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Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, The first advertisement I saw this morning was for personalized, medical-grade face masks. The internet may be creepy and annoying, but it usually knows what’s up.
And what’s up is nearly 600 days after the first case of COVID was announced in the United States, after 600,000 deaths and counting, after encouraging gains due to vaccines and sacrifices, we’re headed back to where we started.
Fueled by the Delta variant, the pandemic is gaining again in Michigan, and it’s devastating some areas of the country.
The virus is effective at what it does, and it's gotten smarter. The problem is that humans, the most evolved species in the history of this planet, haven’t.
The vaccine works, yet roughly half of the population refuse to get it. Masks and social restrictions – the only effective defensive position when half of the population refuse vaccines – also work. But we’re very aware that a lot of Americans don’t like being told what to do, and politicians have lost their appetite for trying to make us.
So here we are, a year and a half after the start of the pandemic and eight months after the first vaccine dose in America, heading back into the chaos and sadness of a disrupted society.
Notice I don’t say “uncertainty” – we all know what it looks like. Social restrictions in public places, and all of the nastiness of angry people venting on one another; the damaging effects on local economies; filled hospital ICUs and exhausted health-care workers; schools struggling to educate students and conduct sports while being second-guessed on every decision.
That’s not a prediction on my part; it’s already happening. Some businesses, like Home Depot, are requiring masks again inside their stores. Some school districts, like Ann Arbor Public Schools, already have announced mask requirements for the coming school year. Eight universities and colleges in Michigan aren’t waiting for the cavalry – they’ve already announced that all employees and students will have to be vaccinated.
Conspicuous by their absence in this maddening slide back into the abyss are politicians and public health leaders. It’s one thing to be an individual with a personal point of view about masks or vaccines – good for you, it’s your health and future. But it’s another matter when your entire job is the well-being of the people you represent and for whom you work.
“The messaging around the removal of masks if you're vaccinated and lifting the restrictions, was very much like: ‘If you get the vaccine, we won't have to do this anymore,’” said Lauren Gibbons, MLive political reporter. “I think, politically, no one is interested in putting restrictions back.
“The key here will be, can the (Gov. Gretchen Whitmer) administration and public health experts convince more of the public to get vaccinated, because otherwise it's trending in a direction that is not good for COVID-19 numbers and not good politically.”
So, in short, the political approach a year and a half into the pandemic is leaders meekly encouraging people to get vaccinated, while protecting their political capital for next year’s election. Not exactly profiles in courage.
So that puts the onus squarely on individuals, which is not confidence inspiring, and onto institutions like schools, businesses, local governmental units. And, as it has every day for a year and half, our health-care workers.
In November 2020, MLive public health reporter Justin Hicks spent days reporting from a COVID unit, and wrote this:
These days, caregivers are somewhat numb. They’ve lost sense of time. Even the optimists try not to think about when they’ll reach the end of the tunnel, because even an end to the pandemic doesn’t mean patients will stop coming.
This week – remember, eight months after vaccines rolled out – Hicks had this to say on the MLive Behind the Headlines podcast:
“I was in a COVID unit last week. Every single (caregiver) I talked to got emotional talking about a specific patient that sticks with them or just kind of the weight of it all. And each one went back to the idea of, ‘If people would just see what we see every day, there would be more people getting vaccinated, there'd be more people who would be taking steps to get this over with.’”
You’d hope that’s true. But we’ve all seen the toll of COVID on families, businesses, communities. A year ago, we had restrictions and no vaccine, but we also had hope. Now, we have vaccines and no restrictions, and a sense of dread as autumn looms.
“I think everybody needs it to be over, but not everybody is doing what it takes for it to be over,” Gibbons said. “That's what it comes down to.”
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John Hiner Executive Editor Vice President of Content Mlive Media Group
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