Covid isn’t over, but even the most cautious Americans are moving on

Covid isn’t over, but even the most cautious Americans are moving on Americans who have tried to be rule-following pandemic citizens are at last abandoning precautions as the coronavirus fades into a background threat. Washington Post

...

Emboldened by the government’s recent lifting of the public health emergency, Americans who have tried to be rule-following pandemic citizens for the past three summers are at last abandoning precautions as the coronavirus fades into a background threat.

Officials are no longer warning of scary new variants. Free tests are harder to come by. The White House covid team has disbanded, and the virus is increasingly erased from public conversation. After 2020’s summer of isolation followed by 2021’s “hot vax” summer and last year’s summer of revenge travel, this summer, the fourth since covid arrived, marks a season of blissful ignorance — or begrudging acceptance that the rest of society is moving on.

Available metrics suggest the virus is declining, although no one really knows how much the coronavirus is circulating given a drop in data collection.

What the end of the public health emergency means

The toll of covid-19 is increasingly obscured as more data sources disappear, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s community levels dashboard that categorized the strain on county health care systems as low, medium or high. Now the CDC recommends Americans use a tracker displaying new covid-19 hospital admissions by county to understand the state of the virus in their community. By that measure, there were 6,600 new admissions nationally the week ending June 10, compared with roughly 30,000 at this time last year.

Other metrics, including emergency department visits, test results reported voluntarily by a network of laboratories and wastewater surveillance also indicate infections are low and declining.

“We are in a relatively good spot,” said Brendan Jackson, the CDC’s incident manager for its covid-19 response.

Americans seem to share this assessment, with 62 percent saying in May that covid-19 is over, compared with 47 percent who felt that way in February, according to the most recent Axios-Ipsos poll. More than half now say they never mask in public, and the share of respondents who said they always or sometimes mask dropped from 30 percent in February to 23 percent in May.

...

The vast majority of the more than 80 people contacted by The Washington Post say they are relaxing precautions, believing they’ll be fine because they’re up to date on their shots and transmission rates are low. Those who still mask and socially distance are making peace with most others no longer doing so.

“The pandemic, for all intents and purposes, now is gone, but the virus isn’t gone yet,” said Donald Yealy, chief medical officer for UPMC’s health services division.

Even when transmission is low, coronavirus is one of the most common respiratory viruses, infecting tens of thousands, experts say....

Activists who are waging a difficult fight to keep covid-19 a top priority say the retreat is premature, as the virus continues to prey on the most vulnerable — killing 40,000 so far this year. Hundreds still die daily, and long covid continues to inflict lasting complications on otherwise healthy people.

“This is still a novel virus. It’s only been three years,” said Lara Jirmanus, a primary care physician in Massachusetts and activist with People’s CDC, an organization that has advocated for the preservation of mask mandates at hospitals and expansion of free PCR testing. “Covid can still disable you each additional time that you get a covid infection.”

...

Country / Region Tags:

General Topic Tags: