We are grateful for the drugs that work, for the shots keeping most of us alive - and the new vaccines in development that might reduce these staggering waves of breakthroughs.īut there’s still plenty of virus to see, hear and speak of. We worry less about our older or sicker relatives. We go more places and do more things than we did a year ago. Of course they are, in just about every way we can think of. We’re tired of the pandemic too! And we aren’t saying that things aren’t better. (“BUT THE PERSON STANDING NEXT TO YOUR UNMASKED FACE AT THE GROCERY STORY OR ON THE BUS MAY NOT BE.”)Īnd when we’re being virus-splained by someone with that particular blend of arrogance and ignorance, we’ve been known to casually drop into conversation, “WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT VETERANS’ HEALTH DATA SUGGESTING ELEVATED RISK OF HEART ATTACK AND STROKE AND DIABETES FOR A YEAR AFTER COVID?”ĭon’t get us wrong. AND IT MIGHT BE EVEN WORSE,” we want to scream.) (“YOU CAN GET IT AGAIN - MAYBE IN A MONTH. That leaves us at Nightly feeling like skunks at the garden party - that is, if we had enough friends who didn’t have Covid right now to even have a garden party. “So the way of dealing with it is: ‘We’re done.’” “People are tired of the pandemic,” University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm told Nightly.
Yet, in a New York Times poll last week of registered voters, less than 1 percent placed the pandemic as their top priority. Some medical experts think we may be hitting as many as a million cases a day, though it’s impossible to tell exactly since so many people now rely on at-home rapid tests, if they test at all. wastewater surveillance sites show moderate to high viral levels - with 40 percent hitting the highest level since Omicron snuck up on us last Thanksgiving. Hospitalizations are creeping up, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker. daily death toll of breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. “The worst version of the virus” to date, is how Scripps Research virus expert Eric Topol summed it up.ĭeaths are mercifully steady, usually running about 300-350 a day (though right now it’s passed 400), but that’s still well over the average U.S. Yet the BA.5 variant, which looks to be the most adept yet at evading vaccine protection and antibodies from prior infections, is spreading voraciously. It’s all over the place, including college-educated blue-staters who are weary of the pandemic and have convinced themselves that just because they or their family or their brother-in-law’s colleague didn’t get really sick from Covid, no one will get really sick from Covid. And it’s no longer coming solely from science-denying, Anthony Fauci-detesting Trump voters.
Midway through year three, the denial is pervasive. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesīIPARTISAN DENIAL - We have entered the “See no virus, Hear no virus, Speak no virus” stage of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden and other top Democrats mingle among a largely unmasked crowd at the Congressional Picnic at the White House on Tuesday.
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