Real Talk About Covid
On June 22, the seven-day average of new Covid cases dropped to 11,878, the lowest figure since March 26, 2020. Vaccinations were coming along nicely. The US was opening for business, and for a few weeks, strangers could eat unmasked indoors, even sitting next to each other at the bar.
All of that is a happy memory, and things have gotten extremely bad again. Cases have spiked to 75,000 a day. Deaths and hospitalizations are spiking as well. The highly-contagious Delta variant is rampaging through the country, feasting especially lustily on the tracts of the country where spurning vaccination is a marker of tribal pride. The country now faces the very real possibility of hundreds of thousands of new cases a day and another complete shutdown of businesses and government agencies. That means those in the hospitality industry—breweries, pubs, and restaurants central among them—are about to go through another round of restrictions and closures.
It is all so maddening because it didn’t have to happen. The US has become a dysfunctional country unable to manage even basic operations like coordinating the response to a global pandemic. Going forward, we’re going to have to do things differently than we have over the past three months.
It’s not worth getting too deeply into what went wrong with our spring and summer response. Many have described these failures. In short, a solid third of adult Americans refused to get vaccinated, a figure that roughly aligned with predictions as much as a year earlier. Instead of excluding these dangerous disease vectors from entering the public sphere, we tried to coax them to get vaccinated and imposed no consequences for failing to do so. The result is a careening outbreak a month before schools are supposed to open and two months before people are driven back indoors. Summer, remember, is when coronaviruses are at their lowest ebb.
There is very little time to respond to this, and we need to take drastic action. Fortunately, that’s beginning. Josh Noel writes in the Chicago Tribune (and Twitter confirms) that local businesses are taking the lead.
As COVID-19 cases spike in and around Chicago due to the highly contagious delta variant, restaurants and bars have swiftly reexamined protocols and procedures without waiting for government mandates, especially as so-called breakthrough cases among vaccinated people emerge….
Several businesses have announced in recent days they will only permit customers who show proof of vaccination, including Hydrate Nightclub, Berlin Nightclub and Pilsen bar Skylark, which said simply on Facebook Friday, “Only fully vaccinated people are now welcome at the Skylark.”
We don’t live in a totalitarian state and government can’t round people up and force-vaccinate them. If you’re reckless enough to endanger yourself and your loved ones, that’s up to you. But neither should that asinine choice dictate what happens to the rest of us, which is what’s happening now. You aren’t the only one with freedoms, and responsible America now needs to exercise theirs by excluding you.
Taking action to isolate unvaccinated people isn’t performative punishment—it is absolutely critical to preserving the economy and the lives of those who are responsible. I have a friend with a medically fragile child. They are going to be forced to stay in lockdown not just until child vaccines are available, but until infection rates also go down. It’s literally life and death for his son, and a massive burden on the family. Beyond a potentially crippled economy and many more deaths, there are other major costs as well, like the epidemic of depression, isolation, and so on, that result from our failure to get out of this pandemic—all because some Americans want to swan around talking about their “freedoms.”
Your right to not get vaccinated should come with consequences. I hope businesses begin demanding workers get vaccinated and follow the Chicago pubs’ lead on vaccine proof for their customers. It clearly comes with costs. Doing so will alienate some workers and customers, and it’s a pain in the butt for private businesses to have to police things. Workers will face ugly backlash from the unvaccinated. Yet not doing so will result in productivity losses from sick or dead employees as well as financially crippling protracted closures. I applaud the pubs/breweries asking for vaccination cards, and I hope it becomes widespread. (I personally haven’t seen it at all here in Portland.)
Governments also have means of coercion should they choose to use them. And they should (at least where politicians aren’t themselves anti-vaxxers). Communication and incentives have failed. Governments routinely require citizens to comply with standards to receive certain benefits. (This is a classic technique among conservatives to dampen benefit use among the needy.) Requiring proof of vaccination to receive benefits is not different than requiring unemployment recipients to look for jobs. Of course, governments can also pair these techniques with incentives like paying people to get the vaccine, which will help many who haven’t had the time or access to get the jab.
Finally, the responsible portion of the country needs to forgive itself for being mad at the irresponsible portion. We should be mad. It’s painful to consider turning our backs on the recalcitrant chunk of the population. I can easily see how a stew of bad faith, short term political calculation, and graft have been behind the campaign to misinform, and many of the unvaccinated are themselves victims here. Yet people who refuse to get vaccinated are doing enormous damage to the country, and it will save lives and livelihoods to make that decision painful for them. It’s my policy to refuse to meet with anyone who’s not vaccinated, or to go to social events where unvaccinated people are welcome. This just feels wrong, but I can’t see an alternative. If you refuse to participate in the rules of society in a pandemic, I just can’t hang out with you.
I am so depressed we’ve come back to this place. It has been a joy to start seeing people again and going out to pubs and restaurants. And yet despite our responsibility, we may lose these moments for months to come. This forces us all to take actions we shouldn’t have to take, but it’s literally the only choice we have left. Here’s hoping we responsible folks can act so the irresponsible choices of a minority don’t dictate how we live our lives in he coming months.