Elected officials face a conundrum: how to protect constituents who would rather die than keep fighting Covid.

(Originally published Feb. 18 in “What in the World“) The United States has now lost one million more lives than normal during the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control. That includes the more than 950,000 confirmed Covid deaths and fatalities from other causes in excess of the “normal,” pre-pandemic rate. This should silence those who say that Covid deaths are merely taking the lives of people who would have died anyway from old age or other diseases. We already learned last September that Covid was has reduced the average human life expectancy.

This isn’t just the quiet accumulation of trickling mortalities. The rate at which people are dying of Covid in America remains near the highest in the pandemic—2,300 a day.

So the pandemic isn’t over. But we’re clearly over the pandemic. This raises lots or problems for anyone still trying to, you know, live. Eliminating anti-Covid restrictions means we can expect a rebound of Omicron down the road as masks are doffed and people resume mingling as their immunity wanes. We’ve also been warned to expect a new strain that will cut through what immunity we already have.

As difficult a problem as this poses to those who’d prefer not to catch Covid, it presents a real head-scratcher to those whose job it is to govern society and protect their interests, i.e. keeping them alive and healthy. They have a responsibility to protect us, but we won’t let them.

The aim for governments now, Katherine Wu writes in The Atlantic, is to “monitor, then intervene, then monitor, then intervene.” But that would mean:

…”building and maintaining an arsenal of weapons to fight [the virus]; it means having the resources and sociopolitical will to react rapidly when the threat returns.”

Sociopolitical will, alas, is something the pandemic has revealed is in very, very short supply in Western democracies. Governments are instead condemned to monitor, then fail to intervene, then monitor, then fail to intervene, again and again and again. Health experts, meanwhile, find their warnings aren’t just falling on deaf ears, but are increasingly met with hostile responses. As Joel Achenbach writes in The Washington Post:

“The current state of the pandemic has put Biden administration officials and many disease experts in an awkward position. They need to persuade people to stick with the program a bit longer, until the virus is brought under control. But they run the risk of losing their audience.”

California, whose government is under intense pressure from pandemic-fatigued residents to surrender to Covid, has devised a plan to “live with the virus.” The plan focuses on early detection using sewage analysis and mass self-testing, but doesn’t appear to have any concrete commitment to mitigating new outbreaks once they’re found. Self-testing is fundamentally unreliable, as there are no ways to enforce reporting or self-isolation. Self-testing is an honesty test most of us would fail.

The California plan also relies on masks for unvaccinated or vulnerable individuals, which is also ridiculous. Masks are primarily effective at preventing people infected from spreading the virus, not preventing uninfected people from catching it. And vaccinated individuals are almost 90% as likely to catch Omicron as unvaccinated ones, so they should be wearing masks almost as much. For how long, you ask? Until the transmission and death rates have been brought back down to levels that look something like where they were in the fall of 2020.