On January 30th of this year the Biden administration announced that COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) and national emergency declarations would be ending on May 11, 2023. These pandemic declarations were announced at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. They helped with various policies such as the expansion of telehealth and free COVID testing. It helped with coverage with Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP, as well as private insurance, speeding up the acceptance of medications and treatments so that patients can be treated.
To say that the last 3 years have been hard is an understatement. 2020 was one of the roughest years of my family’s life. We tried our best to stay safe. We stayed home that whole year except for trips to the grocery store. The following year I lost my mother due to complications resulting from COVID-19. Shortly after she died, my brother died similarly. As vaccines began to roll out, we became more and more comfortable out in public. We finally got COVID at the end of 2022. The recovery was not bad and we were testing negative relatively quickly. In 2023, my family and I are so ready to move on and live our lives. We wear masks less often. We keep them close by for trips to the store or if we’re not feeling safe in our environment.
Despite being fed up with COVID-19 and the precautions, ending emergency declarations is scary. Sure, if I only account for how my family is doing, it makes sense. We are well equipped to deal with our health thanks to our insurance and decent jobs, but only considering my family would be short-sighted. The problem is, there are plenty of people out there who cannot get insurance. There are plenty of people out there who either cannot get the vaccines available or flat out refuse them. People who mask in public are in the minority. I cannot count how many times I’ve heard nasty coughs around me. I’ve had that nasty cough. We are living in highly infectious times and the people who will be most affected by the end of these declarations will be the poor. All of this is scary. We need to support each other as we continue to live with COVID-19.
I had hoped that the pandemic would change our culture so that persons suffering from cold symptoms (or any signs of illness) would adopt the habit of wearing facemarks to protect those around them from the particles exiting their bodies as they exhale, sneeze, or cough. Sadly, the pandemic seems to have made many people lose their rational faculties (or did they ever have any?), and the wearing of masks became a political and identity issue.
One thing I learned from the pandemic was that medical science isn't nearly as good as I had supposed, and the tribal cognitive biases that make people dismiss any facts or findings that contradict their beliefs are strong within the scientific community. I used to have respect for editorial boards at top medical journals, but they published some fake articles in 2020, and had to retract those. Faculty at Stanford University were publicizing so many findings based on ridiculously bad studies that I started to think Stanford must now be a joke. With Ivermectin, there were many promising studies and findings, and people rejected those as if they were 16th Catholics rejecting some heresy (faith and tribal loyalty guided their rejection of the evidence, I believe). But then, as the evidence for Ivermectin weakened to a point where it now seems to have generally only a trivial benefit, if any, the true-believers in Ivermectin continued to hold to their faith. With masks, there was likewise a tribal division. Even the Cochran Collaboration, for which I had previously held the highest respect, published a review led by Tom Jefferson that was of very dubious quality, showing us that we don't really know what effect wearing masks has. People who supported Ivermectin and were opposed to masks then started saying things like, "there is no evidence that masks work" when in fact there is quite a bit of evidence that they do, just as there was for a time quite a few promising studies about Ivermectin. They hated it when people ignored the evidence in favor of Ivermectin or cited flawed studies to claim Ivermectin was useless, but then did exactly the same when it came to considering the evidence for the benefits of masks. My conclusion is that people's attraction to tribal identities around controversial issues clouds their judgement even more than I had assumed, and I've always thought of myself as fairly doubtful about the rational abilities of humans (I always look both ways when crossing 6th and 5th, although they are one-way streets).
I'm so sorry about your loss of your mother and your brother in the Pandemic. Many students in my classes lost family members to COVID, and my friends in some of the hardest-hit areas (like New York City in the first months of the Pandemic) lost a huge percentage of their friends and acquaintances. It was like the AIDS thing in the 1980s, but compressed into weeks rather than years. I think of the over 1 million extra deaths we had in the USA from COVID and medical complications related to the pandemic, and the scale of the pain is beyond my comprehension. I liked listening to those obituary stories NPR and the PBS News Hour was providing to look at the lives of people who were lost in the pandemic, and hear about all these wonderful people and the grieving relatives who mourned them. COVID was a horrible way to die, and my tendency to approach the problem as an intellectual game of numbers and forecasts helped distance me from the horror, and these stories on NPR and PBS helped bring me back to my humanity.
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