As a Doctor, I Don’t Fear Covid as I Once Did. But I Carry Its Grave Lessons Forward.
Walking through the intensive care unit is often a lesson in how much there is to fear.
Just a few years ago, I walked through these halls thinking constantly of Covid, afraid that I would contract the virus in a patient room or in a conversation with a colleague. The fear was distracting, sometimes all consuming. But now I am no longer afraid that the virus will leave me seriously ill, and the pandemic is a receding memory. Sometimes it is hard for me to believe that it even happened.
Nearly four years after the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic, the coronavirus is still with us. It likely always will be. And it is still resulting in 500 to 1,500 deaths every week as of the last month — higher than the mortality from influenza, though lower compared to previous years. There is also the persistent threat of long Covid, the debilitating symptoms that can persist after an initial infection.
But our response has changed. On March 1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending that Americans with Covid no longer need to remain isolated for five days after falling sick. Instead, people can return to their regular activities after they have not had a fever for 24 hours, which is the same recommendation for the flu and other respiratory illnesses.
When I pause to think about what happened in this intensive care unit, in the same patient rooms I walk through now, it is remarkable that most of us have managed to return to life as it was before. But that is what we do. We can remain in a state of heightened vigilance for only so long. There is no other choice.
And we are still adapting to a new reality: The virus is endemic. Covid is no longer so different from the seasonal flu and a host of other respiratory viruses, an inconvenience for most of us but a dangerous and potentially mortal threat for some. We have ricocheted in a few short years to acceptance from terror, which leaves us in a strange place: How do the majority of us move on when this virus still poses a threat to a relative few? Can we balance our desire to forget the past few years with the lessons that we, as a country, have learned?
Even having the chance to pose those questions is a step forward we could not have predicted just a few years ago. The threat of this virus was so great that in the early months of the pandemic, our lives stopped. We were afraid to breathe the air. Now, because of vaccinations and prior infections, our immunity is far greater than it was then, and infections are now typically milder. The devastating Covid cases that drove the earlier recommendations regarding longer periods of isolation are far less prevalent.
