How to Reclaim Normal Life Without Being ‘Done’
In many ways, the pandemic has never felt quite so paradoxical. In the United States, cases and hospitalizations are falling, and millions of people are as vaccinated as they can be. A rash of coastal-state mayors and governors is peeling back mask mandates—a stateside mirror of countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where pandemic restrictions have all but disappeared. Things are definitively better than they were just a few weeks ago. And yet—and yet—they are nowhere near anything we’d ever call good. Immunization rates on the whole are still far too low. The next variant of concern is inevitably on its way. The health-care system is still stretched too thin, and the COVID-conscious cohort is thinning by the hour. The pandemic has always been a tricky behavioral landscape for individuals to navigate. But now? It’s like all of us are walking an isthmus between islands of dread, the mainland still very much out of sight.
[Read: Calling Omicron ‘mild’ is wishful thinking]
There is also, regrettably, no universal map—and most of our internal compasses probably feel shot. Two years into the global crisis, individual choices and circumstances have stretched the vulnerability spectrum so that it now all the way to . At every point along this continuum, some people are still trying to ratchet down risk as much as they can; some are living entirely sans COVID cares. We’re all trying to make decisions for ourselves, and still every pandemic choice affects all of us at once. It’s no wonder “so many people have thrown their hands up and said, ‘Screw it,’” Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, told me. I’ll come out and say it: All of this is truly exhausting, and it very much sucks.
