Disease vs. Countermeasures
We're approaching a point where the latter is as scary as the former
The target of the moment for unimpressive Twitter dunks is a piece in The Atlantic by Matthew Walther with the provocative headline “Where I Live, No One Cares About COVID.” Though I guess it’s really the sub-head that’s got people riled up, “Outside the world inhabited by the professional classes in a handful of major metropolitan areas, many Americans are leading their lives as if COVID is over.”
As a matter of description, he’s absolutely right. I’ve made two trips to New York City over the last couple of weeks, once to see the Hold Steady in concert (as seen above), and the other time to film some tv-show talking-head segments in a downscale part of Long Island. A fair number of the concert-goers kept masks on throughout the show (I took mine off to drink a few beers, but otherwise kept it on). In the outer reaches of Queens, there was hardly a mask to be seen, and the few that were (mostly on service-industry employees) mostly weren’t being worn in a way that would impede any viruses that happened by.
The same split is visible in a smaller way locally: I live in an upscale suburb of Schenectady, and work at an elite college, and within those bubbles, mask-wearing is pretty consistent and mostly conscientious. The Co-Op market within walking distance of Chateau Steelypips never dropped its mask requirement, even in the halcyon days of the trough between waves, and the more expensive of the local supermarkets has always had more people masked than not. The lower-end supermarkets have been much less masked, and in fast-food places, forget it. When I took my not-yet-vaccinated kids to Arby’s a month or two back, we got weird looks for being the only masked people in sight. Visible public precautions are very much happening in a bubble.
The piece gets into a bit of trouble when it shades into the prescriptive, though, suggesting that those public precautions are excessive and foolish. There are small parts of this where he’s got a good point— outdoor masking never made any sense at all— but mostly, I think it’s overdone. Masks are an annoyance, but really not a big deal— the students at Union and in my kids’ schools have adapted without any real trouble, and much as I think it’s silly in a lot of circumstances, I’m happy to put one on in solidarity with the staff who have to wear them all day long. I just don’t understand the people who rant about masking requirements as some kind of grave injustice.
At the same time, though, there is a part of me that wonders if we’re getting to the point where some of the precautions are as bad as the disease. Weirdly, I’ve been thinking about this because those two out-of-town trips have triggered new rounds of paranoid hypochondria— I keep half convincing myself that I’m coming down with Covid. This is mostly a matter of seasonal crud— I always get a bit congested at this time of year, particularly when the temperature keeps swinging back and forth between freezing and not— and partly other stuff. I’m cutting back on snacks in one of my periodic efforts to lose a bit of weight, and probably the worst of my “I’ve got Covid” moments last week came when I convinced myself I was feverish when in fact I was just starving.
In a certain strictly medical sense, it makes very little sense for me to be freaking out about this— I was fully vaccinated back in February and got a booster shot in October, and as of this past Saturday both kids are fully vaccinated and Kate is fully boostered. Even if I did end up with a breakthrough infection, the risk of any of us getting seriously ill is very small.
In thinking this through, I realized that what I’m worried about is less the disease than the countermeasures. I’m not that concerned about getting sick, but the isolation/quarantine that would follow on a positive test would fuck up all kinds of stuff. We’d likely need to keep the kids home from school (and remote school in the spring of ‘20 was a disaster in a lot of ways), I’d need to stay home to a degree that would drive me nuts (I don’t deal well with confinement), our trip to see family for Christmas would be screwed up (even though they’re also all triple-vaccinated), etc. Medically, it’s unlikely we’d face anything worse than a bad flu, but on a social and personal level, it would be a remarkable hassle.
That stuff is way more consequential than needing to wear a mask to run errands, and is what currently makes masking in the grocery store seem reasonable and prudent. Those measures are also going to be harder to unwind as we move to a world where Covid is endemic (as seems to be happening), particularly in our little elite bubble.
I’m not sure I’ve said anything super insightful here, but if you’d like more of this, here are some buttons:
and as always, the comments will be open.