> Everyone would still be done with it
Hospitalizations and deaths have been so low for so long that as soon as people stop paying attention, it is over. We've been out of the pandemic phase and crossed over into endemicity for most of a year. Time to get used to it.
Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020 [1], with much worse drops for minority populations (3 years for the latino population) and 10 years of progress of equalizing white and non-white life expectancies has been reversed.
Is this an acceptable steady state for society? I don't think it should be. This is all preventable and we otherwise spend lots of resources on improving these metrics.
What you are saying sounds like people being done with lung cancer and start smoking again.
We've not only decided that's an "acceptable steady state", but actively embraced it.
> Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020.
In other words: it dropped around 1/10th as much as the difference between today and 1970.
Do you think the average person in 1970 would have accepted 10x the invasiveness of the measures we've had for the last couple of years to reach parity, or were they just used to the "normal"?
You can argue that we should or shouldn't do something, but claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd.
Another way of putting it: We're back to where we were as recently as 2007.
Or, to put it another way: Life expectancy peaked in the US in 2014[2], while it kept rising in most peer countries. That certainly made the news, and something was being done about the root causes of that, but by and large it was being ignored politically.
Again, none of this is an argument for or against any particular COVID measures. I'm just pointing out that it's a particularly egregious case of historical blinders & end-of-history thinking to think that human beings as a species can't get used to the relatively small (in a historical context) rise in risk the world has seen in the last couple of years.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... 2. https://thesoundingline.com/in-brief-us-life-expectancy-peak...
World war 2 lowered life expectancy by 3 years. Is 1.5 ok for COVID?
I’m not sure what you mean by that but nobody I know thinks it’s perfectly fine to have half a million people per year die unnecessarily.
> claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd
People are dealing with those risks all the time. About ~90% of people were voluntarily wearing mask when I went grocery shopping earlier today. People had their seat belts on on the roads there. Their kids were in child seats even though it’s quite inconvenient to put them in there. We do lots of things to mitigate risks. Some of them are pure theater (letting the pilot go through airport security), others are really effective (having a co pilot in the cockpit).
People SHOULD update in light of new evidence. Right now I think I am quite safe from crime. If I get robbed twice next month, I will absolutely re-evaluate that statement.
That said, the most recent spike was vastly milder than previous spikes, so it would be extremely surprising to suddenly have The Worst Spike Ever