On May 28, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued new Interim Public Health Recommendations for Vaccinated People,essentially giving a green light to fully vaccinated people to resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing. This guidance surprised nearly everyone, coming just a few weeks after the CDC director had noted that she had a sense of “impending doom” as she was watching the pandemic unfold. It reflected a dramatic pivot point in the US handling of the pandemic, an implicit shift away from community responsibility for Covid-19 transmission, towards individual responsibility. It suggested, essentially, that the onus was on those who remained unvaccinated to take precautions because the vaccinated could drop their effort to protect others.
Leaving aside arguments over whether this was the correct move based on the science, we saw this as an expression of the CDC’s appraisal of what regulation the country could—and could not—bear, and an acknowledgement that after a year of Covid-19 restrictions, the country was at the end of its pandemic tolerance.
The last 18 months of Covid-19 has tested us all. The hardships experienced were, of course, quite variable in scale; nothing compares to the pain and grief of losing loved ones. And yet, it was the sum total of all the pandemic-era experiences and losses that shaped the landscape of population behavior during Covid-19, and directly or indirectly, set the stage for what we collectively were willing to do to mitigate the spread of the virus.
Read the full post on The Turning Point.