THE PRICE OF COMPLACENCY
EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK, PEOPLE are coming out from under their pandemic rocks. The masks are off, the bars are crowded, the kids are back in school. Even New York City, home to some of the most stringent mandates, no longer requires proof of vaccination in restaurants or masks in schools. On April 7, the Red Sox and the Yankees will square off on Opening Day in front of a potential crowd of 50,000-plus fans eager to cheer full-throated and (mostly) maskless into the breeze.
Baseball fans aren’t the only ones eager to put the pandemic behind them. So, apparently, is Congress. Money for COVID-19 testing, vaccines and therapeutics is running out and new spending harder to find than Putin’s conscience. Leading the opposition is Senator Mitt Romney. “While we have supported historic, bipartisan measures in the United States Senate to provide unprecedented investments in vaccines, therapeutics, and testing,” he wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden, “it is not yet clear why additional funding is needed.” (Emphasis added.) Romney and 35 other signatories first want a full accounting of the $6 trillion already spent on the pandemic—a task that would likely take months.
“It is absolutely idiotic to say all of a sudden, it’s no longer raining, so I think I won’t have a roof over my head.”
While Congress fiddles, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has killed more than a million Americans and as many as 18 million people worldwide so far, according to a new estimate, is still at large. Europe’s relaxation of pandemic restrictions, together with a more contagious variant of Omicron, BA.2, has triggered a rise in cases and an uptick in the U.S. is expected over the next few weeks. It isn’t expected to cause a rise in hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S., but that’s not certain. Beyond the variant du jour are more fraught questions: Does the coronavirus have more surprises in store in the months ahead? Will a new variant come along that evades the protection of vaccines and prior infections and sends this weary nation back into the pandemic doldrums? Scientists have no answers.
Last month, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dominated the
