Member-only story
A Practical Guide to Surviving this Moment in the COVID Pandemic — The Best Words
The rule changes came swiftly. The CDC guidance continued to pin masking to your county of residence. Governors in New York and New Jersey were set to back off their masking guidelines, dragging their populous states into the majority of the country.
The City of Cincinnati, which had recently extended mask mandates to the end of March, and my employer, suddenly issued rules cancelling nearly a dozen different masking, testing, and vaccination rules and protocols.
A lot of us who had invested heavily in protecting ourselves, loved ones, and even strangers through masking and vaccinations, were suddenly feeling adrift. Was the pandemic over?
It seemed as if we had simply decided that we would collectively quit playing pandemic. We all were just going to change our behavior, even though the previous two months were among the top five months of COVID hospitalizations since the pandemic began. I mean, things were better. Deaths were going down, and higher vaccination rates meant that even many of the hospitalizations were not ending in death. But things weren’t great. They weren’t even good.
