On [January 6], six medical experts close to the White House published three op-eds in the Journal of the American Medical Association, arguing that the time had come for a new approach to the pandemic—one that sets aside the campaign for eradication in favor of living with the disease.
“It’s not necessarily something that we’re going to do—or even seriously consider doing—tomorrow,” [Anthony] Fauci said.
But eventually the Omicron wave would come to an end, and the sheer contagiousness of the past two waves, combined with the vaccination campaign, would leave a broad protective “immunological memory,” as Fauci put it, throughout the population…. At that point, he said, if there are very few hospitalizations compared with the number of cases, “the impact on society should be measured not on how many people are blowing their nose but on how many people are really getting sick.”
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Right now, the tension is temporal, between a present in which the number of deaths remains intolerably high—on average, about fourteen hundred per day—and a likely, but not certain, near future in which the emergency has retreated, even if the disease remains.
