I received an interesting email from UCLA Health. It contained an article exploring the possibility that the emergence of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 may mark the end of the pandemic phase of the disease in the beginning of what is called an endemic phase.
A pandemic is defined as a disease that is spreading exponentially out of control. Each new case infects greater than one person causing the disease to spread into the population at faster and faster rates until it infects everyone.
The biology of pandemics is that they naturally slow down through a process of herd immunity where the population has been exposed to the disease and has built up a degree of resistance. This ability to deal with the disease can manifest either by artificial vaccination or suffering through the cycle of the disease. Either way, it inoculates the herd.
In early 2020, the sooner everyone gets it the sooner it’ll be over theory was one of the paths on how to deal with COVID-19 that was presented to the world. One of the early proponents of it as national policy was in England under the government of Boris Johnson. The rest of the world pursued an isolation and lockdown strategy instead, which England eventually also adopted, and that is how the world has dealt with COVID-19 for the past two years.
This bunker mentality was originally meant to be a measure to “flatten the curve” until a way could be found to negate the mortal danger threat of the disease. Like all such fear driven strategies, the wild imagination of humans took the scientifically “temporary fix” to extremes.
As vaccines became available, loosening the constraints of lockdowns began to be explored. In the United States, this turned it into a patchwork of state and county level policies that created much political chaos.
Whether people-control strategies still made medical or scientific sense, particularly in the latter half of 2021 as vaccination rates began to rise, is questionable; but human fear is predictable.
Arguments have continued over how individuals, companies, and governments should deal with the lack of clarity, and preponderance of fear driven opinion about how to set public policy while the world waited to see whether vaccines did anything to help the situation at all.
Some people put their faith in the vaccine program as creating a shield from the virus. Others placed no faith in the vaccines, deeming their safety untrustworthy and potentially dangerous, preferring to take their chances on their own immune systems seeing them through the disease if they encountered it.
Corporations and governments, as one would expect, universally reverted to their legal departments to create onerous procedures to safeguard their property from lawsuits, should anyone catch the disease on their premises. The only thing deserving more caution than a virus is fear of not being able to claim plausible denial. But viruses have a way of not caring what humans do.