Fear Fatigue: ‘Americans Have Become Numb’ to Covid Warnings

Can you blame the average person for becoming numb to the daily, sometimes hourly onslaught of continued Covid news? So many have tuned out months ago considering the circumstances. With a cadre of vaccines, therapeutics, and natural immunity, many people feel they have covered their risk factors to the point where returning to normal life is the only viable option rather than living in the Covid fear bubble created by the media and public health officials.

Doctors are now at a crossroads of worrying that their fear-tainted messages of the omicron variant are getting lost while they continue to deal with delta variant cases. The public attention span is short, and a heightened state of fear can only last for so long before a new level of risk tolerance becomes naturally baked into people’s daily lives.

In that regard, public health officials would like you to worry about omicron, but also please worry about delta as well, it’s still out there:

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has dominated the news since its discovery in southern Africa was announced last week, but it is the Delta variant — which has been in the United States for months — that is still unilaterally driving the current increase in infection rates in parts of the country.

The disconnect presents public health officials with a new challenge: warning Americans about a new strain of the coronavirus while reminding them that an older strain is showing clear signs of resurgence.

For now, Delta remains the more pressing concern. “It’s true that Delta still constitutes 99.9 percent of all variants isolated in the U.S. However, it is also true that Americans seem to have become numb to Delta,” Dr. Leana Wen, the former Baltimore health commissioner and, more recently, the author of “Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health,” told Yahoo News.

“I hope Omicron will make them pay attention to the threat that COVID still plays in our daily lives,” she added.

Many Americans are not just numb to fears over delta, they’re numb to the renewed drumbeat of doom and gloom over Covid in general. Can it be fatal for some people? Yes. Can we still live life? Yes. Both of those facts are true for a host of diseases we live with every day.

Automobile accidents pose a greater risk than practically anything else we do in life on a daily basis but we get in the car and drive off, aware of the risk, but appreciating the benefit more. Heck, just walking the streets of Chicago or Baltimore right now is probably more dangerous than a front-line war zone.

Just like that, seemingly overnight after Thanksgiving, we were being gifted with press conferences featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci and it felt like March of 2020 all over again. Set aside all the advancements we’ve made since then, they seem to mean nothing. Now there are states like Oregon talking about permanent mask mandates in some settings, because for many public officials, this level of control will never end, and they don’t want it to.

Just remember this holiday season, you’re probably not paying attention to the steady diet of Covid fear now gripping some portions of the media and political class yet again. Don’t get too comfortable, though. After delta and omicron, there will be another new variant waiting to create panic next year.