COVID’s long haul
COVID still has us locked in its steely grip. We have been wrestling with it for over 20 months in multiple waves. In March 2020, we watched its sweep across the globe as an unchecked outbreak, forcing society to shut down to protect ourselves as the numbers of sick, hospitalized and dead mounted. We became mini-epidemiologists and tracked the alpha, delta and now omicron variants. In these pages I reflected on each deadly milestone, pausing to mourn the mounting loss. As of this writing, COVID has killed more than 817,000 in the United States and we have expectations that many more will die.
While to many it might seem like we are on a relentless gerbil wheel, we must recognize we are not back in March 2020. We now have vaccines that have proven very effective at protecting against death and serious illness, and treatments, such as monoclonal antibodies and the two newly approved antiviral pills. Our medical professionals have learned a great deal about the disease and how to treat it. We have accurate tests (currently in short supply) and a better understanding of the importance of mitigation strategies.
Twenty months is a long time without an end in sight. So, the fatigue and resistance around vaccines and masks is understandable. It seems we locked into the COVID waltz, three steps forward and one back … a rhythm we have gotten used to as we have come to the realization that COVID isn’t going away. The best we can hope for is that it quickly becomes endemic and moves to the background.
In previous columns I talked about how we needed to mourn for the dead and missing. But mourning is difficult when the losses continue. It happens when the destruction is over. It is a way to deal with the loss and move on. We need to learn how to live with it. We fell into tribal responses to our current conditions. We live in bitter political times where the line between politics and culture has completely vanished. So it should not surprise anyone that COVID became completely politicized.
Seeing this as tied only to our current politician dysfunction seems too simple. Step back and we can see that public health has always been a challenge of the United States. In a society where we privilege the individual over the collective, public health, which asks us to see collectively, is at a disadvantage. It requires that we do something to ourselves in order to protect others. The success of public health ultimately involves cultural change, and cultural change is slow and tedious work.
Our COVID tribal clustering falls around our sense of community responsibility. Those who see the world only through the lens of individual risk are less inclined to support any mandates. On the other side, there are those who demand mandates to protect the community. These two wings might be small, but they are loud in the media. The vast majority of us fall in between. We take personal responsibility seriously, hence the high level of vaccination in our region and the general following of mask mandates. We are generally respectful of the official recommendations of experts.
It is this middle that is most important for how we come out of COVID. They are fatigued and confused about what they should do and when. These are the people we see partially wearing masks. They aren’t mocking mandates. They are signaling their understanding of the risks and dangers, but they are exhausted. They are not the folks we see in stores or indoors who never wear masks.
What is forgotten in this activity is the responsibility we have to the larger society. Masking, mitigation and vaccinations are tiring, but they protect the community. There are those among us who can not protect themselves. Millions are need our help to protect them, such as the immunocompromised, those with underlying conditions, those under 5, and those who are in families that are resistant to mitigation. And, let’s not forget those who are not yet fully vaccinated or boosted. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves is the job of all Americans. But, we need not rely on laws, mandates, executive orders or government regulations to solve this democratic dilemma. We need to see this as an individual civil responsibility that we owe to each other. We need to be agents of change agents in the culture.
This means we need to have our institutions, civic and business, step up because they are positioned in our world to make a strong case for this sort of responsibility. Institutions need to explain what we owe to each other. They need to personalize the message to their communities.
What we have learned in this pandemic is that we live in a deeply fractured communication ecosystem. We know that communication has power and words can move people. Yet we do not have a civic discourse. We need a clear and coherent message that ties each of us to our beloved community. Instead we have muddied messaging that is so inconsistent and uninspiring that it is easily ignored. Nowhere is this more true than with our civic institutions, who used to own this space. They have retreated and we need them to step up and forcefully remind us of our civic responsibility as fundamental to a democratic society.
These institutions (including religious organizations, universities, civic groups and even the news media) have to depoliticize the message, decoupling it from the current party politics and return it to our civic roots. Friction and factions are part of American politics. There have been deep rifts in our past. But what seems to hold us together is our sense of connection to the larger democratic movement. If we lose that, we lose the republic.