COVID-19 Five Years Later
Everybody else did their five year retrospectives two months ago. So be it. I don't know that I have much to say but I am saying something anyways.
At this point COVID has become endemic in the sense that it is still making people sick and isn't going away any time soon. We have lost count of the waves. There are always new variants popping up but we no longer care.
Any lessons we might have learned from this pandemic have been forgotten. We gained one great tool for tracking disease -- wastewater surveillance -- but both the provincial and federal governments gutted funding for that program, so the remnants of the program are disappointing.
Maybe we learned a few lessons about ventilation and airflow, but there are still many gathering spaces that have poor airflow and will never be fixed. Far-light UV air cleaning is another technology that gained prominence during the pandemic, but today it is long forgotten.
Masks still exist but nearly nobody wears them. Thus far I have not been harassed in stores for wearing a mask but it is only a matter of time.
We have gone back to in-person meetings in a big way. For the time being I am still labelling calendar events as "Online", "Hybrid", or "In-Person," but I am getting pushback about this. Most hybrid events are not great for virtual attendees. KWLUG tried to buck this trend but I do not think it has been that successful. Meanwhile I continue to avoid in-person indoor events for the most part. The few in-person indoor events I have attended have been uncomfortable. I have felt out of place each time. So I have mostly given up on socializing.
If we can say one thing for certain it is that the Great Barrington Declaration was wrong. Herd immunity did not protect us; variants continue to circulate and it is clear that people can contract COVID with every new variant. The "focused protections" that were supposed to shield the vulnerable turned into "vulnerable people should stop participating in society forever". The Declaration claimed that the rate of new infections would become stable, but that has not really happened; we continue to experience wave after wave, and the waves are much less seasonal that minimizers would have us believe.
Have the variants gotten milder? In some sense, yes. Delta was the worst variant, and then Omicron became an upper-respiratory infection. Delta (which hit in 2021, well after the Great Barrington Declaration was signed) was a disaster. People who got the original variant were also susceptible to Delta, so the idea of immunity through infection was false. The upper-respiratory tract variants tended to cause less acute damage than deep lung infections like Delta, but even the "milder" Omicron led to a great deal of Long COVID. There is also some evidence that repeated infections increase the chance of Long COVID syndrome.
It seems clear to me that Long COVID does not affect people uniformly at random. There are some factors that make some people more susceptible to Long COVID than others. Age and obesity play into this, but there are other factors that I feel we do not understand well yet.
I have a very strong sense (not backed up by research) that COVID takes our inherent weaknesses and magnifies them. I had weak winter lungs before COVID; when I got COVID my lungs got weaker and my winter cough got worse. I have observed this phenomenon in others as well.
I have also noticed this phenomenon with respect to our health care system; COVID stressed the weaknesses of health care until it broke. Too many people burned out and left the system. Too many people delayed going to the doctor during the pandemic (which was predicted correctly by the Great Barrington Declaration), so there is a big jump in serious disease diagnoses. In some places so many people have left that institutional knowledge has degraded. Socialized health care is on its last legs. The system has broken. The privateers have won.
For a while we thought people could work effectively from home, but that is dead now too. Bosses want their workers in the office. The nice employers might give employees one or two days of work-from-home time per week, but for many workers the expectation is that all workers will go to the office every day. I understand part of this -- ad-hoc communication is important and it is much easier done when people are in the same building -- but part of this is utterly stupid.
Speaking for my personal situation, COVID has affected me very badly. I got it and it was an alienating experience, but my paranoia around the disease means that I am outside of society even more than I was pre-pandemic.
The COVID minimizers worried a lot about the effects of extended school closures. Maybe their fears have come to pass. It seems that there is a generation of kids that are ill-educated and have bad social skills. I do not know whether I believe that kids today are actually worse off than kids before, or whether this just continues the generational cycle.
The COVID hysterics keep latching onto new threats that don't seem to be panning out. They were all terrified of avian flu for a while, and while avian flu has been incredibly damaging to USA farm animals, it did not (yet?) blossom into the next human pandemic. Before avian flu the hysterics freaked out about variant after variant. There were definitely some doozy variants (JN.1 is my personal nemesis, because it is likely what infected me) but it looks like we have collectively moved on. The days of COVID restrictions are over no matter what happens.
I still have some expired COVID tests that I stockpiled, but the days of free tests are over. So lots of people are getting COVID and spreading it to others, but aren't bothering to take precautions when they are sick. Maybe that is okay and maybe that is not. As a COVID paranoid I continue to worry about repeated infections and long COVID, but increasingly I think I should not care any more. Nobody else does.