This Covid re-opening will definitely for sure work out differently this time, right guys?

Well Omicron is seemingly subsiding finally, having reeked havoc on many holiday travel itineraries and New Year’s Eve party plans. So in response, most state and local governments are plowing forward with revoking mask mandates and other protective measures designed to limit the spread of the virus.

But we’ve been here before.

When we first started easing restrictions after the initial surge of Covid-19, the Delta variant popped up, and rode through the population like Moses through the Red Sea. Cities and states rushed to reimplement mask mandates and restrictions on indoor public spaces in order to stem the tide of a hospitalization rate that threatened to overwhelm the health care system.

After Delta, we once again saw protections rolled back, and once again a new variant emerged, this time the deadly Omicron. My own plans to visit my parents for Christmas were quickly scuttled as hospitals once again filled to the brim with Covid cases.

Along the way over a million Americans died from the virus. A number that I used to think wasn’t possible for a virus, given modern medicine and previously trustworthy institutions like the Centers for Disease Control. But the CDC, it seems, is taking orders from CEOs these days, rather than following the science on public health.

So here we are again, rushing to “open everything,” with an army of self-proclaimed centrist armchair epidemiologists leading the chorus on policy change. Noted New York Times quitter-turned-Substack grifter Bari Weiss boldly proclaimed that she was “done with Covid,” as if viruses were an attitude instead of a serious health problem.

Trained economist-turned-election-predictor Nate Silver implored President Joe Biden to tell liberals it was safe to get coffee with friends, while mocking those who take time to plan and consider Covid risk for social get-togethers. Presumably, Silver is just lonely and wants Starbucks with his lib friends, I don’t know.

Politicians are responding to these calls, worried that public health protections will negatively affect their chances at the ballot box in the upcoming mid-term elections. But given the timelines of previous variants, a new dominant strain could emerge just in time for the ballot box.

But why would easing protections now end any differently than the last two times? We know that the virus still runs rampant within the unvaccinated community, which provides a breeding ground for new variants. While it’s easy to sit back and look at data that shows that its mostly unvaccinated people dying of Omicron and that they “bring it on themselves,” there are still immunocompromised folks out there, not to mention all children under five years old not yet old enough to get vaccines.

Who’s to say that the next variant won’t be resistant to our current vaccines? We need common sense and risk-management right now, not some faux outrage over alleged freedoms to fill the void left by cancelled coffee plans.