We’re Entering the Control Phase of the Pandemic
And just like that, the national attitude on COVID is flipping like a light switch. As the United States descends the bumpy back end of the Omicron wave, governors and mayors up and down the coasts are extinguishing indoor mask mandates and pulling back proof-of-vaccination protocols. In many parts of the country, restaurants, bars, gyms, and movie theaters are operating at pre-pandemic capacity, not a face covering to be seen; even grade schools and universities have started to relax testing and isolation rules. These policy pivots mirror a turn in public resolve: Two years into the pandemic, many Americans are ready to declare the crisis chapter of COVID-19 over, and move on to the next.
We can debate ad nauseam whether these rollbacks are premature. What’s far clearer is this: We’ve been at similar junctures before—at the end of the very first surge, again in the pre-Delta downslope. Each time, the virus has come roaring back. It is not done with us. Which means that we cannot be done with it.
What’s up ahead is not COVID’s end, but the start of our control phase, in which we invest in measures to shrink the virus’s burden to a more manageable size. “This is the larger, longer game we’re having to think about,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me.
[Read: Endemicity is meaningless]
To even think of controlling COVID for the long term means knocking up against some of the limits of our knowledge. Our future will depend both on the virus’s continued evolution, impossible to predict right now, and on our response, which will hinge on the strength of our resources and our willingness to deploy them. Every disease that troubles us prompts some sort of reaction; for this one, the nation is still deciding how much to invest. Control, then, can’t mean putting the virus behind us—quite the opposite. It means keeping tabs on it, even when it’s not terribly abundant; it means building and maintaining an arsenal of weapons to fight it; it means having the resources and sociopolitical will to react rapidly when the threat returns. Monitor, then intervene, then monitor, then intervene.
Taking this challenge seriously—trying to properly contain a deadly, fast-moving, shape-shifting virus that has spent the past two years walloping us—could require a revamp of
