January 10, 2022
I've been in denial about Omicron for weeks.
Maybe you can sympathize. After two pandemic years, I was sick of wearing a mask. Vaccinated and boosted, I couldn't understand why I should worry about a milder, albeit more contagious, variant that is highly unlikely to send a healthy twentysomething to the hospital. I was, as they say, "vaxxed and done."
It wasn't until I read Ed Yong's latest piece in the Atlantic that I understood that a small number of severe cases out of a large number of infected people is still a massive burden on the hospital system. On an individual level, this means that if I crash my bike and need to go to the emergency room, I'll likely have to wait hours to be treated. Societally, it means a shortage of hospital workers—because they've either gotten sick or left the profession—and the collapse of the health care system as a whole. "This is the cost of two years spent prematurely pushing for a return to normal," Yong writes. "The lack of a normal to return to."
I've been thinking a lot about what the return to "normal" looks like, especially this weekend. In October 2020, I moved from New York City to Denver, but my old roommate hung onto the apartment. On Saturday, he moved upstate. It took me a while to figure out why this positive development in his life made me so sad. And then I realized that that apartment embodied my pre-pandemic life. When I visited last spring—climbing those same carpeted steps, eating pizza on that same ratty brown couch—I could almost pretend that things were as they had always been.
Soon, a stranger will sign the lease and start sleeping in my old bedroom. Things will never go back to the way they were, and I was foolish, in those early pandemic days, to think they would. I guess Omicron isn't the only thing I've been in denial about. Nothing lasts forever. And that's just the way things go.
Onward.
—Abigail Weinberg
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