I Won't Miss Pandemic Priors

As new omicron infections rapidly decline in the United States, and the country is once again gazing at what appears to be a quickly approaching light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, I'm finding myself thinking more and more about the things I absolutely won't miss about the last couple of years.

To be clear, I'm not declaring victory over COVID-19. It's going to be with us for a long while, if not forever. But I think there's good reason to believe we're shifting quite a bit closer toward the endemic phase of the virus. That is, unless a new variant or two decides to play spoiler and drag things out a bit longer. Either way, there's currently a lot of immunity out there among the public, and these days, society is far better equipped to deal with the health threat than we were in March of 2020. For that, I'm extremely thankful.

As for what I'll miss least about this era, number one at the top of that list should be of no surprise: the unconscionable number of deaths.

We're coming up on a million total lives lost here in the U.S. (an estimated 80 million worldwide), and it remains very unsettling to me how accustomed our country became (and still is) to news of thousands of its citizens (mostly the unvaccinated) dying each and every day from the virus.

As for the much larger number of serious illnesses and hospitalizations, I obviously won't miss that either (and neither will health workers). Of course, a lot of people will still get quite sick, and still require hospitalization because of the coronavirus, but hopefully those numbers will start to look much more like seasonal flu numbers before too long.

Next, there's the strain put on businesses and our school systems, though I think we've come a long way on those fronts. These days, the biggest challenge for most companies is keeping up with consumer demand. And though some sectors of the national media present the very real issue of hard-line school restrictions as a country-wide problem, even the relatively few districts and regions that indeed kept them in place for way too long seem to be finally throwing in the towel; let's hope it sticks.

That brings us to the next item on my list. While it may sound quite a bit different than the others, I'd argue that it's actually tightly ingrained with all of the above. It's something I call "pandemic priors."

By pandemic priors, I'm referring to the mindset of an individual that their past or initial views of the pandemic are forever applicable and reliable, regardless of changed conditions... whether those conditions come from new data, new knowledge, new technology, new medical breakthroughs, or something else.

For example, since late spring of 2020, I've listened to countless people snidely recite the famous "14 days to flatten the curve" shut-down strategy — not merely out of frustration with the pandemic (which nearly all of us share), but as presented evidence of the government and scientific community betraying our trust, along with our country, by extending government measures well beyond that timeline.

I think it's a pretty dumb take (and I say that as someone who has a long list of gripes about how members of both entities have handled things over the last two years), because it relies on the notion that everything there was to know about the virus's affect on our population was known in March/April of 2020 (when the strategy was announced and employed), and that nothing that occurred after that two-week period held any relevance whatsoever to how the health crisis should be treated going forward.

Sadly, this type of thing has been an ongoing theme throughout the pandemic.

If you believed wholeheartedly two years ago that the coronavirus was no worse than the flu, there's a decent chance you still believe that... even after nearly a million U.S. deaths, countless hospital and ICU horror stories, and the jaw-dropping graphs illustrating both. You might even be one of those people who still reflexively reacts to every news-site's COVID-19 social-media update with a 😂 emoji.

Of course, some day, COVID-19 will be no more dangerous than a seasonal flu. But we haven't gotten there (or anywhere close) yet. Nor have we at any time over the past two years.

When conditions change, so do certain realities.

If you believed in spring of 2020 that masks were totally useless, there's a decent chance you never stopped believing that... even after countless studies have proven otherwise (at least when it comes to the non-cloth variety). Until the vaccines were widely available, wearing masks inside public places was the best anti-lockdown mitigation practice society had, even if some of us hated wearing them and acted as if having to do so in a grocery store amounted to some kind of human-rights violation.

Has the importance of masks declined with easy vaccine access? Yes. Have they been less effective against more transmissible forms of COVID (like the omicron variant)? Yes.

When conditions change, so do certain realities.

If you believed at the beginning of 2021 that the COVID vaccines are dangerous and/or ineffective, there's a decent chance you still believe that, no matter the extraordinary amount of global and domestic data showing otherwise. These vaccines have been injected into infinitely more arms than any other vaccine in human history, and they've proven both astonishingly safe and effective. For every single person on the planet? No. For the overwhelming majority? Yes.

Are the vaccines as good at actually preventing infections from the later COVID variants than with the original form of the coronavirus? No.

When conditions change, so do certain realities. The persistently good news is that the vaccines continue to provide strong protection, especially when boosted, from severe illness and death (if you do happen to become infected).

If you believed a year or so ago that children were at dire risk in school classrooms, and were big drivers of community spread, there's a decent chance you still believe that... regardless of all the data showing otherwise.

Is their risk nil? Of course not. Are some students at higher risk than others? Yes. Is the overwhelming majority of students going to be just fine? Yes. Can students bring home the virus and infect their parents, siblings, and others? Yes. Are classrooms major drivers of community spread in a post-vaccine America... especially when anyone five or above can now get vaccinated? Not so much.

When conditions change, so do certain realities.

Of course, the blame for this sometimes ideological refusal to acclimate (on both ends of the spectrum) doesn't fall entirely on individual stubbornness. Some of it's due to poor or ineffective public messaging. Some of it's also attributable to dishonest and discredited brokers of really bad information, who've achieved their own form of community spread through viral videos, email forwards, and even cable television. Feeding people's pandemic priors, and convincing them that those priors are a product of independent research, has become a full-time job for some... and a lucrative one a that.

The most damaging of grifts and conspiratorial nonsense have been the anti-vaccine campaigns. We'll never know for sure just how many people, who placed all their eggs in their pandemic priors basket, and put their faith in these bad actors, needlessly died because of it... but I suspect the number is pretty devastating. I don't think I'll ever forget some of the stories I've heard from people I know personally over the past year, about the family members they tragically lost due to this. They're absolutely heartbreaking.

At this point, my best hope is that we'll get to that endemic phase sooner rather than later — primarily for the sake of public and societal health, but also because people's pandemic priors won't really matter so much anymore.