On Having Covid-19: Some Thoughts on the Pandemic that Never Ends

It finally happened.  After dodging several waves of Covid-19, my family got it after a camping trip where my wife most likely contracted it from a campground bathroom where someone’s lingering aerosols infected her.  We had been cautious by current standards, testing frequently, almost exclusively eating and drinking outside for years now, and never doing inside activities unmasked.  

We taught at our college in person, my son went to school, and we dodged bullet after bullet until we didn’t.  As many epidemiologists are saying now, “everyone is going to get it.”  We did.  

I am grateful that due to our vaccines, boosters, and Paxlovid all of us made it through our illnesses without too much suffering other than some nasty headaches, and, in my case, some Covid-induced blood clots that have me on blood thinners for at least a few months.  I was vulnerable due to a previous post-surgical DVT close to a decade ago. But I’m lucky, I guess. 

So it goes.  

We are fortunate to have gotten Covid post-vaccine and treatment, and I must say my gratitude to the work of the researchers who created these miracles and the health care workers who have labored tirelessly through a grueling few years of pandemic is immense.  After a brief moment as “frontline heroes,” doctors and nurses in the healthcare industry are still radically understaffed, overworked, and now underappreciated again.  

The folks who cared for me in Emergency when I went to get my leg checked out were kind, competent but clearly beleaguered as I watched them for many hours waiting for my tests in between every variety of trauma.  As one of my best friends, a doctor in Los Angeles, put it to me, hearing about my Covid gave him PTSD “from pulling sheets over peoples’ heads.”  It’s been a long, brutal slog.  And it’s not over.  

While sitting there waiting at Kaiser, my emotions ranged from sadness at the enormity of what we have been through during the pandemic years, marvel at the insane clusterfuck that is the average hospital ER, respect for the medical personnel who are overwhelmed every day, to deep anger at the colossal stupidity and selfishness that has made so much of the suffering and endless prolonging of this national disgrace possible .  

Yet this current wave of Covid-19 seems to be washing over most of us almost unnoticed.   

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I wrote a Memorial Day column about how we needed to “properly mourn the dead” as we approached 100,000 American lives lost in what Trump had deemed our “war” against an “invisible enemy.”  Last year I noted that previous column and, with a heavy heart, observed that we were then approaching 600,000 deaths, about the same tally as the worst death toll of any American war, the Civil War, in which 620,000 people perished.  

As of this writing, we have now passed the one-million mark of Covid-19 fatalities, coming close to matching the death toll of all American wars combined .  And of those deaths, since the advent of vaccines, a stunning number have been preventable. 

The unfortunate truth is that:

• A new analysis by researchers at Brown School of Public Health, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Microsoft AI for Health shows that vaccines could have prevented at least 318,000 Covid-19 deaths between January 2021 and April 2022. This means that at least every second person who died from Covid-19 since vaccines became available might have been saved by getting the shot.

Of course, this is a matter of not just the initial, criminally incompetent response of the Trump Administration, but the continuing ineptitude of our political leaders, with much of the blame going to those on the right who politicized science, masking, and vaccinations.  Thus, the populations of red states with demagogic, anti-science governors and legislators have suffered more than we have here in California or other states with more rational policies throughout the first part of the pandemic.  As the Brown study documents: 

• Displaying vaccine preventable deaths at this granular level allows a closer look at state vaccination performance. For example, California, Florida and Texas – all of which are large, populous states – have similarly high overall Covid-19 death rates. But Texas and Florida have about twice as many vaccine-preventable deaths compared to California.

But these days, partisan piety about how much better the Democrats have been than Republicans on Covid policy are long gone, with most prominent Democrats from the White House to state houses and municipal governments throwing caution to the wind, abandoning mask and vaccine mandates, and, if not declaring victory, at least winking at pervasive public apathy.  

As many have observed, the CDC’s revised guidelines have shifted the burden from state, national, and local governments to individuals.  So it’s essentially the wild west out there as we hope a nasty variant to be named later doesn’t emerge that dashes any hope of a new normal that does not include occasional massive waves of disease that might contain more deadly surprises.  

Indeed, with many polls showing more Americans worried about being inconvenienced by Covid mandates than dying from the virus itself, and angry antivax and mask wingnuts overwhelming concerned citizens at school boards and elsewhere, the notion that we should let science guide our public response has pretty much been thrown out the window.  

Thus, a discouraged Dr. Anthony Fauci is left to starkly warn of a dire fall and winter if vaccination and booster rates don’t increase, with very few people even listening, no less taking heed. In light of this, the good doctor’s earnest appeal to peoples’ “collective responsibility” to one another is almost painful to hear.

As Steven Thrasher observed in Scientific American, the United States now stands out not as a leader with its Covid response, but as a vanguard with regard to the normalization of preventable mass death:  

• Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has continued to have by far the most COVID infections and deaths per country: one million dead, with no end in sight. This is an unfathomable number, yet in contrast to the beginning of the pandemic, the news media has often downplayed the one-million mark. In May 2020 the New York Times ran a sympathetic headline reading “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased. But when the death toll reached nine times that number, the Times callously wrote, “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.”

Hence, far from solemnly remembering the dead as those pushing for a US Covid Memorial Day would like us to, Americans have essentially told them to get lost so we can get on with the business of normalizing never-ending Covid-19, complete with multiple waves or surges a year and the subsequent tallies of what are now deemed as acceptable losses for the foreseeable future.  

Most of us with vaccines don’t need to worry as much about hospitalization and death so we can simply reduce the ongoing news of preventable deaths to the status of background noise and hope we don’t get long Covid when we catch it for a second or third time.  We are, as the Guardian recently noted, “playing with fire.” And with schools relaxing most restrictions as vaccination rates lag future risks with new variants loom just around the corner.  

The U.S. has an extensive history of declaring “wars” on things and then losing them and/or forgetting about them entirely.  We lost the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and the war on a good number of other things.  I forget how many.  

We just lost the war on Covid too if we were ever really fighting it.  Ultimately, we’ll shrug off a million deaths and many more just as we have come to tolerate the periodic slaughter of school children by armed gunmen.  Life is cheap in America.  

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: This is the way the pandemic ends (or doesn’t), not with a bang but a whimper.