Stay vigilant in COVID fight

As the United States contends with its third significant wave of COVID-19 infections, the question of when we will finally get past this obstacle and return to truly normal lives keeps evading a believable answer.

The refrain has been: "If we can just tamp this down, we can return to normal." In reality, while vaccinations are a real answer and masking, distancing and other precautions help, a full return to normalcy is not materializing.

When the Spanish Influenza epidemic first hit in 1918, people also wondered when it would run its course. That virus, an H1N1 avian flu, never faded away, and is the root strain of the seasonal flus that still plague us 103 years later.

But the world did return to normalcy, slowly. Eventually, nearly everyone had been exposed, granting some immunity, and over time that virus mutated into less dangerous strains, which often happens.

So … here we are. Infections are again increasing, with positivity rates in New York 10 times what they were a month ago. COVID admissions at Long Island hospitals are multiplying rapidly. Deaths are climbing, too, mostly because too many people are refusing to get a highly effective vaccine that presents almost no health risks. Schools reopen in a month and were just told the state will not provide guidance on how to do so safely.

What now? We cannot shut down again. It would sound the death knell for too many businesses, impoverish too many families and decimate too many educations. A shutdown would also stifle too much of what is good about society and community, and unfairly impact the people who did everything asked of them, including vaccination, only to have refusers ruin the recovery.

So we need to avoid a shutdown while also aggressively slowing the spread of COVID.

Businesses have begun demanding customers and employees show proof of vaccination, and that’s appropriate. Most need to. This is now a disease largely of the unvaccinated, particularly when it comes to hospitalizations and deaths. It behooves any organization, business, governmental entity, college, school and employer to do anything possible, including denying employment and service, to convince people ages 12 and over to get vaccinated.

And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidance last week, asking that even vaccinated people wear masks in indoor public settings. That’s a minor inconvenience that could also help stave off a shutdown and save a life.

We are not going to see deaths from this wave at the scale we did in the previous two. Enough of us have been vaccinated to avoid that level of deadliness. But neither is normalcy just around the bend.

If we want to work and go to school, be entertained and socialize freely, eat and travel and live as we wish, we’re going to have to do the right things, not just once but for as long as it takes.