Two Years

One lesson becoming clear from the Covid experience is that there’s a limit to how long people are willing to live under pandemic rules, and that limit is about two years.

Consider that even though there’s another wave of infection post-Omicron currently peaking in the United States, nobody is paying any attention to it much less going back to lockdowns and masking rules. We are still averaging hundreds of deaths per day.

Or that Australia and New Zealand have abandoned their zero-Covid policies and reopened their borders despite the certain knowledge that it would lead to a wave of illness and death (though much less illness and death than they would have experienced at the beginning of the pandemic, now that we have effective vaccines and treatments).

Or that in China, which is still trying to maintain zero-Covid, news reports seem to suggest that the populations under the harsh lockdowns required to eliminate the disease are increasingly restless and unwilling to tolerate the conditions. It seems possible that in the face of large cities effectively turned into prisons for months at a time, the Chinese government may at some point be forced to choose between controlling Covid and causing a popular revolution.

The unavoidable truth is that Covid will be with us for the foreseeable future. We have long passed the point where it can be brought under control, and people are tired of living in pandemic mode so this will become one of those infectious diseases like influenza we just learn to live with.

A century ago the influenza pandemic taught us a very similar lesson. In the end, we couldn’t control the disease, and life went back to normal while the pandemic influenza strain mutated into one of the many influenza strains that circulates every year. And how long did it take for us to learn to live with the disease? From the history I’ve read, it took about two years.