Thread by @ezraklein

I'm seeing this too, and I...don't think it's great.

There are more options here than, as @EricTopol puts it, inevitability vs. avoidance. This is what I've been trying to tease out pushing for a clearer description of goals.

https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1476632045845630978

There are other camps one can fall into, rather than seeing this as a binary between "let 'er rip" and "lock back down" (which seems to me to be what's obviously demanded by many arguments here, but since it won't happen, few are directly advocating it)

Here's mine: People are going to have very different risk tolerances, different needs, and little patience for lockdowns. No strategy that doesn't accept that can work.

So I want policymakers to make sure people have a full supply of risk management tools.

We've done...pretty well on the vaccine access in the US.

But do we have enough testing supply, or rapid tests approved? No, obviously not.

Am I confident we would approve, produce, and deploy targeted boosters fast enough for a variant? No, not at all.

Have we made best ventilation practices and products clear, made those products affordable and ubiquitous, and made it easy to know which places are using them? No.

Are we sending out N95s to anyone who asks? No.

What's needed to supercharge production of the Pfizer antiviral?

I've been banging on about supply-side liberalism lately, and this is a form: Instead of saying the options are to bear risk of infection collectively or individually, we collectively build the infrastructure for people to be able to lower their risk. nytimes.com/2021/09/19/opi…

And that can be expressed as a goal: People should have quick, costless access to vaccines, high-quality masks, high-quality tests, and boosters as needed. The costs of upgrading ventilation should be shared.

We've done fairly well on vaccines, poorly on most else.

I think Omicron has scrambled the conversation. So much before was about limiting spread.

It's unclear if that's still possible, and even if it is, I don't see people advocating anything near what it would require.

But the alternative to society-wide policies trying to limit spread isn't giving up.

And there's no reason to believe Omicron is the last variant.

So the big question is: what you do between Omicron and the next variant, or between covid and the next pandemic?

Omicron is moving so much faster than our politics that it's not clear to me it really matters what camp you fall into there, except for personal decisions.

But what the goal of our overarching covid (and pandemic!) policy is — that still matters a lot!

My fear is we'll just endure Omicron, try to shift back to normal after it, waste a bunch of time again, and if and when the next variant comes, regret that we didn't build more flexible pandemic infrastructure when we had the chance.

Maybe a simpler way of phrasing the question I keep asking is this: What should be true of our pandemic infrastructure or policy in 6 months that isn't true now?

Add this to the to-do list:

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1476989595485028359