Covid: The high cost of the ‘new normal’
If we have finally reached “endemic” Covid, said David Wallace Wells in The New York Times, it “looks pretty brutal.” An endemic disease is one that is stable within a population, like the flu, but Covid is actually evolving a new, hyperinfectious variant every two or three months. The latest—the Omicron BA.5 subvariant—this week drove new U.S. infections up to 140,000 reported cases per day, and the real number is likely closer to 1 million. That’s the most since the original Omicron surge in January. Most virologists would not call that level of infection endemic, but “in a vernacular sense,” the term may describe how Americans view where we are. Through vaccination and/or prior infection, more than 95 percent of Americans now have some immunity against Covid. The risk of serious illness and death has plunged, and most people have stopped wearing masks or taking other precautions. But is this really a new normal we can live with? Death rates have declined as a percentage of cases, but with an even bigger surge likely coming in the fall, the Covid death toll in 2022 could reach 300,000—10 times that of an average flu season, and not far from the 400,000 deaths in 2020. Most Americans have accepted that “Covid is never going away,” said Aidin Vaziri in the San Francisco Chronicle. But with constant waves of illness disrupting work, vacations, and family life, they haven’t figured out what that means, or “how they plan to adapt.”
No one has a plan, said The Baltimore Sun in an editorial. There’s no rational justification for Americans choosing to “shun masks, join indoor crowds, and generally throw caution to the wind.” What we’re seeing is a wave of mindless “indifference” to the virus, enabled by a strange new passivity from government and health officials. When President Biden contracted Covid last week, said Michael Wasserman in The San Diego Union Tribune, it was a chance to remind the public that even vaxxed and boosted Americans are at risk, and that Covid can still be “particularly lethal” for seniors like the 79-year-old Biden. Instead, the White House released video of a cheerful, healthy-looking president downplaying his “mild symptoms.” This was a “missed opportunity.”
Sorry, but the tide has turned against the doom-mongers, said the New York Post in an editorial. A few power-hungry officials are still “acting like it’s early 2020”—Los Angeles is reportedly about to reimpose a mask mandate. But Biden’s mild case of Covid is “high-profile evidence that the pandemic is completely over.” Are case numbers rising? Yes, but with deaths no longer tracking infections, “case rates no longer mean a darn thing.”
Don’t be so sure, said Katherine Wu in The Atlantic. The virus is “spewing out globe-sweeping subvariants at a blistering clip,” and there’s no guarantee that future mutations won’t be both more elusive of immunity and more lethal. Tempting as it is to let down our guard, it’s only by minimizing the spread of infection that we can slow down the “churn of variants” as scientists work on better vaccines. Continued caution will be a tough sell to an exhausted nation desperate for normalcy. But our government must do everything it can—in vaccine development, distribution, and messaging—to ensure this new “Covid normal,” as grim as it is, isn’t followed by something far worse.