The Time for Panic is Behind Us
A response to the CDC's recommendation that fully vaccinated individuals now wear masks indoors.
I posted the following on Facebook:
People who think we need to get down to 0% infections are the ones who will continue to advocate for masking and other types of social-isolation. But 0% is never going to happen. Like it or not, this virus is here to stay. The word I’m hearing now is “endemic,” which describes a disease that is "prevalent in or restricted to a particular location, region, or population."
Covid and all its variants is now endemic. It's not going away. It will be here in the fall, it will be here next year, and the years thereafter. The time for panic is behind us. Now we learn to co-exist. People who can get vaccinated should get vaccinated; doing so will lessen the likelihood of them being hospitalized or dying. People who have been vaccinated may also get the virus but apparently are less likely to end up in the hospital.
Some are now referring to Covid-19 as “the pandemic of the unvaccinated.” This, apparently, is a fact. Nearly all of the hospitalizations and deaths now seem to be among those who have not been vaccinated. This is a tragedy. But telling the vaccinated to wear masks to protect the unvaccinated, and to somehow prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, is, as John Podheretz of Commentary Magazine put it recently, a gut-punch. Businesses and restaurants and stores are just getting back to some kind of normal. Telling them to go back to a type of shut down is a body blow. As is telling those of us who “believed the science” and got the vaccine to put the masks back on two months after we were told they were no longer necessary.
We who took the time to get the vaccine (and it was a hassle, at least for me), who took the risk (this vaccine hasn't been approved officially), who "trusted the science," were finally "allowed" to get back to normal....are now being shunted back to our rooms like little kids.
There are those out there, mostly, I suspect, on the political left, who may be fine with this idea, but I smell a rat. Someone wants to keep us in a constant state of fear and dependence, but I’m not buying it.
Most of us willingly complied when this thing started back in 2020.
Most of us are sensible and responsible.
But there comes a point where we say, enough.
We're adults.
Leave us alone.
A response to one of my Facebook friends
I shared the above thoughts on Facebook, and one of my friends wrote, "Why is this virus any less serious than polio or smallpox? What substantiates a panic? How many deaths do we endure as a society before we make drastic efforts to eradicate a disease?"
I think you could probably answer the first question yourself, particularly since, thanks to amazing progress in medical research, there is a vaccine for this particular coronavirus that seems to be effective.
Covid-19 seems to have mercifully spared children. It’s the older among us who are more likely to suffer more severe cases of Covid. And though tragic ("every man's death diminishes me"), we're more likely, as a society, to react viscerally to anything (like polio, like smallpox) that puts children at greatest risk. Drastic measures in those cases seem justified. Anyone who is a parent instinctively knows this.
Shutting down the economy was drastic. Some are arguing that the shutdown probably did more harm than the virus itself in terms of economic, social, emotional costs.
Universal masking didn’t seem “drastic” at first since we didn’t know what we were dealing with, and we didn’t have a vaccine. Masking a year and a half later, now that there’s a vaccine is drastic, primarily because I get the sense that we’ve stopped talking about Covid and seem to be talking more about “safety” in general. One argument that I’m hearing about schoolchildren being masked has to do with the fact that—surprise, surprise—there were fewer cases of regular seasonal flu due to shut downs and masking. Maybe masking is a good thing, period.
I predicted this would happen way back in March 2020, and everyone sort of laughed (“that will never happen, Elaine--you're overreacting"). Yet here we are talking about vaccinated people being masked. I have strong opinions about masking, but none so strong as the willingness of some people—especially parents—to put face masks on children for 8 hours a day in school. This is drastic, and here is where panic will do the most harm.
To be honest, I’m afraid for the current cohort of 5-year-olds. Small children adapt easily to pretty much anything. Masking to them will soon be second nature, maybe already is. But they’ll be subconsciously suspicious of the air they breathe, the pencils they touch, the teachers or classmates they interact with at school. Give these children five years of masking and they’ll be socially and emotionally crippled.
How many deaths do we endure as a society before we make drastic efforts to eradicate a disease? I don’t think this is a question that can be answered. We're living during a time of amazing medical advances, a time when people live longer than they did 100 years ago. But we'll never "eradicate" disease. Not in our lifetime, not in our children’s lifetime, maybe never. To think “eradication” is possible is to relegate ourselves to a lifetime of fear, of isolation, of suspicion.
What substantiates a panic? I guess my answer is forgetting that we’re mortal, forgetting that “all flesh is grass, and all its glory like the flowers in the field. The grass withers, and the flowers fall…” Forgetting to teach these things to our children. I don’t know if the next generation thinks like this, and I suspect even we ourselves tend to forget how to think like this. We get so caught up in “solving” problems or looking to government to solve our problems.
But we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least try to help our children navigate difficulties and not cower before them. If we’re unbelievers, we might teach them that there is no utopia on earth, that there are pitfalls and dangers and struggles, and that someday this life will end. If we’re believers, we might offer hope that there is life after death. Either way, we can teach them, and ourselves, to make the most out of this life in spite of the dangers.
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
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CDC Interim Public Health Recommendations for Fully Vaccinated People
Updated July 27, 2021
