When will we get “past the pandemic”?

As Dr. Francis Collins concluded his 12 years as head of the National Institutes of Health, he amused an audience watching a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services town hall event with his adaptation of an old favorite tune, “Somewhere Past the Pandemic.” He did this no doubt intending to encourage the nation in a grandfatherly yet entertaining way. But it drew attention to a question on the minds of many: What exactly constitutes “past the pandemic?” What is the measurement or what is the sign of it being over? Is there any hope this pandemic will ever end? He, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, give us none. The goalposts are forever shifting.

It was in March 2020 that we realized the deadly power and nationwide reach of the mysterious COVID-19. This was no mere “bad flu season.” Refrigerator trucks serving as makeshift morgues were parked outside of hospitals. At the time, many political leaders took emergency actions—and understandably so. You remember the urgent goal: Flatten the “curve” to save the hospitals. State governments soon turned this into a demand to hunker down until infection rates came down. Things opened in the fall—more in some places than in others—but many restrictions remained. As 2020 turned to 2021, the vaccines came riding in to save us. But far from freeing us from the state’s heavy protective hand, the grip of government just tightened in different ways. Masking remained. Then vaccine mandates and, for the uncooperative, firings.

But we have reason to believe this will never end. In April 2020, Fauci, speaking as a member of President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, predicted we would see a gradual return to “some degree of normality” after a downturn in the outbreak trajectory, “so you can pinpoint cases instead of getting overwhelmed like New York City.” The key to this, he said, was the development of an effective vaccine. These benchmarks were encouraging to learn.

But almost two years later, just two weeks before Christmas, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul imposed a statewide mask mandate because of COVID’s spreading omicron variant, and this despite low infection rates and fully functioning hospitals in a state where roughly 80 percent are fully vaccinated, a figure that is even higher in New York City.

“This is about getting us through a pandemic,” Hochul assured us. Get through what, we ask? Omicron produces typically mild symptoms with a quicker recovery time. And when she announced the mandate, the variant had killed only one person worldwide. Fauci himself urged people to cancel New Year’s Eve parties and blanched at the thought of removing masks on airplanes—ever. In the Big Apple’s five boroughs, you can’t enter a restaurant, not even a Burger King, without a vaccination card.

Dr. Marty Makary, professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University, called the government and media response to the omicron variant a “pandemic of lunacy” driven by an unwarranted “wave of fear.” For good scientific reasons, he calls the omicron variant “omi-cold.” Given this waning of the pandemic and in the interest of treating this particular virus with a suitably measured response, he recommends that we “reduce testing in low-risk situations. … We can’t go hunting for a problem that is a very mild or asymptomatic illness.”

More and more of us are suffering battle fatigue and war-weariness as we move into 2022. Gen. Colin Powell, with Vietnam behind him, gave us the Powell Doctrine, an element of which was that America should never initiate war without an exit strategy, without some concrete understanding of what victory looks like. If that is true for conventional wars, it is true also for The Great COVID War. Admittedly, we did not choose for this menace to land on our shores, but we did choose to make it a war and we choose to continue our war footing. It is looking, however, like a “forever war” against a virus that—in some form or another, whether deadly, weak, or trivial—we know will never die.

God gave us government for our good (Romans 13:4). That good is limited, but it extends beyond personal safety. Part of government’s role is also securing mature adults in their moral, spiritual, and economic liberty to manage the ordinary risks of life in pursuit of godly goals. A deadly pandemic that portends a potentially massive death toll is far from ordinary. But people need to know at what point the virus that arrived like a lion has been reduced to a biting and kicking little lamb. Governments that constrain us with emergency pandemic restrictions are obliged to tell us what “past the pandemic” means. As of right now, it is failing to do so with any concrete measure or clear communication.