San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)

WE’RE AT A CROSSROADS

- CHARLES M. BLOW The New York Times Blow

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, told “PBS Newshour” that “certainly” America is now “out of the pandemic phase” of COVID-19 as our rates of new infections, hospitaliz­ations and deaths continue to ebb. But, he added, “We’re not going to eradicate this virus.” Our best hope is to “keep that level very low, and intermitte­ntly vaccinate people,” possibly as often as every year.

Put another way, the endemic has arrived.

As Fauci later told The Washington Post, “We’re really in a transition­al phase, from a decelerati­on of the numbers into hopefully a more controlled phase and endemicity.”

The cost to get here has been almost incalculab­le. There have been 81 million recorded COVID-19 cases in America and nearly 1 million deaths. The United States is now averaging about 360 deaths a day from COVID-19, which would be an alarming number in almost any other context, but it looks like progress when measured against the pandemic’s peak, when thousands of people were dying each day.

Still, this moment doesn’t feel as celebrator­y as it did last summer. In a triumphant speech on July 4, Biden declared that “245 years ago, we declared our independen­ce from a distant king. Today, we’re closer than ever to declaring our independen­ce from a deadly virus.” He was, however, quick to say that the battle against COVID-19 was far from over: “We’ve got a lot more work to do.”

We would, in fact, have another deadly wave of the virus.

We are now weary of any talk of independen­ce from the virus or victory over it. Small things were celebrated by people, such as those who clapped on airplanes last week when they were told that masks were no longer required.

We have been well taught by this virus, humbled by it, so that we now understand that it has no intention of doing what Donald Trump once promised it would: “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

What has fluttered away instead are our patience and our precaution­s.

An Associated PRESSNORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll of American adults released last month found that “fewer than half are always or often avoiding nonessenti­al travel, staying away from large groups and wearing a face mask outside of their homes” for the first time since at least February 2021. “And just a third are avoiding others as much as possible.”

People have absorbed their personal risk calculatio­ns and simply decided that they will return more to a so-called normal life, even as the virus continues to claim lives.

We seem, as a society, to have become resigned to the virus, accepting a certain level of sickness and death as the new normal.

But what prevents the remnants of the virus from settling on the topography of America’s existing inequaliti­es? What becomes of all the trauma? How is it treated?

How can we even begin to connect the dots between rises in violent crime and

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