Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are going up in much of the United States, hinting at a third wave. Fortunately, healthcare businesses and governments have the tools to fight this surge: testing, tracing, quarantining the infected, and most of all, vaccinating the public.
Nonetheless, the Biden administration is reacting with hysterics and ridiculous nitpicking. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention invoked an “impending sense of doom.” Biden adviser Anthony Fauci over the weekend explained why vaccinated adults getting together could still be dangerous if their children played together.
If Walensky and Fauci are going to keep this up, President Joe Biden should bar them from further media appearances. Public health officials should be spending their time approving and deploying the vaccines from Novavax and AstraZeneca, not spreading baseless fears. When it comes to messaging, the public needs neither doom nor nitpicking but rather clear guidance on a “finish line” and what to expect “after COVID” to feel like.
Specifically, amid all the talk of variants and unmasked children, and the rare case of fully-vaccinated people getting the coronavirus, a basic truth remains: “Zero COVID” is not a realistic goal. The coronavirus may never fully disappear. There cannot be any holding off of the full reopening waiting for such an impossible dream.
The U.S., like the rest of the world, doesn’t impose the restrictions needed to reduce influenza infections or deaths to zero. Instead, health authorities offer and encourage vaccines and try to protect vulnerable populations. “Zero flu” would require school closures every winter, outlawing church, closing bars, and requiring masking and social distancing every single winter, forever.
Governments don’t demand traffic accidents go to zero — that would involve a driving age of 25 and a 5 mph speed limit, just for starters.
It would take massive restrictions on freedom, demolition of society and community, and cost to the economy to reduce deaths to zero. It’s even more unreasonable to aim for zero infections when an overwhelming majority of infections result in mild or no symptoms.
To demand zero COVID-19 infections before ending mask mandates, capacity limits, lockdowns, and school closures is downright inhumane. The emotional, social, economic, and physical costs of these restrictions have been immense. Students suffer from not seeing classmates or getting to know teachers. Many parents suffer from needing to monitor and administer at-home schooling. Parents, children, single people, grandparents, and everyone suffer when communities are suspended by the closures of libraries, sports leagues, and meeting grounds such as coffee shops, bowling alleys, and bars.
Families and individuals suffer from work lost.
Some of these mitigation measures have real benefits. All of them have great costs. They need to be ended as soon as possible.
Fauci and others constantly give reasons why life won’t be safe even for the fully vaccinated. There are variants to the virus. There’s the unsupported, if not yet disproven, notion that vaccines will prevent illness but not transmission. There are also anecdotes about the tiny number of cases in which the fully vaccinated nevertheless get infected.
People like Fauci could go on forever with exceptions, excuses, and hypotheticals to justify continued feelings of doom and panic and infringements on freedom. Free people need to push back on this nanny-state urge. In part, that means reminding the public that, as with other maladies, the defeat of the coronavirus doesn’t require reducing cases to zero. Indeed, the costs of zero COVID-19 infections are too high.
