As COVID-19 pandemic drags on, Americans struggle for new balance
Jordi Salomon put the pandemic in the rearview mirror long ago. Her two little boys are back at school, where there has been no mask requirement since spring. They attend birthday parties and theme parks, visit the library and play with friends.
Ms. Salomon, 35, of Orange County, Calif., makes sure the family eats well and gets outdoors as much as possible, and she is careful to respect the wishes of friends and relatives who are comfortable meeting only in masks.
“But I can’t live in fear,” she said. “My kids are only kids once. There is so much to do and experience in that magical time.”
For Americans such as Ms. Salomon, life has in many ways returned to something like the Before Times.
Restaurants are packed, and cultural performances sold out. Children are sitting in schools, and workers are trickling back into offices. Masks are no longer required in public, even in New York City’s subways.
The summer travel season was a blockbuster. Even cruise ships — derided as floating petri dishes early in the pandemic — were filling up with eager passengers.
Most Americans want to get back to normalcy and are unwilling to let COVID-19 rule their lives any longer, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator, said in an interview.
“Those two sets of goals are achievable,” Dr. Jha said, so long as Americans keep getting vaccinated, test when necessary and wear masks in crowded public settings.
“We shouldn’t act like it’s 2019,” he added, “but we also should not act like it’s 2020.”
But the coronavirus has not gone away. Although deaths have plummeted since the beginning of the year, about 315 Americans are still dying of COVID-19 on the average day. This year’s toll has so far exceeded 219,000.
More than 27,000 Americans with COVID-19 are in hospitals on any given day, and an uncertain number face lingering complications, so-called long COVID. Declines in test positivity and hospitalization are flattening, hinting at a possible reversal.
Roughly half of Americans eligible for boosters have not gotten them, and just 10% have gotten the most up-to-date bivalent booster.
Experts are warning that waning immunity and the arrival of new subvariants may lead to another surge of cases and hospitalizations.
“The pandemic is over — we still have a problem with COVID-19,” President Joe Biden recently said. That is the needle that Americans are threading right now, and it makes for a strange national disequilibrium. On any given day, half the country appears to be relieved that the worst seems to be over, while the other half seems gripped by the persistent fear that the nation may never really be free of the virus.
Most Americans are eating out again, visiting friends and returning to offices, according to recent surveys by Axios-Ipsos. Only 5% of respondents said they considered those activities to be high risk.
But fewer than one-fourth of them thought there was no risk at all. Close to half said they had returned to their pre-COVID lives — even as two-thirds said they believed the pandemic was not over.
“It’s a weird moment we’re in, and a confusing one, I think, for a lot of people,” said Debra Caplan, an associate professor of theater at Baruch College in New York, who added that she was mystified by what she termed society’s “collective shrug.”