Four years (!)

Four (!) years ago this week, the World Health Organization declared the rapidly spreading covid-19 virus to be a global pandemic. (I meant to post this earlier, but it's been a pretty wild week...!)  

There's been lots of commentary in the media & elsewhere online, marking four years of the pandemic. Katie Hawkins-Gaar at the Substack "My Sweet Dumb Brain" posted "Throwback: Blame the anniversary effect."  (Subhead: "It’s been four years. Things are still weird."  Yep. :p )  

On the other hand, in "Four Years of Covid," Mel at Stirrup Queens remembered how she couldn't find soap in the early days of the pandemic:  "We still mask. We still carry hand sanitizer in our pockets. We’ve had many vaccinations. But we travel again. We see friends. We go to parties and eat outdoors. It’s a good life; not as carefree as it was four years ago, but so much better than the beginning when I dreamed about soap." 

As I commented to Mel, "I think the worst part is how divisive these past four years have been. I feel like so many people have amnesia about just how bad it all was — and still is! It’s still very much of a threat to our collective and individual health and well being, but it feels like our governments (and corporations) are determined to move us all along (“nothing to see here”) and have us believing it’s over (it’s not) and that it’s no more serious than a bad cold or the flu (maybe, but maybe not). Sigh." 

To that point, the CDC recently revised its covid isolation guidelines, shortening the recommended isolation period to just two days instead of the previous five. The CDC said this will bring them in line with its advice for other kinds of respiratory infections, including influenza and RSV. 

Not everyone thinks this is a good thing (including me!). "Why Are We Still Flu-ifying COVID?  The diseases are nowhere near the same," Katherine J. Wu wrote in the Atlantic. (Gift link; available for 14 days.)  Excerpt:  

...COVID and the flu are nowhere near the same. SARS-CoV-2 still spikes in non-winter seasons and simmers throughout the rest of the year. In 2023, COVID hospitalized more than 900,000 Americans and killed 75,000; the worst flu season of the past decade hospitalized 200,000 fewer people and resulted in 23,000 fewer deaths. A recent CDC survey reported that more than 5 percent of American adults are currently experiencing long COVID, which cannot be fully prevented by vaccination or treatment, and for which there is no cure. Plus, scientists simply understand much less about the coronavirus than flu viruses. Its patterns of spread, its evolution, and the durability of our immunity against it all may continue to change.

And yet, the CDC and White House continue to fold COVID in with other long-standing seasonal respiratory infections. When the nation’s authorities start to match the precautions taken against COVID with those for flu, RSV, or common colds, it implies “that the risks are the same,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland, told me. Some of those decisions are “not completely unreasonable,” says Costi Sifri, the director of hospital epidemiology at UVA Health, especially on a case-by-case basis. But taken together, they show how bent America has been on treating COVID as a run-of-the-mill disease—making it impossible to manage the illness whose devastation has defined the 2020s.

Meanwhile, the vaccine hesitancy that has flourished these past few years has extended beyond covid vaccines.  Measles, which was declared eradicated in Canada 20 years ago, is sadly making a comeback, with increasing numbers of cases. I was thankful that Little Great-Nephew got his shot yesterday. 

(I don't remember whether I had measles as a child? I do remember that my sister & I got shots for "red measles" in the late 1960s/early 1970s -- probably one of the early measles vaccines available. I had my family doctor test me when I first started trying to conceive, and apparently I am immune to rubella?) 

Last year at this time, I wrote a post called "THREE YEARS -- plus odds & ends."  In 2022, I posted about "Two years of pandemic living," and what was good/better and what wasn't. In 2021, I relived March 12, 2020 -- i.e., what I called  "The Last Normal Day" -- one year later. These and all my other past pandemic-related posts here, tagged "COVID-19 pandemic." 

As I said last year, "And so onward we muddle" -- now into YEAR 5 (!). (Sigh...)