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The world seems normal again. I spent the first days of December busy scrambling through TSA, buying meals from vending machines, and trudging through the boarding line: everything you would expect from an airport. But when passing my gate, I saw a small, unnoticed sign: “Please Wear A Mask.”
It seems normal again, but is it? There’s moments in the day that seem like we’ve moved past COVID, but then we hear it:
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It’s something that brings back memories from three years ago. And then the question comes up: “Should we still be scared of COVID?”
STEVEN THRASHER: Right now, we’re in the second biggest wave of the pandemic, it’s only behind the Omicron variant. And that was the deadliest outbreak— that was in January, February, and early March of 2022. We’re not at that level of deaths. That got to 4000 deaths a day.
You just heard from Professor Steven Thrasher, the Daniel Renberg Chair of Social Justice in Reporting at Medill, and a faculty member of the Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. He’s also the author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide.
THRASHER: Today, we’re averaging right now about 200 to 250 known deaths, although the counting is not nearly as precise.
That statement might bring you back to the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, but Thrasher is actually referencing numbers that are posted and still being tracked today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the CDC.
SOKHIENG AU: I think as from the beginning, there’s a lot of really different political voices on COVID and how it should be treated. And that’s still continuing today, even though it’s much more muted now, right, the conversation because it’s less of an emergency— it’s become an endemic disease.
You just heard from Professor Sokhieng Au, medical historian and public health practitioner. Her research spans various fields, such as international public health, as well as inequities in humanitarian relief, among other subjects.
GRAY: I’ll be one of maybe like two or three people masking and sometimes it’s just me. Friends and people I meet sometimes will like see that I’m masking and ask like, oh, do you want me to? So I know it’s like not that everybody is against masking. I think it just doesn’t come to mind for a lot of people.
That was Seeger Gray, a third-year Northwestern student who still masks and was willing to help provide his own perspective.
So if people no longer seem to prioritize COVID restrictions, but, as mentioned by Professor Thrasher, cases and deaths continue to rise, should we still be scared of COVID going forward?
GRAY: If trying to make people afraid of COVID would get us to take it seriously, then it probably would have worked by now. I think people have probably become desensitized to being afraid of COVID.
AU: I don’t think there’s a real use for being afraid of it. I think we can be cautious, we should always be a bit cautious, especially still with the populations who are vulnerable, and they continue to be vulnerable.
THRASHER: I don’t think scared, or fear is the right word. Fear usually doesn’t help a lot. But we should certainly be taking it much more seriously than we are. And I guess it would be okay to say yes, we should be more afraid of it than we are right now. Because there’s a very blasé attitude towards it at this time. We have a lot of tools to deal with it, but they are not politically and economically accessible.
Fear appears to be controversial, but as more of the population strays away from the COVID restrictions that marked the start of the pandemic, what does this mean for individuals who still are the most vulnerable to the sickness?
THRASHER: People who are immunocompromised really can’t go many places. Some of them felt comfortable doing so when there was universal masking, but now that there are no protocols, they feel very frightened. I keep reading accounts of people who don’t feel safe getting medical care because they’re, you know, compromised. They don’t feel like they can go to the dentist because their dentist is no longer masking or they don’t feel like they can you know, see a general practitioner doctor or go to the ER because once you go to the ER, you’re suddenly around a lot of people who are sick and the ER ours are not requiring masks.
There’s a dissonance between what news is being discussed and what is happening beyond the news. People are still being affected by the disease, but that no longer is a priority in people’s lives.
AU: A Great deal of evidence has shown, for example, that African Americans, Native Americans, Latino populations, lower income populations, there are other disparities that are not about health issues at all that continue to affect [the] outcome [of disease]. And those kinds of things were not well addressed during COVID and they’re still not well addressed, now that COVID is has become endemic, essentially.
But in order to reach “after” COVID, moving forward requires building a stronger form of emotional and political framework.
THRASHER: The one emotion that I would say is most important, for you to feel a sense of care at this time. One, for yourself, and two, even if one is vaccinated or not thinking that they’re high risk, even though they can be mistaken about that.
AU: There’s sort of a rhetorical deflection going on, amongst those who don’t particularly want something like universal health care where there’s this association with health care as a privilege, rather than a right that everyone should have. And unfortunately, that privilege is really tied to your socioeconomic status.
Things seem normal, but they aren’t yet. Many have reached the point where they no longer feel bound to a mask, but that means ignoring a population of people that have been glossed over as restrictions have been dissolved.
In order to address COVID in our time today, things shouldn’t “seem” normal. They should simply be it. And that begins through acknowledging that although we shouldn’t be scared of COVID, we need to be aware of it.
FOR WNUR NEWS, I’M ALEX HUERTA
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