Two Years Into a Pandemic ... Give People a Break
The "Open Everything" crowd and the "Don't Open Anything" crowd need to chill
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
Just a quick reminder that I’ll be back to Zoom Chatting tomorrow at 12:30. Here’s the link and we have a lot to talk about so it should be a great discussion!
Open Everything That’s Already Open
Earlier this week, the governors of four blue states - New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, and Oregon announced timelines for ending school mask mandates. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she was ending the mask mandate for private businesses but was leaving the school mandate in place for now.
While a number of political pundits have suggested that the impetus for these moves is politics (Americans are tired of pandemic restrictions), the real reason is likely reflected in this chart:
On January 15, the daily average of Covid cases was 803,730. As of yesterday, it’s at 227,000. That’s a massive drop in just over three weeks, and there’s little reason to believe that the trajectory of cases won’t continue to fall.
This is how things are supposed to work. When Covid cases increase, slap on public health restrictions that, hopefully, stop the spread. When cases decline, remove them. In other words, be responsive to the science and the data.
Yet, the “open everything” crowd is still banging that drum. Here’s Yascha Mounk in the Atlantic, in a piece titled “Open Everything.”
Highly effective vaccines are available, free of charge, to any American over the age of 5 who chooses to take them. Antiviral pills, which will further reduce the risk posed by COVID-19, will soon be in wide circulation. We finally have the tools to live with the coronavirus. Yet life in America remains shaped by pandemic caution thanks to state directives, policies adopted by private organizations, and choices made by individuals.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were too slow to adapt to changing circumstances. Now we are once again in danger of prolonging the status quo more than is justifiable. It is time to open everything.
Please stop making these arguments! It’s true that not everything is open … but most stuff is. As I wrote last week, if people want to return their lives to normal: have friends over, eat in restaurants, go to cultural events like concerts, plays or sporting events, they can do so. Hell, I spent Saturday afternoon playing poker in a very crowded poker room in Pennsylvania — no vaccine requirement of mask mandate. Increasingly, Covid has become a choice of how much risk Americans are willing to accept. And Mounk appears to be upset that millions of Americans are not making the same decisions that he is:
In their personal lives, many Americans go even further than these official safety requirements. I understand why. We were told that face-to-face contact with other human beings constituted a significant risk to others and ourselves. Many of us became accustomed to carrying out an informal risk-benefit analysis before every outing. Although few people forgo social activities to the extent they did in 2020, many still ask themselves whether that spontaneous visit to a local coffee shop or that long-awaited vacation is “really worth it.”
None of these sacrifices is prohibitively onerous on its own. But some, such as the requirement for children to wear masks for much of the day, do significantly decrease the quality of life. And together they create a deep sense of societal malaise.
Accepting restrictions that weaken our social ties when they seemed temporary was one thing. Putting up with them indefinitely is quite another. For many, the sense that we will live in pandemic purgatory for months or years to come now poses a heavy psychological burden.
I empathize with this argument (and I share Mounk’s frustration with mask mandates in schools), but read the room, buddy. As noted above, we are only three weeks from averaging close to one million Covid cases a day — and many of those who got sick (though didn’t die) were vaccinated and boosted. More than 2,500 Americans are still dying EVERY SINGLE DAY from Covid. To expect people to immediately go back to normalcy so soon after a massive spike in cases and deaths is not realistic. Throw in the fact that February is the worst month and one in which “hunkering down" is the most appropriate response, and how can anyone be surprised that people are still on edge?
Six or nine months, I probably would have made a similar argument to Mounk’s, but over time I’ve come to appreciate that moving past an epochal, life-changing pandemic will not happen overnight. Back in the Spring, we thought the pandemic might be over, and then boom, here comes Delta. In the Fall, it looked like we were past that variant, and then came Omicron. Americans have a right to be wary. You can present all the data you want about how the risks to the vaccinated are minimal, and kids rarely get sick from Covid, but people generally stink at assessing risk. We all need to be empathetic and understanding of the psychological toll that Covid has taken on people and appreciate that everyone judges risk differently.
