The blame does not lie entirely at the feet of officials. Over the past two years, significant portions of our society have eschewed masks, vaccines, and other precautions to stop the spread of the virus. We’ve decided that a thousand or more deaths each day is regrettable but acceptable. But the fact that we are asking potentially infectious people to return to schools, hospitals, and restaurants in order to avoid societal collapse is a clear sign that officials failed to plan—both for another surge and for a more transmissible, immune-evasive variant like omicron, despite plentiful evidence for the likelihood of both.
Officials could have ordered millions of tests and masks over the summer, when manufacturers were destroying tests and imploring the administration to stockpile unsold masks after the premature announcement that vaccinated people no longer needed to mask. They could have scaled up the production of medications and therapeutics needed to prevent and treat severe illness, as well as the research and tools needed to understand where this virus might take us next. They could have strengthened hospital capacity, including addressing rampant burnout—in part by bringing down cases so that health workers wouldn’t be run ragged over the past two years.
Instead, we are once again playing defense, trying to minimize the losses this virus continues to wreak upon us—and doing so, in some cases, from a weaker position than we were in when the pandemic began. In many places, leaders simply lack the political will to implement the same measures from last year. “You have a lot of places, even with Democratic governors or mayors or county executives, who are opposing mask mandates—just using individual-responsibility language,” Feldman said.
Even worse, legislators in more than half of US states have passed more than 100 new laws during the pandemic to restrict public health powers at the state or local level. There are also fewer workplace protections now, since the federal rule requiring employers to give workers paid sick leave for Covid-related reasons lapsed at the end of 2020. “They’re just saying, ‘Go back to work, keep working. This is fine. You probably won’t end up in the hospital’,” Feldman said.
“This is one of the darkest moments of this pandemic,” he added.
Covid will be with us for years, if not forever. It will evolve and present new challenges and complications. Because of the way we’ve allowed the virus to spread, it’s likely that we will all get it at some point. But the longer you can wait, the better—until hospitals are no longer overwhelmed, until there are more widely available and effective treatments, until long Covid is better understood and treated.
The argument that we can and must resume our normal lives assumes that we ourselves are not vulnerable and our lives are not inextricably bound up in the lives of the vulnerable. It assumes a level of normalcy I have never felt, because we are all connected to someone who is at risk of the worst to come.
Now, a new line from Biden rings in my head. “For [the] unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death,” he said earlier this month. For the vaccinated, especially the boosted, everything will be much better, he added. And that’s true. We’re lucky enough, in this country, to have fantastic vaccines that seem to be holding up very well against serious illness and death even against variants like delta and omicron—for those who can access them and mount a strong, lasting immune response.
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