From our collective experience as a global society, the concept of locking people away from one another has had little effect on the overall spread of Covid-19. Many people can, in fact, stay home and work from home and keep their children home. Many people, on the other hand, simply cannot. There are too many home situations and work situations to account for a massive stay-at-home lockdown mentality. Add to that a desire even by compliant citizens or authoritative politicians to willfully disobey these orders when it suits them.
Beyond the failure of lockdowns and closures to contain the spread of a highly contagious airborne virus, the mental and educational damage inflicted on millions of adults and children is still yet unrealized. Jobs crushed, businesses destroyed, relationships ended, children losing entire grade levels of ability, and a lost period of celebrated life events.
It may be time that some in the ruling class begin to admit, as some already have, that ending the pandemic and returning to normal life does not equate to zero Covid cases. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, an ardent Democrat, declared the emergency in his state “over” and said he won’t be re-instating new mandates, for example.
As Tim Carney writes at the Washington Examiner, everybody’s going to get Covid-19 at some point no matter what precautions they take or how careful they think they are:
It’s time to face the fact that nearly everyone is going to get COVID-19. We need to stop treating the coronavirus like the bubonic plague, or like a punishment for sin, and start treating it like an endemic disease.
Even if you wear your mask, refuse to interact with unvaccinated children, force everyone around you to wear a mask, and sanitize your hands like crazy, you’re going to get COVID-19 — and you’ll probably get it repeatedly.
Individuals should get vaccinated, not so much to prevent infection — the vaccines do help somewhat on that score in the short term, but breakthrough cases seem extremely common — but to make their inevitable infections less serious. Most coronavirus cases are mild, meaning they don’t require hospitalization, but those “mild” cases are often unpleasant and debilitating for days. The vaccines make the mild cases milder.
More importantly, vaccination reduces by 90% the likelihood that you will be hospitalized or killed by the virus.
Carney is not arguing this in an unsympathetic way to those who have perished from Covid-19 since March of 2020. Every life lost to this disease is a tragedy. There are few if any of us who have not watched a family member or someone within our circle experience a serious case requiring hospitalization or resulting in death.
On the contrary, Carney’s argument is that government obstinance and vaccine-blinders have caused unintended consequences that could be avoided.
The problem with trying to eliminate Covid is like trying to eliminate the common cold. Airborne viruses travel much faster than humans can comprehend no matter how hard we try and how many restrictions are placed on people. The virus is always twenty steps ahead.
Carney’s point here is not that we should ignore Covid, or downplay the deaths, it’s that the government should get smarter about it and pivot to helping people live with it rather than trying to eliminate it:
Also, since everyone’s going to get it, everyone should have rapid tests at home. Rapid tests at home help you to discern whether your headache, fever, and cough stem from COVID-19 or not. They also help you know whether you’re contagious days after your symptoms end. Bizarrely, the Biden White House has mocked the notion of getting everyone at-home tests.
Biden and company are lukewarm on at-home testing and on therapeutics in part because they are still fighting an unwinnable war.
The fact that rapid tests haven’t been more widely developed and ubiquitous in every home is a disservice. It’s a simple check that many, many people would gladly employ on a regular basis and a way to detect cases before they spread further. Yes, false positives and negatives occur, but that’s more manageable than trying to lock people away or live under a false assumption that you can somehow avoid this virus forever.
Writing at the UK Daily Mail, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, of Stanford Medical school, says it’s time to end the pandemic by helping people learn to cope with Covid-19 in their daily life the same way they do the seasonal flu.
The plan is simple: Protect the most vulnerable with vaccines, provide more rapid testing, and fast-track available therapeutics to treat cases before they become serious:
The centerpiece of the declaration is a call for increased focused protection of the vulnerable older population, who are more than a thousand times more likely to die from COVID infection than the young.
We can protect the vulnerable without harming the rest of the population.
As I stated above, we do not have any technology that can stop viral spread.
While excellent vaccines protect the vaccinated versus hospitalization or death if infected, they provide only temporary and marginal protection versus infection and disease transmission after the second dose.
The same is likely true for booster shots, which use the same technology as the initial doses.
Lockdowns don’t work, as evidenced by recent history. Furthermore, we have mountains of evidence floating around indicating that alternative ideas orthodoxy sometimes produce better results:
During Florida’s summer wave, Gov. Ron DeSantis promoted the use of monoclonal antibodies – an FDA-approved treatment – by patients early in the course of the disease, an action that saved many lives.
Safe and inexpensive supplements like Vitamin D have been shown effective. Promising new treatments from Pfizer and a new antibody treatment for the immunocompromised by Astra Zeneca promise to become more widely available. Until that happens, they should be preserved for use by the most vulnerable when sick.
Third, the widespread availability of inexpensive, privately conducted, rapid antigen tests in the UK has empowered everyone to make wise choices that reduce the risk of infecting vulnerable people. So far, the FDA says that these tests work to detect omicron.
The point from both these articles is that Covid-19 likely cannot be eliminated. There are too many people in the world for this virus to infect, re-infect, mutate, and re-infect again. It will become endemic and it will hopefully weaken over time, as the omicron variant appears to be doing, based on some studies.
If President Biden took a different turn, stopped relying exclusively on vaccination status as an indicator of “winning” the war against Covid while we’re losing it, the battle itself could be won today while the war rages on. If vaccinated individuals can still catch and spread Covid-19, then there is little hope that universal vaccination is the metric by which this pandemic can be declared won.
Cases will continue, variants will emerge, and people need to be empowered to live life and do simple things like at-home tests to help stem the spread.
Back to Carney’s article, the message from the CDC and Biden administration is one of a prophylactic nature:
Bizarrely, the Biden White House has mocked the notion of getting everyone at-home tests.
Biden and company are lukewarm on at-home testing and on therapeutics in part because they are still fighting an unwinnable war.
That’s a horrible response. Pooh-poohing treatments and saying, “Don’t get sick in the first place,” is like dismissing a request for a fire extinguisher in the kitchen by saying, “Don’t start any grease fires in the first place.” Or perhaps, “Don’t elect Joe Biden in the first place.” For the seriously ill, it’s too late to change the past.
If Covid-19 infections are going to continue in some capacity and the goal is to slow the spread, then give people the tools to actually slow the spread. A wink and prayer at vaccination as the only tool simply isn’t working, you don’t have to look far to arrive at that conclusion while many countries, with extremely high vaccination rates, are once again fighting a Covid wave this winter.
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