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.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, for example, plans to lift his indoor mask mandate for most public places on Feb. 28, although masking rules for schools will stay in place as the state fights a recent court ruling that questioned the governor’s legal authority to issue the mandate.

Still, the policy changes mark a turning point for Democratic governors, putting them ahead of the Biden administration’s cautions and those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite calls from some experts who urge Americans to learn to live with the coronavirus, even as science continues to fight it, in a “new normal.”

In one of three articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association by six of President Joe Biden’s former health advisers, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Michael Osterholm and Dr. Celine Gounder wrote:

“Without a strategic plan for the ‘new normal,’ with endemic COVID-19, more people in the U.S. will unnecessarily experience morbidity and mortality, health inequities will widen and trillions will be lost from the U.S. economy.”

Besides calling for vaccine mandates and better access to cheap and rapid testing, among other ideas, the former advisors also called significantly for “humility” and a rebuilding of trust in the nation’s public health system after an initial response that they called “seriously flawed.”

Some of those flaws in the responses, which began under former President Donald Trump’s administration are understandable, in dealing with a persistent, evolving and previously unknown virus.

Indeed, many of the vaccine-hesitant, including some of my own relatives and friends, have been quick to cite what sounds to them like double-speak and broken promises, such as Biden’s failure to achieve the ambitious vaccination goals he set long before the emergence of the omicron surge.

And how about those rare but still dangerous “breakthrough infections” that hit those of us who are vaccinated? “Disappointing” is a mild description for how I feel after telling everyone, as Biden did, that they wouldn’t have to worry about COVID-19 anymore after getting the vaccine. Like Biden, I’ve had to amend that argument.

Who knew? At least, the percentage of breakthrough infections is small and the symptoms less severe than among the unvaccinated. For those who still insist on resisting vaccination, I’ll keep trying. But increasingly, amid the abundance of free vaccines in this country, that’s their choice.

The news, as I often say, never sleeps. But even those of us who try to show an abundance of caution about threats to life and limb, have to make assessments of risk that, even as we fight the virus, help us to figure out how to live with it as Americans did after earlier pandemics.

For now, we need to protect ourselves, but also figure out as best we can what will be the “new normal.” Otherwise, when we hear that “the coast is clear,” will we believe it?

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)