We went on a vacation to a state far, far from our home in July. During our stay at Dinosaur National Monument, they changed the signs on the doors on the gift shops, from advising the unvaccinated to wear masks to advising everyone to wear masks. You know the rest—canceled plans, pushed-back opening dates, alternating declarations that we are still in a raging pandemic and this is no big deal. I understood that masking again made sense. I understood that as much as I felt OK, the pandemic still continued for much of the country, and the world. Hot vax summer was never a scientifically defined season.
But also, I feel like I quickly slid from understanding this, and handling it like a 31-year-old adult—July birthday dinner outdoors, just in case—to fully losing my shit. I never got chest pains before April 2020, and have had long stretches without them since; I am getting them again now. I refer to my articles, in my head and sometimes aloud, as “my stupid little posts.” I decided to get a COVID-19 test the other week for a cough, and before the results came back negative, I looked up New York’s program for infected people and found that they can stay locked in a hotel room for up to 14 days for free. Wow, that would be really nice, I thought. We’ve just been doing this for so long; even as life gets measurably easier in some ways, I feel like whatever energy I had to cope with the hard parts was long ago used up…
I think a big part of the problem for me is that the tools to ease this crisis are right there—namely vaccines, but also masks and rapid tests—and so many people are just not using them, and also our system is not set up to deploy them, and so we are all stuck. I hit some kind of breaking point editing a piece about the utility of booster shots and how they won’t make too much of a difference, public health–wise. Once again, America is simply failing at collective action, which is causing an enormous amount of suffering.
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