The Covid Pandemic is Over

They just haven't admitted it in the United States yet

The first big hint came last week when Boris Johnson, in fear of being ignominiously kicked out of 10 Downing Street, dropped all Covid restrictions in England. All the vaccine, mask, and social distancing mandates…gone. Poof! Just like that.

Whether Johnson saves his political hide from the popular backlash against his own glaring Covid hypocrisy remains to be seen. What matters to me is that Wales, Scotland, and Ireland quickly followed suit.

How long, I asked myself, until it happens here in the USA? The Biden Administration has backed away from mandates since the Supreme Court shot down their vaccine mandate. Biden himself said there was nothing more he could do about Covid. The Democratic Mayor of Chicago recently called a strike by teachers who didn’t want to return to the classroom because Covid an illegal strike.

The Democratic Governor of Connecticut refused to impose more Covid restrictions when Omicron was spiking, implying they don’t do enough good to justify them.

Then my wife and I went to one of the bastions of liberalism in northeast Ohio, the local Barnes & Nobles bookstore. She wanted to buy a cookbook. I wanted to browse. Since March 2020, when the store was open at all, they strictly enforced their own mask mandate. Yesterday hardly anyone in the store was wearing a mask, including employees.

Just a few weeks ago they were mandatory. No more. It’s a sign.

Afterward we went to our favorite Italian restaurant. For almost two years, the place has been almost deserted and all the employees were required to wear masks. Yesterday, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, it was packed. There was even a waiting line before we left; something we haven’t seen in a long time. And the employees were clearly no longer required to wear masks.

People in northeastern Ohio are going back out to eat, and to shop, and mostly without masks. It’s another sign.

Meanwhile, the news is no longer all talking heads fearmongering about the latest variant and shrieking that we’re all going to die because of unvaccinated people. Instead, the fearmongering is focused on Russia! The old standby bogeyman. That’s yet another sign.

Even Fauci has finally admitted vaccines don’t stop the spread of Covid. As the surge of panicked people who rushed out to get tested for Covid, tested positive, and who, without symptoms, swamped many hospital emergency rooms, fades, the infection and hospitalization rates are dropping like rocks in most states.

It is only a matter of time before first the Biden Administration, and then one by one the Democratic states who have imposed the most severe Covid restrictions, declare victory over the pandemic and tell us we have to live with endemic Covid for the rest of our lives. Which happens to be true.

Covid has mutated into forms that manifest as common colds, because that’s basically what they are, and I would say always have been. Of the Democratic-controlled states, I expect the Midwestern ones will drop the Covid restrictions first, while the liberal bastions on the coasts hold out the longest simply because there are more liberals there who are still convinced we can vaccinate our way out of this if only they make the ignorant/Trumper/anti-science/unvaxxed’s lives miserable enough.

They’re simply flat wrong. There is no vaccinating our way out of this because there has never been an effective vaccine, such as the ones developed for smallpox and polio, for a respiratory virus, and there isn’t one now. I suspect there will be a frantic, last minute push for more vaccinations, boosters, and testing, but the limits of that market have nearly been reached if they haven’t already, and some day before too long all the Covid restrictions will be a memory.

The only question is when. I suspect it will be before Memorial Day. It may be sooner than that. We shall see.

Thanks for reading, good day, and good luck.