The Only Thing

Plus, who wouldn’t feel a bit more comfortable venturing into the world knowing that everyone around them isn’t a vector of disease?
Yasmeen Serhan "The Futility of Vaccine Passports"

Okay. So I have a question. Since when does a vaccine, or other immunity, against the SARS-2 coronavirus mean that a given person "isn't a vector of disease?" Did all other human communicable diseases drop dead while I was away? Because I know, for my own part, I've had some nasty respiratory bugs in my day, not to mention the random pain in the butt that is the common cold. (Although, perhaps strangely, I've never had influenza.) Have all of these pests been eradicated in the past year? This would be huge news, so I'm impressed that I haven't heard about it.

This transition of the SARS-2 coronavirus over the past fifteen or sixteen months, from being a new disease to being the only disease worth having any concern over is somewhat remarkable, and so I'm a bit surprised that more hasn't been made of it. Granted, formulations like the one I quote from Yasmeen Serhan, which imply that proof of SARS-2 immunity can be taken as a sign that a person is free of any communicable disease, are likely rare; I don't believe I've seen it put quite that way before. But broader implications that the virus is the only, rather than a different, threat to one's health are out there.

And the outbreak dominates the news. The BBC, for instance, has added a section for Coronavirus to its home page. And this article on a new Utah law aimed at making men pay for half the costs of a partner's pregnancy has a link to a video captioned "Coronavirus: 'Pregnancy during a pandemic is terrifying'," and the "You may also like:" headlines are "In pictures: The babies born into a pandemic", "From boom to bust - why lockdown hasn't led to more babies" and "'Raw and inspiring': Tales of pandemic motherhood." This, for a story where the SARS-2 coronavirus is never mentioned. And other sites that normally have some sort of paywall, like The Atlantic, have elected to allow their pandemic-related stories to be freely available.

There's nothing particularly inappropriate in all of this. The pandemic has come to dominate the news cycle for the past year, and news outlets haven't been shy in making room for it. And, being the sort to see the news media as a business, I'm of the opinion that pandemic coverage takes center stage because people are interested in it. After all, this is something that seemingly came out of nowhere to become the third leading cause of death in the United States. It's responsible for a significant majority of the increase in deaths from 2019 to 2020. But unlike heart disease and cancer, which hold the top spots, many people feel a sense of agency concerning the SARS-2 coronavirus.

But it's not the only thing that people might have to be careful of. And the implication that "safe" from the pandemic equals safe overall hides that fact. Deaths from the flu may have been completely swamped by the SARS-2 CoV pandemic, but some forty-thousand or so deaths annually is still worth taking into account.

If there were one thing that would change about the overall reaction to the pandemic, it would be to more firmly place it in a context of public health more generally. As much as vaccine hesitancy and opposition to mask mandates make headlines and offer convenient villains to boo, I suspect that it's likely that a culture that sees staying home while sick as socially-dangerous malingering is also a culprit. Back when the pandemic was just starting to ramp up in the United States, I had a couple of encounters with visibly ill people working in grocery stores. I doubt that either of them had come down with a SARS-2 CoV infection. But they were disease vectors nonetheless. Maybe keeping that in mind will help the nation make some changes that will blunt the inevitable next disease outbreak.