The U.S. public health system is doing its best to frame the deadly coronavirus pandemic in the same category as the flu. By doing this, it is oversimplifying the dangerous and erratic nature of SARS-CoV-2 and putting millions of people – especially the elderly and immunocompromised – at tremendous risk.
The flu is a true seasonal virus. It generally spreads in winter when people remain indoors more. Covid-19, on the other hand, is a year-round erratic virus that mutates frequently and has lulled us – both experts and the public – to believing that the pandemic was over more than once (witness President Joe Biden’s 2021 speech given at a party on the White House’s South Lawn with more than 1,000 people in attendance, in which he declared that the U.S. had achieved “independence” from the coronavirus, although he gets some credit for cautioning against complacency with more transmissible variants circulating in the country. Within months of that speech, we were seeing higher numbers of severe illness and hospitalization than had previously been the case).
This is not unlike when, after the First World War and the Spanish flu had upended life, President Warren G. Harding said that these events altered the perspective of humanity. He argued that the solution was to seek what he termed “normalcy” by restoring life to how it was before the war.
Harding’s detractors of the time tried to belittle the word “normalcy” as a neologism and malapropism, saying that it was poorly coined (by Harding), as opposed to the more accepted term “normality.” The William Safires of the age discussed evidence that “normalcy” had been listed in dictionaries as far back as 1857, although it was an obscure math term before Harding’s use of it during his campaign. Harding, who had been a newspaper editor (possibly the first U.S. president with that background), did address the original of the word, claiming that only “normalcy” and not “normality” appeared in his dictionary, although he didn’t cite which dictionary this was.
Many, indeed virtually everyone, pined for a return to normalcy once we began to social distance, don face masks, avoid large crowds and poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and – once we began the long climb back to a semblance of normalcy – stay home when sick or exposed to disease.
Most public health experts hoped that lessons would be learnt from all this, that this type of mitigation should be practiced for – gasp – other respiratory viruses. (Indeed, it bears mention that our precautions killed off one known circulating lineage of Influenza B virus, known as the Yamagata virus.) But that has yet to happen. Instead, there’s a chorus of voices pushing SARS-CoV-2 to be more like the flu, a scientific impossibility in so many respects it barely deserves a response.
Yet, that is where we are. But it doesn’t have to be where we stay.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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