We can’t “end the pandemic”. Maybe, if the whole world had locked down like China at the very start we could have. Maybe. But it’s totally impossible now. Covid is carried by any number of wild animals. If we somehow eradicated every human case, someone would catch it from a mouse or a deer or a free-range cat. And then it would spread again.
All we can do is mitigate it. Vaccinate people improve public ventilating and develop better drugs to treat it. And we can reduce the spread by testing and masking and isolating, sure. But not eliminate it.
Science can develop treatments and vaccines. Science can offer guidance as to what actions might produce what reduction in spread. But actually making the choices is fundamentally political. Politics is how groups of people collectively make social choices. But scientists aren’t dictators. And that’s a good thing. Weighing the benefits against the costs isn’t a scientific exercise, it’s a value judgement.
Different societies make different choices. I think masks are worn a great deal more in Japan than in the US. I think they have legislated stronger ventilation standards, too (or at least have spent more energy on that.) I’d personally be happier if we’d collectively chosen a path more like Japan. I agree that wearing a mask is cheap. It really doesn’t interfere with anything other than eating. (Isolating and quarantining are expensive. Keeping kids home from school was crazy expensive for both the kids and their parents.) But it’s the proper job of politicians and political entities to make value judgements about costs and benefits. What is a reasonable speed limit on this road? How do we balance the desire for raw eggs against the risk of salmonella? How clean must the exhaust from this turbine be, and at what cost to consumers? Those are all political decisions. Ideally guided by science, but ultimately made politically. Because zero risk is impossible, and reducing risk gets progressively more expensive.
But the idea that ending the pandemic should override literally every other goal indefinitely is a political belief, not a scientific one.
Frankly, it sounds like you’ve decided on the ends (an end to democracy so that your political enemies can be permanently excluded and “run roughshod over with official force”) and have chosen Following The Science as the most polite-sounding means.
I am frustrated and angry, yes. It probably comes from watching grown adults throw hissy fits over minor easily gotten over inconveniences and reading from immunocompromised folks and their families terrified to go step outside their homes because nobody’s wearing masks anymore. It doesn’t seem fair that the world is basically catering to the former at the latter’s expense.
And no, no numbers from me right now. I realize the hypocrisy of going off of feels just like MAGAts, but my understanding is that nobody with half an education is saying that the pandemic is over, but it feels like everybody considers it so. But as with climate change, just ignoring it doesn’t make it reality, and I find it mind boggling sometimes.
Covid hasn’t gone away, and is extremely unlikely to go away in our lifetime. But i think a lot of experts are saying that we are moving from pandemic to endemic.
Of course, endemic doesn’t mean harmless. Malaria is endemic in much of the world and is responsible for immense human suffering. Covid remains much more dangerous than the flu, and I’m personally still taking precautions. For instance, i will wear a mask when i go out dancing this evening.
But at this point we shouldn’t be talking about “until the pandemic is over”, we should be talking about what choices to make in what situations somewhat indefinitely.
COVID is like flu. It is a part of the human condition forevermore. Just as is flu, cancer, stupidity, poverty, bigotry and all the rest.
Get over it. It is not special. It is permanent. You and everyone must live their lives holistically based on the totality of risk and reward. We will never return to 2018 when COVID did not exist.
If you weren’t wearing a mask or sheltering at home in 2018 you have little incremental reason to do so in 2023. And if you were hiding at home in 2018, you probably had / still have bigger psycho-social adjustment problems than mere COVID.
It’s like flu, only it’s more likely to kill you, and much more likely to disable you.
I took precautions for malaria when i visited places where malaria was endemic. I’m still taking precautions for covid. But I’m not hiding at home. I’m doing most of what i did before the pandemic. The biggest changes are that I’m working from home (love it!), eating out a lot less, and wearing a mask a lot more. But I’m hanging out with the same people i used to spend time with socially, and shopping in the same place, etc.
AS @puzzlegal and @LSLGuy are saying. COVID appears to be exiting the pandemic phase and entering the endemic phase. It may be a little more dangerous than the flu at this point, but with most people having some kind of immunity, it may soon become no more dangerous than the flu. The flu doesn’t become dangerous unless it has a major mutational shift. Otherwise, most people have acquired good enough immunity year-to-year to prevent overcoming our healthcare systems.
Take a look at the NYT tracker. You’ll see that even though we are moving into a “surge” of cases (according to rises in test positivity rates and wastewater data for the past few weeks), hospitalizations are barely moving. Deaths are lower than they’ve been since the beginning of the pandemic. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html
I almost completely stopped wearing a mask after I caught covid a year ago. I wore a mask a couple of instances when I had some kind of cold or RSV or something (Covid negative) just to prevent spreading it to others.
