The Common COVID
By: M.G. Siegler
Tags: 4til40, Disease, Vaccines, Health, Covid-19

The Common COVID

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

Folks, I think it’s time to call it. COVID-19 is going to be here with us for a long, long time. Maybe forever. Which sounds terrifying, except that it’s perhaps the opposite. Because it means we’re going to learn to live with it. That’s what we do. So… what if we just start doing that now?

This isn’t some anti-vaxx, anti-mask lunatic saying this. I’ve pretty clearly been the opposite throughout all of this. But I also think it’s important to be open-minded and honest about where we are and where we’re going.

As expected, the Delta variant is now washing over the world. But the good news would seem to be that those who are vaccinated shouldn’t have much to worry about. Yes, there are and will be breakthrough cases, this was always expected. But those cases seem to be significantly easier to deal with than they are for the unvaccinated. In many cases, there are no symptoms. In others, there are symptoms akin to a common cold. It varies, of course.¹ The key is that the deaths are down. Way down. The vaccines are working.

And yet.

Many people still will not get the vaccine, for whatever reason. Nearly all of these reasons fall on the spectrum of stupid to misguided, but it really doesn’t matter at this point. At some point we have to recognize that we’re not going to convince these people. Carrots did not work at scale (again, as expected). And while other countries are switching to sticks — and guess what? It’s working! — we’re unlikely to do that because freedom or whatever the fuck.

So it’s time to get on with it. Or, I guess it’s almost time. Ideally, we would “get on with it” when vaccines are truly available to everyone, including young children. That will be a few months still, it seems.² At that point I’m guessing will already be beyond this current surge and on to the next one.

That’s the thing, it’s pretty clear we’re going to keep getting surges and lulls. Like the tide coming in. Yes, it’s largely thanks to the unvaccinated, but again, it’s unclear what else we can do to convince them at this point. As with Donald Trump, they’re going to learn the hard way (and let’s be clear, there is a huge overlap). Or not, because they won’t actually learn anything, as was also the case with Trump. It doesn’t really matter. We’ve spent enough time and money trying to convince them. They can go with God, and as morbid as it sounds, perhaps quite literally.

Meanwhile, as the COVID tide continues to come in and out, we need to move on with actually living. Sure, we can keep putting on and taking off masks every few months. But at some point we have to be honest with ourselves: this is Sisyphean. And really, it’s increasingly a maneuver to try to protect the people that won’t protect themselves.³ Worse, the mandates are all over the place and often contradictory. It’s confusing. It’s confounding. That’s America in one gnarly nutshell.

So what if we just get back to life? To do that, it’s really a mind-shift that’s needed as much as anything. People will get COVID because people catch all kinds of sicknesses. Maybe they have to be out for a few days or maybe not at all depending on the situation. Maybe it spreads around an office as a flu or cold would. Yes, it will undoubtedly spread faster and more fiercely, but over time the antibodies should mute this impact. Ideally the sick people would know to stay home but again, we have to be honest how this plays out. This is going to slowly morph over time into a sickness thought of, if not treated like those more common ones.

The difference, of course, is that for the immediate future, there’s a chance that if the person with COVID infects someone who is not vaccinated, they could get really sick. But again, we’ve spent as much time as we possibly can convincing these people to get vaccinated. You could literally walk down the street anywhere in the U.S. right now and get a shot. This is not true in most other places in the world, which is really quite sad and pathetic on our part. We have the power to end this here and we just don’t give enough of a shit collectively to do that.

So we move on. We keep living and some people, sadly, keep dying. But it’s hard to see a legitimate alternative at this point. We won’t force vaccinations. And the rules and recommendations about masks and everything else can only cause so much whiplash. We have grown collectively, if not comfortably numb. COVID is never going to end, the best we can hope is that it morphs over time into a truly benign disease. And we live with it just as we do with so many others.

This is just so obviously how all of this is going to play out. Because while we have the way to end this, we don’t have the will. And, to be fair, and to further showcase our selfishness, many other countries don’t have the way. So around and around we go. COVID is here to stay.