Can We Learn to Live with COVID-19, Before COVID-19 Fatigue Kills Us?
Can it be? Two years into our politically polarized fight to end the pandemic, COVID-19 fatigue seems to be rising faster these days than the pandemic itself.
No, I haven’t joined the anti-vaxxers or the anti-mandate protesters who block commerce with truck convoys to push back against vaccine mandates.
But, even after willingly masking up, getting my shots and a booster and keeping a sensibly social distance whenever possible, I find myself asking increasingly when it’s all going to end — and I know I’m not alone.
“I’m done,” exasperated journalist and author Bari Weiss famously said on “Real Time with Bill Maher” in what has become sort of a national battle cry in late January. “I’m done with COVID.”
“We are too,” comes the popular response, even from experts in the ever-cautious public health community. But “it’s not done with us.”
Indeed, it is not. Too many COVID-19-infected victims are still getting sick and dying.
But almost all of the fatalities have been among the unvaccinated, despite efforts of diligent outreach workers and, for my family and friends, annoying nags like me to promote the vaccine.
At what point, I ask, are we as protected as we probably are ever going to get?
Offering signs of light at the end of our dreary and seemingly endless pandemic tunnel, governors in Illinois, New York and Rhode Island on Wednesday became the latest in Democratic-led states to announce a limited relaxation of their statewide mask requirements.
Those announcements closely followed similar loosening of restrictions by governors in California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Oregon that they also would be easing some of their masking requirements in the coming weeks, with some exceptions.
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