I can still remember assuming the pandemic would end.
It was about a year ago. I had just received my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and my wife had just received her second shot of Moderna. My daughter finally went back to school after a year of wasting away in remote classes. It felt like we were turning a corner as a country, with the horrific death rates in the winter of 2021 fading into the past. We weren’t out of the woods yet, but that would be soon.
But here we are in mid-April 2022, more than two years into the pandemic, and my own city of Philadelphia just announced it will reintroduce an indoor mask mandate next week, just over a month after the city finally dropped it. .
Rather than having a defined beginning, middle, and end, the pandemic has taken on a different shape, one that resembles the cyclical structure of pagan religions more than the linear unfolding of Christian eschatology. The pandemic doesn’t stop, it evolves, waxing and waning and then waxing, like cycles of the moon or the tides. Philadelphia enjoyed liberation from masks for a month or so, but now they are coming back. I have no doubt that the new mandate will someday disappear, but I very much doubt that it will disappear for good.
The mandate is now returning, of course, as the highly contagious Omicron variant that caused a massive increase in cases a few months ago has led to an even more contagious sub-variant labeled BA.2. by the epidemiologists. That sounds ominous — and it is for those who haven’t been vaccinated and haven’t gained natural immunity by catching the original version of Omicron in the late fall and winter. For the rest of us — those who have been vaccinated, who have had at least one booster shot, and/or who have developed antibodies from a previous brush with Omicron — it will be a risk, but a very small one.
How small exactly is hard to say. That’s because we can no longer know with near certainty how widespread the virus is. The national number of new cases is starting to rise again after falling for months, with the peak being most pronounced in the northeast. But for the first time since the start of the pandemic, home testing is widely available. Results from those who self-test are not picked up by the government. That means that reports of new cases, as well as positivity rates, are now more unreliable than ever. We just don’t know how many people are sick – although lagging indicators such as the number of COVID-related hospitalizations and deaths, which are currently on the back burner, should still be useful and accurate in the coming weeks and months.
Without solid data to document new cases, we’re thrown back to anecdotes — and that move is clearly deteriorating things in Philly. A relative who teaches at a university in the city reports that she has never had so many students sick with COVID. Most suffer from symptoms similar to a severe cold or a fairly mild flu. That’s in line with what vaccinated and boosted individuals experienced with the original Omicron wave. It’s not great, but it’s also not an emergency that requires renewed public health interventions.
Or is it? The city of Philadelphia certainly seems to think so. The city’s health commissioner Cheryl Bettigole acknowledged at a news conference Monday afternoon that the official number of new cases was still extremely low (just 142, while the seven-day average during the worst of the Omicron wave was nearly 4,000). Still, Bettigole insisted that “this is our chance to stay ahead of the pandemic,” even though he is doing so by imposing a new mask mandate when cases and hospitalizations are low, in violation of CDC recommendations.
Pressured by the decision to ignore CDC guidelines, Bettigole pointed out… structural racism. “Local conditions” are important, she said. “We’ve all seen here in Philadelphia how much of an impact our history of redlining, history of inequalities has had, especially our black and brown communities in the city. And so it makes sense to be more careful in Philadelphia than, you know, maybe in an affluent suburb.”
So, people in an affluent suburb may decide for themselves whether to put on a mask when entering a store or other indoor space, but those in Philly will be forced by the government to do so because… redlining used to be practiced in the city? I honestly can’t parse the statement or construct a coherent argument to justify it. (Your freedom was once limited, so your freedom must be limited now?) All I know is that starting next week, people who live, work, or visit the city will be less free than those who don’t to do. And that the rule is being imposed for reasons that have little to do with a threat to public health.
Philadelphia residents, whether black or tan or white, will be protected from the worst symptoms of the coronavirus by the vaccines, and even more so if they receive booster shots in accordance with current FDA authorizations and recommendations. In the vast majority of cases, the injections turn a positive diagnosis (breakthrough infection) into an unpleasant experience rather than a life-threatening event within a few days. Doesn’t that mean the first priority of health officials should be the widest possible distribution of the vaccines, with additional therapies being made widely available for the very few who develop worse symptoms?
If every person in Philadelphia were vaccinated, would even a single mask be necessary?
That’s what’s so maddening and demoralizing about this latest twist in the saga of the COVID-19 pandemic: instead of responding to the persistence of the virus by doing what would allow us to live our lives with as little possible disruption and as much normality as possible, those in positions of power seem to prefer imposing greater restrictions that are also less effective.
That was frustrating when it happened early in the pandemic, when we were all in the dark trying to figure out in real time how the virus works and how best to protect ourselves against it. But after more than two years and a million deaths and the approval of several effective vaccines that have turned COVID-19 into something about as deadly and debilitating as the flu, strep throat or bronchitis for nearly everyone who uses them, it’s worse than frustrating . It’s something closer to frenzy.
I’m not a troublemaker, so I’ll obey the mask mandate when I’m in town, starting next week. But I’m not doing it to protect myself. I will do it to comply with the rules imposed by officials for no reason.
When it comes to my own health, I’ll take it into my own hands when I get my second vaccine booster in early May, six months after the last. The prospect of living with endemic COVID-19 would seem much less excruciating if that’s all that’s expected of us.
Maybe someday it will be. All I know, if that’s for now, in Philadelphia and most likely other cities soon, we’re not there yet.
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