Fight the COVID Delta Variant, but Don’t Let It Stop the Reopening.

I agree completely. We are not in the same situation as we were before, and infinite lockdown and eternal prison countries are just not sustainable or sane.

The other key difference is that there’s no “just around the bend” anymore. We can’t say new restrictions now are just a matter of weeks or a couple months until we get a new, key tool to fight the virus. We continue to vaccinate, but COVID is now endemic and will likely remain so indefinitely.

I just want to quote the whole fucking article because it talks about things that lockdown lifers pretend don’t exist or their previous favorite lie, “Zoom is just as good as in person!”

The concerning data about declining life expectancy reflects not just COVID deaths themselves but deaths related to the social dislocation due to COVID: more fatal drug overdoses, more deaths due to liver disease (often associated with heavy alcohol use), and more homicides. Experts are concerned that disruptions to non-COVID medical care could increase deaths from other diseases in the years to come.

Even mask mandates aren’t a trivial imposition. There are reasons people don’t go around wearing masks under ordinary circumstances. Masks can be uncomfortable (especially if you do a job where you’ve been required to wear one all day) and they interfere with non-verbal aspects of communication. Being deprived of seeing other people’s faces is just one aspect of the loss of human connection in the last year.

I supported all the restrictions (and more) when the virus and threat was new, when we didn’t know anything and we were feeling our way in the dark. But now, none of that is true.

None of this is to say that all the restrictions were wrong: Many of them, at many times, have passed cost-benefit analysis, because COVID is such a scourge. But the cavalier manner in which their proponents have often discussed them — if I hear “this isn’t hard” one more time, I’m going to scream — has demonstrated a lack of empathy, and a lack of understanding of why the bar for reimposing them now that a vaccine is widely available should be so high.

I saw some assclown saying “this isn’t hard” about Covid restrictions on Twitter yesterday.

The is going to make the (largely liberal) lockdown lifer losers cry very big tears, but the author of the Business Insider column is right. The world can’t live like we did for a year or more, nor should we have to.

The goalposts keep being moved, harming millions in the process against a virus that is not going anywhere no matter what we do. We have safe and effective vaccines now; time to start fucking acting like it.