Giving up

We're officially giving up on COVID now. My Democratic governor is going to drop indoor public masks mandates and probably mandates in schools soon after. Some other Democratic governors are doing the same.

Why?

They will say it's because cases are dropping, so obviously the pandemic is over. They will say it's time to learn to "live with COVID". But deaths are still over 2,000 a day in the US (Covid deaths highest in a year as omicron targets the unvaccinated and elderly). And you would have to be brain-dead to believe there will not be future surges from a multitude of variants (The Atlantic Daily: America Still Isn’t Ready for the Next Pandemic).

It's political expediency - that is why politicians are relaxing measures to inhibit spreading the virus. Voters are bored with the effort, so they are ready to accept a daily death toll in the thousands. Don't worry - the dead people will be (mostly) racial minorities, poor people, old people, sick people. Those people don't vote, do they? Those people aren't us, right?

This is who we are. Not just Americans, but humans. Chimps have a greater ability to defer gratification than us. We just don't have the integrity or patience or decency to actually do the right thing about anything that matters, whether it's a world-wide plague or climate change. It's why we're going to persih from the Earth (after we first kill off everything that rode into town with us).