There will never be an end to coronavirus restrictions unless the public decides to end them.
Health officials certainly don’t plan on ending them. Just this weekend, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky released a video in support of continued masking in which she cited cold and flu season as a justification for indoor mask mandates. Cold and flu season. Two common sicknesses we have lived with for hundreds of years that pose little to no threat to the general public.
This pivot was entirely predictable since the minimization of an actual threat — serious illness and/or death — stopped being the goal for public health officials a long time ago. No matter how much hospitalization and death rates decrease, officials continue to treat positive case numbers as the defining metric for restrictions. Their goal now is clear: They want a zero-COVID, and apparently a zero-sickness, world.
Here’s another example: Dr. Jay Bhatt, a medical professional, wrote an article for ABC News arguing that masking indoors and social distancing is still necessary even after receiving a booster shot against COVID-19. He’s not talking here about people who haven’t been vaccinated at all. He’s talking about fully vaccinated adults who have decided to get another shot as additional protection, and he still wants them to restrict their daily lives.
Noticeably, two of the five justifications he gives for these continued precautions have nothing to do with COVID-19. One is, “It’s flu season.” Another is, “Other viruses are out there.”
This is, to put it mildly, delusional. We have moved so far past the original goal, which was to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing from a massive influx of COVID cases, that health officials are now trying to convince the public that getting sick at all is something that must be forcibly prevented.
Our ability to reasonably assess the risks of this thing we call everyday life has been hijacked by a bunch of power-hungry hypochondriacs, and for too long, a good chunk of the public has gone along with it. Certain areas, such as Los Angeles and New York City, might never return to pre-COVID normalcy. But most people still have enough sanity to want to live life as they did before, without masks, traveling restrictions, or social distancing, even if doing so means getting sick once and a while.
We need this sane majority — especially the business owners, corporate executives, and school officials who don’t want to live in COVID permanency — to stop giving these officials the compliance they need. The sooner that happens, the sooner this mass mania ends.
