In March 2020 I wrote that we needed to “cancel everything” in response to the acute threat of Covid-19. Events with large numbers of people should be postponed, companies should send their employees to work from home and schools should teach online.
I’m still convinced it was the right thing to do. Before any vaccine and before we had effective treatments against the disease, these measures were necessary to save lives and prevent the collapse of the health system.
Today, almost two years later, we finally have the tools to live with the virus. There are highly effective vaccines available free of charge to anyone who chooses to use them. The risk posed by Covid has dropped dramatically for the fully immunized. Between October and November 2021, 7.8 out of every 100,000 unvaccinated Americans died from Covid each week, according to the CDC. In that same period, 0.6 out of every 100,000 vaccinated Americans died from the disease each week. Among those who had also taken the booster shot, only 0.1 in every 100,000 died.
Today we also have antiviral drugs that, according to clinical trials, reduce hospitalizations or deaths from Covid by almost 90%. Although they were approved too late to be available to most patients during the explosion of the omicron variant, they should soon become a highly effective and widely available tool.
At this point, a very important percentage of the population has also acquired some degree of natural immunity. As the wave of the omicron begins to recede, the combination of vaccines, natural defenses and effective drugs against the disease significantly reduces the danger of hospital emergency departments becoming overwhelmed in the near future.
Those who refuse to be immunized remain vulnerable. But our current attitude towards them makes little sense. The unvaccinated are subject to immense pressure and moral outrage. Governments and private institutions are doing what they can to make their daily lives difficult. Many even openly rejoice in the suffering of others when anti-vaccine people die of Covid. This is wrong. We must feel compassion for all victims of this pandemic, whatever risk they may have chosen to take.
At the same time, the unvaccinated are implicitly the main justification for the restrictions that still continue. Those who want to keep them point to persistently high mortality from Covid, and these deaths are especially concentrated among the unvaccinated. This too is an error. We don’t have to live our lives on hold indefinitely because others have decided to put their own lives at risk.
The immunosuppressed and the elderly continue to be at significant risk, through no fault of their own. Even young, healthy people can have symptoms, such as persistent fatigue, long after they recover from a Covid infection.
It is a tragic fact that the worldwide spread of the coronavirus is likely to continue to produce severe suffering for years to come, but that is not reason enough to permanently change our society in ways that make it less free, sociable and joyful.
Just as we are willing to take calculated risks in other areas of life, we must be willing to tolerate some risk of contagious disease. When you go across the country by car, you know you could have an accident. There is a risk that you could be injured, that the other driver could be injured, or that a child crossing the street could be hit. But this does not morally oblige him to spend the rest of his life without leaving home.
The risk from bacteria and viruses is still much lower today than it has been throughout most of human history. In 1900, nearly 1% of the population died from infectious diseases each year, about an order of magnitude more than today. However, people exposed to these dangers chose to live a full social life, judging that the risk of pestilence, however serious, did not justify giving up the need for human contact.
If no one went out to a restaurant or threw a party ever again, we would reduce the transmission of Covid, as well as that of many other infectious diseases. But the cure would be worse than the evil. As our ancestors did, we must prioritize living life over minimizing mortality.
This means ending the pandemic purgatory we are living in. It would involve ending the remaining restrictions imposed by governments on day-to-day activities. We would end up with merely performative measures. Politicians and public health officials would convey the message that people should no longer limit social activities, encouraging them to return to dinner parties and taking their children out to play with friends without feeling guilty. And we would all try to live as normally as possible.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we took too long to adapt to changing circumstances. Now that the risk that Covid poses to society is much lower than at any point in the last couple of years, we are once again in danger of prolonging the status quo longer than is warranted.
It’s time to reopen everything.