I’ll change my mind if a mutant comes along that is scary. It usually hits other places before it gets to us, so I can have some forewarning.
What I meant was that COVID was similar to flu in that it is now a permanent feature of the human landscape. It is not something to be eradicated. It is like gravity and cancer. We can complain about it, but it ain’t goin’ away. We and all our ancestors will live with it substantially forever.
I did not mean to suggest that as a disease it has the same personal or population risk profile as does flu. Or cancer, poverty or bigotry.
We had the experience and the tools to beat COVID, were it not for endemic stupidity. The cost in lives and illness from those poor decisions is infuriating.
Please post facts. Not just rants or opinions. This is becoming unfair to these forums for me to let this go.
Right now, climate change versus Covid, no contest climate change is the much bigger deal. Covid was a killer, but from all appearance it’s receding from importance. Climate change is not. I do not think you are doing a service with whatever your interest is in continuing to pump up Covid without any basis in facts or numbers.
I cannot critique the posts of someone who refuses to engage in factual information and just wants to rant. This isn’t the Pit. I don’t feel I should have to put you on ignore either. Frankly that isn’t fair to me or other people here.
Speaking as an older person, covid is more likely to mess up my life than climate change, especially in the next few years. That being said, yes, climate change is the more important problem. Humanity has survived many plagues worse than covid. I guess humanity survived some ice ages, but wow, that’s a much bigger deal than a plague that mostly kills the elderly and sometimes disables people, mostly people past the prime of their lives.
International travel is a big one, too people have always roamed, but plagues can spread so much faster on airplanes than on foot, and that makes a huge difference.
…of course we should be treating climate change as a big deal. But it isn’t binary. And this is a thread about masking in forum about Covid, and Covid is only “receding from importance” because of a relentless “push for normality” that has been driven by the same business and political interests that are driving opposition to any climate change initiatives.
It’s all the same thing. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the average person to be able to deal in “facts and numbers” when most governments are not even collating the facts and numbers any more. We are flying blind. So perhaps stop judging people for having to make decisions with not enough data because the people responsible for collecting and sharing that data are no longer doing that any more.
I will admit that I let my frustration get the better of me, and it was steering this thread towards my ranting and away from discussion of the OP. So in hopes of keeping things on track, here is my answer:
If I were world tyrant, people would continue to wear masks in public for the medium to long term regardless of lack of official edict or personal comfort, because I think it’s the right and safe thing to do for their own personal safety and the safety of others. When should it stop? I have no idea, though if the entire world created a permanent mask mandate tomorrow, would it really be that bad? Definitely not the end of the world!
Then again, I fully acknowledge that multiple genies are out of the toothpaste tube here, and have been for a long time now, and I/we probably can’t judge non mask wearers for the simple fact of not wearing one the same way we did in 2020-2021. (If nothing else, I do think I have a higher opinion of humanity than that.) All I can say is, remember to consider the health of others, especially those close to you, as well as your own when making the choice for yourself.
One thing I’ve learned from the pandemic is that the subjective cost to me of wearing a mask is much less than it is for many other people. I’m still mostly masking in public. But that’s in large part because i don’t especially mind masking. An awful lot of people seem to be really uncomfortable in masks.
For me: Wearing a mask while mostly sitting down or moving gently, for maybe twenty minutes or an hour or so at a time – not much of a problem. Wearing a mask while setting up a market stand including tables, chairs, produce boxes, a 75 lb tent, etc., sometimes in 90ºF or 40ºF weather – very large problem. Trying to wear one while harvesting produce, during the early height of the epidemic when they thought it could possibly be carried on anything for long periods of time, was close to impossible (I was working alone, so direct transmission wasn’t an issue). Activities and lengths of time inbetween – highly variable.
But even with the best mask-wearing circumstances, it’s always a relief to get the thing off. I know I can breathe through it, I am breathing through it, but it feels like never getting any fresh air.
Transmission rate in my area went to low some months ago; they no longer give that, but they still give hospitalization rate, and that also is at low and has been that way for months, despite the fact that nobody’s wearing masks and the vaccination rate isn’t great and is awful for the later boosters. I’ve got to figure that nearly everybody has had at least an asymptomatic case by now.
I’m now only masking if in enclosed spaces with significant numbers of people for extended periods of time; which situation doesn’t come up much in my life any longer, since I also avoid such spaces when possible and for me it’s usually possible. And of course if requested by somebody; but I haven’t been so requested for a year or so, even when I offer. (If approached by somebody masked, I’ll offer; but that rarely comes up any longer, either.) I am very thoroughly vaccinated and expect to get the next booster when it becomes available.
Don’t know about you but the “push for normality” that I experienced came directly from the general public of all political stripes and none and was in direct opposition to the prevailing political will.