What you can ask is for the government to give people the ability to return to normal if they want, while also ensuring that their communities are protected. For the most part, that’s what has happened — and with the further relaxing of mask mandates, it’s what will be happening over the next few weeks. The government cannot make people go back to the office or employers to require them to do so. Public officials can’t tell people to stop worrying about a deadly virus that killed more than 911,000 Americans. Because of the Supreme Court, they can’t even require people to get vaccinated, which a quarter of the country still refuses to do. Mounk and many others (myself included) are moving on from the pandemic. Plenty of Americans are not there yet. They’ll get there eventually. But maybe stop pestering them for wanting to take their time.
Having Said That …
… please stop making arguments like this:
That more than 200 million Americans who are vaccinated against Covid want to move on from the pandemic is not normalizing mass death. It’s acknowledging reality.
The overwhelming majority of people who are dying from Covid are not vaccinated. They have made a choice to imperil their lives and those around them. Believe me; if I could convince every numbskull in America who won’t get vaccinated to get their shot, I would do it (I’d likely start by not calling them numbskulls, but it’s a great word, and I don’t often get the chance to use it). But that’s not going to happen. And you cannot get ask hundreds of millions of Americans who have done the right thing, gotten vaccinated, and are abiding by public health guidelines to continue to upend their lives because one-quarter of Americans won’t do the right thing. You simply can’t. It’s not going to work.
And you can spend all the time you want telling me that kids under five are not vaccinated or that Long Covid is a thing, but at the end of the day, people can make their choices about the kind of risks they want to tolerate. I’m willing to risk Long Covid. I think most Americans feel the same. When my kids were not vaccinated, I still scheduled play dates and took them to indoor locales. I made a judgment — based on the data — that kids are in little danger of getting seriously ill from Covid, and I wanted them to have as normal a childhood as possible.
If you’re still worried about your unvaccinated kids getting sick, even though the data says they are likely at greater risk of getting seriously sick from the flu, that’s your right. But asking the rest of us to be hyper-vigilant because you can’t properly assess risk is something else altogether. It’s quite reasonable and logical to look at the data and the risks and conclude that there are marginal benefits in maintaining public health restrictions. Accusing those people — which would include public health officials — of normalizing mass death is needlessly hyperbolic. Stop shaming people who want to return their lives to normalcy two years into a pandemic.
What’s Going On
This is a lovely essay by Jennifer Senior on friendship in middle age.
Covid is so warping our societies that now, even Canadians are acting up.
Philadelphia Eagles safety Anthony Harris is truly a mensch. What a wonderful story.
That Donald Trump clogged White House toilets by trying to flush papers down them — and those papers might have included classified material — is the perfect metaphor for his presidency.
If Trump were to be prosecuted for the improper handling of classified material after winning the White House, in part, because his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton is alleged to have improperly handled classified material, then irony will be dead … never to be revived.
Yesterday morning it appeared that Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky had won the award for most idiotic statement of the day by a member of Congress.
Then Marjorie Taylor Green said, “hold my beer.”
Musical Interlude
Unfortunately I don’t know any songs about gazpacho …
I am not sharing this as I find the tone off-putting and I disagree with the arguments. I don't think you and millions of other Americans never really wanted to accept the gravity of this virus and comport their behavior to stop the virus. Almost a million Americans have died and over 2000 are dying EVERYDAY. You shrug that off like it is nothing. We need to grieve and understand the magnitude of this tragedy. My goal is to not get the virus period. Is that wrong.? I don't think so. Just so you can go to restaurant or a concert? Do you hear how you sound when you write that? I grieve for all who have been lost and pray for those still sick because I know as John Donne wrote (I believe) Any man's death diminishes me. We don't live insular lives, we live with others and when a virus like this comes around, we have to comport our behavior to stop it. If anyone is made uncomfortable because I want to protect myself and others, then I wonder why that would make anyone uncomfortable. I will be advocating and wearing masks and mandates until this virus is under control, which it is clearly not. This column is very disappointing.