Omicron, and a Pandemic Check-In

Few emotions in 2021 feel quite at-home to us as "frustration."  After a year of spending time with ourselves, with our families, with very few other people due to quarantining, we reentered the world & suddenly we remembered-we don't all see it the same way.  

This has been a challenge for me personally, quite frankly.  I remember in the months leading up to my vaccination at the beginning of April, I was more eager than can possibly be imagined to get my shot.  It was literally the only thing I talked about, to the point where I am sure that I was annoying everyone in my life.  I had quarantined probably too stringently, to at the very least a questionable level.  This was a combination of me being a rule-follower (I am the sort of person who files their taxes as soon as they get their W-2's), a diagnosed hypochondriac, & a deep introvert who didn't want to be the person who broke others' quarantine.  I literally took the day off from work two weeks after my first shot, enjoying the world that I had largely ignored for over a year for the first time, getting to shop & eat at a restaurant & go to the movies...I openly wept at the beginning of Raya and the Last Dragon just because I was sitting in my happy place again.

I didn't expect the other people in my life to be as eager to get vaccinated as I was.  For starters, I had lived quarantine alone-most people hadn't.  Oh, they had definitely had a smaller circle, but of the people (friends or family) who I see regularly in-person, I'm the only single one, the only one who lives alone, and so I was the only person who had basically just had my own thoughts in the past year.  Not all of this was difficult, mind you (I am an introvert, and I learned pretty quickly into the quarantine that I either needed to start working on projects that felt like I was doing something or I'd lose my mind), but I needed to go out into the world again after so much loneliness, and I understood that I might need it more than others.

By-and-large, though, I learned that I was not someone who had an antivaxxer in their friend circle (or in my immediate family).  While none of my friends were as exuberant (or loquacious) about their vaccine as I was, everyone got their shots pretty quickly.  For some it was just a "thing you're supposed to do" rather than something to be particularly celebratory about, and for at least 1-2 it was more of a "I suppose I have to," but everyone did it.  It wasn't something that had to be coaxed or pushed or even prodded; I oftentimes said early on that there's "no wrong reason to get the vaccine" & this was an ethos shared by everyone in my life.  Everyone understood that it was important for the world (and for themselves) that we all get vaccinated as quickly as possible.  This was also the case for the booster.  Though initially it was an "I'll get around to it," when the fear of Omicron started to spike , suddenly everyone quickly had their appointments on the calendar, all of us trying to get as much added protection as possible as we headed into our holiday festivities.

But I wasn't naive that my world, where I also don't have any friends that voted for Trump, was representative of the population, and I remembered thinking pretty early on that the Biden administration was making some clear mistakes on the Covid vaccine rollout.  It was clear that there was a subset of the populace that was only going to get the vaccine if they were forced to, and that after a year of Donald Trump botching the pandemic response & so many people outwardly protesting social distancing & masking, that people weren't going to do the "right thing" because it was the moral thing to do.  So I didn't understand why, for example, we dismissed early in the pandemic the prospect of a vaccine passport or encouraging more bans on domestic flights, AmTrak, or use of public buildings for adults without a vaccine.  It was clear that we needed to react swiftly-the only way to stop Covid was to do so as fast as possible.

That didn't happen, and we are now left in a situation that, while not necessarily preventable, definitely could have had its chances greatly reduced with Omicron.  I don't honestly know what to say about Omicron.  At this point, it's clear that a full-scale quarantine or lockdown is politically unthinkable, and Biden, nearly a year into his presidency, doesn't have the sort of personal popularity to have Democrats unilaterally back such a move even if it was the right decision.  

And honestly, I don't know if it is.  I am not a medical doctor or epidemiologist, so I can't make advice on how one should behave about Omicron other than clearly you should be masking up in public places again and you sure as hell should get boosted or vaccinated if you are able to & aren't already, but from a practical standpoint, what good is a subset of the populace quarantining again if another part of the population doesn't give a crap, and will continue to let their actions dictate the ruin of us all?  Honestly-a group of people saw the death of their neighbors, their families, their communities, their economy, the world...and instead of getting a shot, they said "I don't think so-what's in it for me?"  And even when they were offered lottery tickets & vacation time & just straight up cash...they still balked.  If those people look at the world as it is and don't take just one little step to make the world better, what good is it if the rest of us try to protect the world from such a fate?

I'm not a cynical person, and I'm not someone who gives up (a conversation for a different day), but I am also deeply pragmatic when it comes to my worldview, and understand that you occasionally have to move in inches instead of miles, and that you definitely need to understand your playing field before you can address a problem.  At this point, it's clear that German Health Minister Jens Spahn's stark proclamation a few weeks ago is going to be correct; Spahn said that by the end of the winter all of Germany will either be "vaccinated, recovered, or dead."   With Omicron spiking across the planet, it's probable that this will be the fate of Americans and indeed for all the world.

The White House's recent comment that the vaccinated "did the right thing" while the unvaccinated is looking at a "winter of severe illness and death" may sound like the sort of thing you'd see in a dystopian novel coming from the government, but after a year of assuming that people will do the right thing, it might be the first true acknowledgement from the Biden administration, and from anyone optimistically hoping for a better outcome here, that the antivaxxer movement either needs to realize the dangers of their belief system or have it taught to them by reality.  This statement was criticized by some in the media for not doing enough to coax antivaxxers, but if watching 800,000 of your friends & neighbors die over the past two years wasn't enough to coax you, nothing will.

I pray everyone gets vaccinated.  I pray everyone will be safe.  I write this article knowing that others who did the right thing are not as lucky as me-I know people who have loved ones who skipped the vaccine, whom they are praying every day will not get Covid because they aren't vaccinated (and thus prayer is the only protection they have).  And I know that by the end of this winter even some of those who got boosted, who did everything they were supposed to do, will still get breakthrough cases (I'm not naive enough to think that I might not be one of them before it's all said-and-done, and I am just at peace knowing that by getting boosted I made life a lot easier on myself).  But part of me is glad that the Biden administration has decided to stop counting on the goodness of people who don't want to help themselves, and start focusing their decisions on what's best for the vaccinated, because I don't think that trying to coax antivaxxers is going to work, and we need to focus on helping the people who want to be helped.  It is not healthy for the entire country to remain frustrated, and so the only way out is to give everyone the best possible solution, and ignore those who refuse to acknowledge it.