Nows and Forevers

Another chapter is closing on the Covid-19 pandemic.

The World Health Organization announced Friday an end to the global public health emergency that it put into place in January 2020, back when the virus was rushing through Wuhan, China, and about to explode elsewhere in the world. Since then, at least 7 million people have died and the top WHO official said probably 20 million people died in the last three years of Covid-19.

Add to that the U.S. is going to be ending its public health emergency next week, and it’s clear we’ve turned a corner on Covid-19.

Some would say that we reached that point a long time ago. Others would say it’s too early, that Covid is still a big threat to public health.

I look at my own life and find that I fall somewhere in between. I cover health care in my job as a journalist, and it’s true that Covid-19 just doesn’t come up as much as it did even a year ago. There are still people getting the virus, there are still people being hospitalized, and there are still people dying from it. But, according to several physicians and hospital executives I’ve talked to, the situation is nowhere near as dire as it was even a year or so ago.

And that makes sense. There’s a level of immunity in the world now. I know a lot of people who have had Covid, some multiple times. There have also now been two vaccination rounds, one for the original and the other for the next-generation variants. And there is still treatment that works in many cases to keep most people with Covid-19 alive. I say “in many cases” because treatment doesn’t always work, sadly. I think we all know that in our own lives.

A year ago, I was masking all the time and had just received my third booster shot. I wasn’t in the office that much at that point, although I was coming back more often, and I always wore a mask. I was out in the world, whether it was for work or personal time. But I was still careful. I even flew to the United Kingdom and spent eight days there a year ago, and I tested constantly (you had to still get a negative test to re-enter the country then) as well as wearing a mask all but outside and one time with friends at dinner. Beyond that, I ate outside or, in one case, ate on an off-hour and well away from others.

I stuck to that for the most part through the summer of 2022. But in September, when I received the bivalent booster (apparently being one of the few to receive it), something changed. I started to relax more. I knew I was still at risk to get Covid-19. But I also realized that, at some point, I needed to get back to living. I stopped using masks at work. I stopped using them when I was out. I avoided people who were sick — that’s just good practice anyway — but I didn’t constantly think about Covid.

People around me would say that I was late to that party. Where I live, it has been a long time since people took a lot of precautions, maybe as far back as the summer of 2020 and certainly before the vaccines were out in the winter of 2021. I thought that was unwise. But gradually through 2021 and 2022 I saw more people/most people going through their lives without taking many or any precautions.

And gradually, I did, too.

That makes me relieved but it also makes me feel guilty. One person I know died of Covid in the early months, and many others have been sickened and some have long Covid. There’s no denying that millions of people around the world have died from Covid, and the pandemic changed so many things. Hospitals, and health care workers, will never be the same. They deserve all the credit in the world for what they did, going to work not only in battle conditions but also at the risk of their health and their families.

But I feel guilty because of how the world changed and how many people were taken from us. It’s not a political thing for me. It’s a human thing.

And there’s also the fact that governments and WHO can declare the pandemic emergency over. But that doesn’t mean that it is. Covid will be with us for the long term, just as the flu and the common cold are. I fear that we’re not ready for the next pandemic, and there are structural problems that experts say continue to be out there, hamstringing us.

Or as Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of WHO said today:

“This virus is hear to stay. It’s still killing and it’s still changing.”