of us to decide what level of risk we can tolerate. The problem is that the management of the pandemic, if ever it was a collective endeavor, is now entirely personal. This shifts the majority of risk to vulnerable populations—people with disabilities, the elderly, those with immunosuppressive conditions—leaving them at the mercy of whatever everyone else feels like doing. There’s no sense of the public, or of the greater good.
Biden is right to point out that the pandemic has taken a toll on our national psyche. The void will remain for all that we have lost: loved ones, livelihoods, schooling, shared moments, time. The end of the pandemic may indeed be in sight, as Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization says. But even as many people move on and resume whatever normal life they can access, the scars of our collective trauma will linger for generations.