The vast majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, have moved on from Covid. As I wrote back in March:
The chaotic news cycle in Ukraine has overshadowed a significant development domestically — the drastic shift in public opinion on Covid-19 precautions. “Two years after the start of the pandemic, the nation is ready to move on,” Axios reported last week. “64% of survey respondents now favor federal, state and local governments lifting all COVID-19 restrictions, up 20 percentage points since early February.” (Although “three in four say they’d go back to masking if infections increase again where they live,” it noted.) On top of that, “84% say their state of emotional well-being is good, the highest shares for both since May 2020.” And “75% said the country is moving toward a time when COVID won’t interrupt daily life, up from 66% last month.”
Notably, it’s Democrats who are reporting the largest shift in views toward the pandemic. According to recent numbers from Morning Consult, “the share of adults who say COVID-19 is a severe health risk in their local community fell to an all-time low of 17%, driven by a roughly 20-point decrease among Democrats in recent weeks. Just under a quarter of Democrats now say COVID-19 is a severe local risk, compared with 12% of Republicans, a level that has also fallen since late January.” From January 14 to March 13, the share of American adults who see Covid as a “severe” health risk fell 17 points, from 34 to 17 percent. Among Republicans, that number fell 11 points, from 23 to 12 percent. But among Democrats over that time period, it fell 23 points, from 46 to 23.
And yet, as I noted at the time, the one group that hasn’t — and won’t — move on from the pandemic is progressive elites, as reflected in the persistently hysterical headlines from mainstream news outlets and the dire warnings from their counterparts in the public-health bureaucracy.
That still doesn’t appear to have changed. Covid doesn’t feature particularly prominently in the news cycle these days — most Americans are more concerned with kitchen-table issues such as inflation, crime, and so on. The last vestiges of mask mandates are mostly gone. But here’s the Associated Press earlier this week dwelling on voices insisting that we can’t go back to normal:
Some of those left behind say they cannot return to normal. They replay their loved ones’ voicemail messages. Or watch old videos to see them dance. When other people say they are done with the virus, they bristle with anger or ache in silence.
Of course, Covid’s death toll is unspeakably tragic — no question. But to continue to inflict restrictions — which have their own harmful effects — on the population is its own kind of cruelty, particularly in the face of a pile of scientific evidence that they would do more harm than good. Still, public-health experts, and their sympathetic allies in the media, can’t seem to let it go. As Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, told the New York Times earlier this week:
“Every single time we think we’re through this, every single time we think we have the upper hand, the virus pulls a trick on us,” Dr. Andersen said. “The way to get it under control is not, ‘Let’s all get infected a few times a year and then hope for the best.’”
The Times is still quoting numerous “experts” suggesting that it’s a good idea to mask up in many places and chiding New York City mayor Eric Adams for neglecting “to bring back mask mandates despite a citywide increase in newly confirmed cases driven by Omicron subvariants.” In the Atlantic yesterday, staff writer Ed Yong mourns the fact that “the CDC’s current guidelines effectively say that Americans can act as if COVID is not a crisis,” despite the fact that “the country still may be heading to that point.” In the same outlet, staff writer Katherine J. Wu writes:
Now that infection rates are trending up again from their early-spring low, it’s hard to put them in perspective. Sure, we’ve once again blown past the mark of 60,000 new documented cases a day (and that’s just the ones we know about), but that’s less than 10 percent of what the CDC was recording in mid-January, when the original version of Omicron, now called BA.1, was at the top of its game. Sure, hospitalizations are headed in the wrong direction, but deaths, so far, are still going down. If BA.1’s horrific blitzkrieg was a wave, what do we call this? A wavelet? A swell? A bump, a ripple, a Hobbit-size hillock? Euphemisms for the recent rise—sharp, but not the sharpest—have been trickling in for weeks. But maybe it’s time to just call a surge a surge.
Eventually, the people who run our institutions will have to learn to let Americans make their own decisions. Vaccines are widely available. Promising Covid treatments are advancing. There are a myriad of other issues that require attending to. It’s time to focus on them.