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Covid Safety Theater is Not Benign

Covid-19 hasn't been a serious threat to most people's health for months, perhaps years. It's time to start acting like it.
Bethesda,,Maryland,/,Usa,-,April,1,,2020:,Giant,Remains

When will Covid the public policy disaster end? Covid the public health disaster is already over, and we’re still dying out here.

A Boston hospital is refusing a man a heart transplant because he will not get vaxxed. The hospital’s “protocol” means he will certainly die of heart problems because he won’t get vaccinated against a virus he may never get. He’ll leave behind three children after the doctors let him die. It is now the third winter of writing about Covid.

Two winters ago, remember the shortages which were going to kill us, the lack of respirators and masks? Remember the urgency with which we erected tent hospitals and dispatched military hospital ships? We shut down schools and lives—two weeks to flatten the curve, two weeks which are in many forms still going on now, years later. Covid deaths per capita are higher in New York and New Jersey, among the most locked-down states, than Florida and Texas, among the least. That has to mean something. But we act as if it is 2020 again.

Each variant is announced like a new Marvel supervillain. We still are told the source of the virus is unknown, but it is clearer and clearer it was created via gain of function research in China funded by the U.S. The Democratic hero governors are gone or no longer matter nationally, their populations and tax bases devastated. Hero teachers are now hated, lazy unionists.

Two years later we know as many as half the hospitalizations “for Covid” turn out to be “with Covid,” admissions for broken arms and liver cancer who also incidentally test positive. We learn that nearly everyone who died of the virus was either elderly or had significant comorbidities (only 2.7 percent of Covid deaths in the U.K. were in people under 65 with no comorbidities; 78 percent of those who died in American hospitals were obese or medically overweight) leaving a gaping question about why we continue broad-spectrum lockdowns that are even now driving deaths of despair.

That was then, this is now. Compared with Delta, Omicron infections are half as likely to send people to the hospital. Out of more than 52,000 Omicron cases reviewed, not a single patient went on a ventilator. Overall, some 80 to 90 percent of Omicron cases are asymptomatic, meaning we only even know about them because of incessant and pointless testing to uncover them.

Falsehoods and half-truths have consequences. Publishing flawed science drives irrational fear and bad public health decisions, as does making false statements about the efficacy of treatments hoping to reassure people (only to disappoint them later when they realize the assurance was hollow). Some of this two years ago might have been excusable given the urgency, but not anymore.

I just saw an immediate relative through a bout of Covid. She wondered about a sore throat on Tuesday, had a bit of a cough on Wednesday, spent Thursday on the couch with a fever and then…felt better. She was fully vaccinated and it worked. After her initial reaction of anger (“I saw life overturned all around me for three years over what turned out to be a bad cold?”) she grew more angry. Did politicians actually know what they were jerking around travel and crumbling education over? Maybe not two years ago but in 2022 they have no excuse.

In the early days of the AIDS crisis, we lost valuable time on theater. In the mid-’80s, 60 percent of Americans wanted HIV+ people to carry a card noting their status; one in three said employers should fire employees who had AIDS. Some 21 percent said people with AIDS should be isolated from the rest of society (no laughing; the Salt Lake Tribune just called for the Utah National Guard to imprison unvaccinated citizens in their homes). Pundits in the 1980s demanded gay men stop having sex as a condition for living among the untainted. Only when we focused policy on real science did we start to fight back, to the point where today AIDS is a manageable medical problem, not a crisis. Look up Anthony Fauci’s role in all that.

Covid-era politicians bear much responsibility for the situation today: They exaggerated the efficacy of the vaccine, comparing it to the polio vax, not the yearly influenza vax, in what it was expected to do. Now we know Covid is a new way to die—we once lived on a planet without AIDS and today we live on a planet with AIDS. Covid surges will happen, a part of life we need to manage, not panic over. The crisis was overblown from the beginning, tied to Trump-hate, kept alive as a cudgel during the election, and then not allowed to whither away once the vaccines were widely available. This represents one of the worst public policy crises of the modern era. Can we recover?

To begin resolving the crisis of public policy, do away things like the TSA still demanding we take off our shoes at the airport. We remove footwear today only because some knucklehead failed to explode his shoe bomb 12 years ago. No one was ever harmed with any shoe-borne weapon, or liquid above three ounces for that matter. But we still drag out the airport process doing things that do not matter. Let’s get ahead of all that with Covid.

Let’s start to end the public policy crisis by getting rid of the things that have little or no affect. No one has or will catch Covid from an unwashed pen or a paper menu. Plexiglass barriers accomplish nothing. Dirty cloth masks are not stopping microscopic viruses. Flashing a cellphone pic of a handwritten vaccine card made out to “McLovin” is not ensuring everyone in the restaurant is vaccinated. And why does “everyone seated is vaxxed” even matter, when they can all still transmit the virus? It doesn’t make sense.

Unmasked at a bar while seated but masked while standing makes even less sense than shoes-off at the airport. Only four to an elevator but unlimited people shoulder-to-shoulder on buses, subways, and planes is silly. We need to stop calling someone without symptoms and with no effect on their daily lives a “breakthrough infection.” Everything should not be a curveball.

We have to stop focusing on case counts and look at impact. For example, there are a yearly average of over 30 million cases of influenza, but only 34,000 deaths. It is time to acknowledge the difference between infection—which means the virus is simply replicating in one’s body in a struggle the immune system will win in the vaccinated and the healthy—and infectiousness, which means the virus is replicating in parts of the body in such a way that it could infect other people. Instead, we bluntly test, add it all together, and scream Fire!

We must realize it is unhealthy for a society to comply because: a) we have become germophobic paranoids, b) it is easier to wear a face diaper than listen to Karen, or c) we really have to get to Denver for work and the airline simply will not let us on the plane without a mask and shoe inspection. None of that has anything to do with ending Covid. What it does is leave too many Americans angry, paralyzed with doubt, and ever more distrustful in government. It’s time for a full field view. The real revolution needs to be fought between people other than flight attendants and unruly passengers.

We pretend the safety theater is benign. C’mon, it’s just a mask. We ignore the failure to educate our kids, the teen suicides, the deaths of despair as more turn to drugs and alcohol to fill in the dark spaces left where friendships and socialization used to be. In 2021, emergency room visits for suicide attempts jumped 51 percent for adolescent girls compared with 2019. In any other context, that would be a crime. We are social animals denied the chance to socialize, like unadopted shelter puppies who soon enough just give up. We need to reclaim our lives.

Unless we take the shot at changing public policy, America will be left as it is now, exploring the edges of what it means to be a failing society. Time to choose.

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

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