Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months? If the U.S. faced half a year of daily hurricanes that each took 1,000 lives, it is hard to imagine that the nation would decide to, quite literally, throw caution to the wind. Why, then, is COVID different?
--Ed Yong
It's not hard to understand why Covid is different. People don't think abstractly. Statistics are meaningless in shaping one's daily experience. A hurricane or tornado may kill fewer people, but the devastation is not abstract. It's local and concentrated and is dramatically symbolized by the environmental destruction. Covid devastation was spread out and invisible for everyone except healthcare workers.
Many died from the disease but most didn't. It wasn't like Ebola or AIDs in the early days, a death sentence. If you weren't living in a small community impacted by a superspreader event, the risks felt low. Individual families were devastated, but most of the people they knew were not. If you knew of someone who died of Covid, it was like knowing someone who died of cancer or heart disease. You feel the impact to the degree that you feel the loss.
Whatever the statistics indicated otherwise about how this was different, that's how it felt. That's how we relate to this kind of thing. And because we don't feel the statistics, the government had to step in to protect public safety. Precisely because the devastation was so difficult to comprehend and imagine, the people who understood it statistically had an essential role in protecting us from the full brunt of it had we instead let it go unchecked.
The thrust of Yong's article is to suggest that letting our guard down now is a mistake, and that the CDC is caving to what continues to be a public failure of imagination. Is it? Or is it that we've reached a point where the risks have become acceptable? If people are fully vaccinated, their risks are very low. If others are not vaccinated, they're probably not following the guidelines anyway, and there's so much the rest of us should be expected to do to protect them from the consequences of their own foolishness.
It's foolish to smoke, and we don't and shouldn't ban it. The government has an important role to protect public safety, but it's not the government's job to legislate against individual stupidity. The impact of individual foolishness is mostly felt by family and friends, and so it should be their responsibility to give their foolish loved ones the slap upside the head they he or she desperately needs. If they can't protect their loved ones, then there's little the rest of us can do that justifies the cost.