On Saturday, several days after my son stopped testing positive
for the coronavirus, I took him out for ramen and then to the movies. The
theater was about half-full; it required masks but also served food and
cocktails, which you could, obviously, unmask to consume. I wouldn’t have gone
three weeks ago, when
Omicron was at its height and my family hadn’t been
infected yet. But now everyone in my household except me has had it — I’ve been
protected by either dumb luck or my Moderna booster — and so, in my own life,
the stakes of a positive test have gone down.
اضافة اعلان
I’m probably not living that much differently from those who
declare themselves
#DoneWithCOVID. The phrase was trending on Twitter on Monday
morning, in response to a declaration by my former colleague Bari Weiss on
“
Real Time With Bill Maher.” “I’m done with COVID! I’m done!” she said. Weiss
described making an all-out effort to avoid COVID-19 early on. “And then we
were told you get the vaccine. You get the vaccine, and you get back to normal.
And we haven’t gotten back to normal. And it’s ridiculous at this point,” she
said. When she finished speaking, the audience cheered.
The desperate desire to get back to normal is understandable.
What’s odd is seeing the absence of normality as a political betrayal instead
of an epidemiological curveball. The reason things aren’t normal isn’t that
power-mad public health officials went back on their promises. It’s because a
new coronavirus variant emerged that overwhelmed hospitals and threw schools
and many industries into chaos, and because not everyone has the luxury of
being insouciant about infection.
Even with omicron around, there’s a fair bit of normality
available, especially if you don’t have kids. Here in
New York City,
restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and theaters are generally open, though shows
are closing at the last minute when cast members fall ill. You can have a party
or go on vacation. What you can’t do is force other people, whose
vulnerabilities might be much greater than your own, to agree with your risk
assessments and join you in moving on while the pandemic still rages.
There are certainly COVID-19 mitigation policies that I think
are awful. It’s absurd that in some places, New York City included, kids who
get COVID-19 can’t return to school for 10 days, even if they test negative
earlier. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people need only
quarantine for five days.) I hate the fact that my kids still have to wear
masks outdoors at recess and that my daughter eats lunch on the cafeteria floor
for reasons of social distancing.
But in general, what’s standing in the way of normal life is
COVID-19, not COVID-19 prevention. In most cases in which schools are closing,
it’s because too many people are out sick to staff them. The same is true of
stores that are cutting back their hours and airlines canceling flights. To
have more normalcy, we need less illness. That means doing all the things
public health people drone on about, especially getting more people vaccinated
and boosted, which still — even with the high number of omicron breakthrough
cases — reduces the risk of infection as well as hospitalization.
Not long ago, I thought that once vaccines for kids over age
five were available, I would start arguing for the end of school masking. Last
month I reported on a letter that Randi Weingarten, president of the American
Federation of Teachers, wrote to the CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, and
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, asking for an off-ramp from mandatory
mask policies. “There are reports coming from some classroom teachers that the
constant use of masks impedes the learning process,” Weingarten wrote. “A
number of parents have expressed dismay about their child’s overall well-being
after wearing a mask continually for well over a year and a half.”
The CDC recently put out updated guidance suggesting that some
people, including those teaching students to read, might want to wear clear
masks. This seems a tacit acknowledgment that ordinary face coverings can have
an educational cost. They certainly have a social one; I have little doubt that
masks are part of why my kids now find school so joyless, and I’ll be thrilled
when they’re no longer necessary.
But I can’t imagine advocating an end to school masking right
now, when those who work in schools are being infected in such huge numbers.
The substitute shortage is so bad that parents — and, in New Mexico, members of
the National Guard — are being asked to fill in. This isn’t a problem that can
be fixed with an attitude adjustment.
Critics of how liberals have responded to the pandemic sometimes
argue that we’ve overestimated our ability to control this virus. But those who
think we can escape this excruciating period simply by changing our mindset are
also overestimating how much control we have. America won’t seem remotely
normal until it’s a lot less sick.
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