Supported by an alliance of conservative and liberal officials and amplified by both groups’ preferred media, Unlimited Covid has evolved from a de facto national strategy to an explicit ideology. Rural farmers, suburban business owners, and urban professionals alike are now working diligently toward the goal.
The result is the world’s highest overall coronavirus death toll and the highest current daily number of deaths, as the nation of 330 million encourages the omicron variant to spread. Since the start of the pandemic, American life expectancy has declined by at least 1.8 years.
Rather than fight the pandemic, the nation has embraced a goal of fighting against the fight against the pandemic. While other countries monitor case counts or hospital capacity, the United States is focused on driving the number of closures, vaccination requirements, and mask orders down to zero. Even where there are no closures, the most dedicated Americans battle against them anyway.
Front-page stories in the New York Times, running with more than weekly frequency, warn the public of the perils of “Zero Covid” policy in China, where lockdowns in the city of Xi'an apparently caused one man to die of a heart attack and one woman to miscarry a pregnancy. China’s commitment to suppressing the virus, the paper told its readers on January 21, means that “a growing number of people are finding their lives suddenly upended.”
Upendedness may be in the eye of the beholder. With record numbers of Covid cases exhausting medical capacity in the United States, Americans are routinely turned away from their own country’s emergency rooms, or crowded out of maternity units, or forced to delay surgeries. But the Unlimited Covid policy defines normalcy differently—as a matter of choice and of attitude.
“I’m done with Covid,” the American political entertainment personality Bari Weiss said on national television, to enthusiastic applause. She added: “It’s not real anymore.”
Nearly 4,000 of Weiss’ fellow Americans had died of Covid that day.
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