I feel so strangely disconnected from pretty much the entirety of Covid discourse I see. I thought I’d offer my own testimony in a thread, mostly to see if it’s familiar to anyone else.
In my little slice of the world, when Omicron came in mid-December and testing lines started stretching down the blocks, govt officials were pretty adamant that they would not be reimposing mitigation measures like indoor dining restrictions. But some restaurants closed anyway.
I was planning to fly to California to see my family over the holidays, so I voluntarily cut out a lot of activities—indoor dining, movie theaters, etc.—but no one ordered me to. And obv I could still travel from a place with lots of Omicron to a place with less.
On the plane back from CA, I started feeling sick with a sore throat and a productive cough. I never developed a fever and I never tested positive across several PCR and rapid tests, so I don’t think it was Omicron, but I isolated myself anyway—again voluntarily.
By the time I re-emerged, we were at about the peak of the wave on the new cases graph. Outdoor masks were back in a big way (I think part of this is that they’re pretty comfortable in cold weather) but indoor dining was still open, just not very popular. Deaths were on the rise.
All of which is to say that, while my life has been somewhat disrupted through omicron, I’ve not ever felt like there was much in the way of official restrictions on what I could do.
And it’s so odd to me that we’re looking a wave of thousands of daily deaths and, for some reason, policy makers think what they need to do is tell people to get back to normal even harder.
People here, from what I’ve seen, have taken their own and their families’ and their neighbors’ health and safety in hand while policy makers have done nothing.
In New York City, I think it’s safe now to say they did a reasonably good job. But the rest of the country is still really suffering, and encouraging others to do more rather than less to protect their loved ones has been nowhere in the discussion as far as I can see.
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