Ted Soqui/SIPA USA via AP Images
At Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles fly 26,661 white flags, one for each person in the county who lost their life during the pandemic.
In a pre-Thanksgiving poll from Yahoo News and YouGov, 74 percent of respondents said their lives had “returned to normal” since the pandemic. As we learned on a particularly Black Friday, that was an inaccurate and even destructive fiction.
The desire for normalcy is human, and reasonable. Most of us are not conditioned to isolating ourselves from friends and loved ones, and require social interaction. The 2020 election was predicated on a new president returning the country to normalcy, a century after Warren Harding ran and won explicitly on that theme.
But things aren’t normal. Even before families gathered at Thanksgiving tables at relatively the same numbers as the more innocent days of 2019, case rates began to increase, and death rates stopped falling. Cases in children, who have only begun to get vaccinated, are rising. One thousand Americans continue to die every day, creating the equivalent of two 9/11s per week. Hospitals in the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest remain in a crisis state. Central California wants to move its COVID patients to Los Angeles County because they’re at full capacity. Even in heavily vaccinated New England, hospitals are highly stressed.
We all bear some responsibility. COVID has been pushed to the background of everyday life.
And the emergence of a new variant called omicron, which appears to be more contagious than the dominant delta, has ended any hopes of herd immunity. We know little at this point about whether omicron is more symptomatic, but with its more than 30 mutations on the spike protein that attaches to and infects human cells, the fear about omicron evading vaccination protection is real, and it’s why global markets are tanking and travel restrictions were instituted.
The travel bans reflect the world’s consistent lagging response to the virus. Omicron was first detected in South Africa but almost certainly did not originate there; the earliest known case developed two weeks before South Africa’s terrific research monitoring caught it, according to the World Health Organization. Omicron has already escaped detection and flown around the world, with cases found from Hong Kong to Canada. Economically punishing bans may make people feel safer, but the problem has long been a lack of investment—in vaccines to cover a global pandemic, and in research surveillance capabilities to isolate mutations in areas with little vaccine coverage.
If you have any other explanation for Joe Biden’s sagging poll numbers, throw them out. He had one job when hired, to end the pandemic. It was unfair to place that on his shoulders; even by Inauguration Day it was reasonably clear we were headed toward an endemic situation with COVID. Plus, beating the virus in the U.S. required the participation of 330 million people, about half of whom are trained to hate the leader of the political party they don’t belong to.
But that was absolutely Biden’s task, and nearly a year later, he has not succeeded. We’re now hearing grumbling that Biden has been a “disappointment” on the pandemic. In one of the more audacious moves in a long time, some of that is coming from Republicans, blaming the president for a situation that has lingered because of clear Republican resistance to vaccines and mask mandates.
The problem here goes back to before Biden’s presidency, to the protests of summer 2020: not the protests against racial injustice, but the furious protests in reaction to lockdowns. As president, Donald Trump encouraged these reopening revolutions, which had deleterious public-health effects.
But the much worse effect was over the longer term. No state or local leader was particularly interested in reimposing any kind of lockdown or shuttering certain types of businesses. Maybe it was because of a fear of lost tax revenue, the belief that a broken economy would be a cure worse than the disease. But I think in reality we all know the real reason: An angry faction of people would oppose it, and unrest would ensue.
In other words, protest and the potential for violence intimidated public officials. We decided that the best strategy was to pretend the pandemic didn’t exist, and hope for the best with the vaccines. Non-pharmaceutical interventions have been essentially written out of the story. Without the delta variant mutation it might have worked, or at least worked better. But instead we had hundreds of thousands of people die because of a handful of malcontents who made government at all levels cower.
A statistic floating around that more Americans died in 2021 from COVID than in 2020 is a direct result of this dynamic. We instituted normalcy at the metaphorical barrel of a gun, and decided collateral damage was acceptable in the name of personal choice.
This also created the malaise that has brought Biden low, and it’s hard not to see that as deliberate. From the conservative perspective, it’s been one of the most self-destructive political strategies in history. They sacrificed their own people to win a future election.
Where Biden can get more criticism is on his global approach to the crisis. The real danger from COVID exists far from American shores. Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. is delivering more vaccines, and planning to build manufacturing capacity to go even further. But Biden has put little into building research and detection capacity, to prevent a worldwide mutation. And after agreeing to seek a global waiver of vaccine intellectual property to spur more production of the vital medications in April, Biden has barely talked about it, and certainly not pushed the Europeans (primarily Germany) who are resistant. In his statement on omicron, Biden reiterated his support for instituting the waiver at an upcoming World Trade Organization ministerial, but that meeting was postponed because of omicron, in a darkly ironic exemplification of global inaction.
We all bear some responsibility. COVID has been pushed to the background of everyday life. A public desperate for normalcy has willed normalcy into being. We’re eating our lunches and doing our shopping as people slowly asphyxiate in quiet rooms. It’s been the ultimate in out of sight, out of mind.
And yet we know things aren’t normal; that’s why we’re so frustrated. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people who express little more than sheer exhaustion over the past two years. They’re taking it out on the party in power, rightly or wrongly.
COVID doesn’t care about our exhaustion. There will be an end to this pandemic someday, but pretending the end has come will only prolong it.
