ONE FOR THE ROAD
James Deakin
Well that was sudden. After two years of draconian lockdowns and mandates, it took less than 24 hours for the global narrative to fall apart and even less time for every internet epidemiologist to become an expert in foreign policy and war. RIP COVID; long live Ukraine.
But before everyone gets obsessed with the latest media distraction and changes their profile pics to have one of those cute frames, can we please close the book on this pandemic and start getting in sync with the rest of the world and start dropping all COVID mandates first? Seriously. We don’t want to end up being the kid that wasn’t told the hide and seek game ended and all the other kids went home while we were still blindfolded and counting.
I say this because the world is at a crossroad with COVID. There’s a clear fork in the road now and as the world rebuilds, the path we take and how soon we take it will have drastic effects on our recovery as a nation.
But let’s just do a quick check, shall we? Just to be sure we’re not jumping the gun. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, UK, UAE, Italy, Spain and now more than 70 percent of Americans should be able to remove their masks indoors, including inside schools, under new metrics outlined Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “That represent a seismic shift in how the public health agency plans to measure COVID-19 risk.” Accordingly, the CDC would no longer recommend that these communities insist on indoor masking. There. A blue check mark said it. That must make it legit.
Credit to the IATF, the latest guidelines that go into effect today do remove most of the restrictive stuff. But what is stopping us from dropping everything like our European counterparts? And more importantly, changing our mindset towards it. I know that everyone wants to be cautious and nobody wants to be blamed, but let’s face it: at this point, it’s mostly theater already. Has been for a while. And with CDC finally recognizing natural immunity, and hospitalizations going down, we now need to start dismantling all the barriers we placed and start returning to normal or risk getting left behind forever. I’m sure there will be groups that will scream “Wait it’s not safe yet. There’s something new to be scared of!” but there is always something to be scared of if you look hard enough and people are free to do whatever it is they want to do with that fear – so long as they stop imposing it on those who have suffered more from the response to COVID, than COVID itself.
Let people choose. We gave the experts two years to dictate and yet the biggest breakthrough came from nature. So yeah, forgive us if some of us have trust issues. We will take our chances from here, thank you very much. Because what is undeniable is, as much as it may have been done in the name of the greater good or public health, many people would argue that the cure has been worse than the disease. People have been suffering from the restrictions – economically, emotionally, spiritually, physically and mentally – and they need to be given the right to be able to make these choices on their own already.