The New Phase of the Pandemic Is Covid Exhaustion

We’re headed into the third year of pandemic life, and one thing is clear: We’re all exhausted from Covid. Virus caseloads are waning across the country, masks are coming off, people are traveling more, and office workers have new return dates. Does that mean the pandemic is over? Maybe. And maybe not.

On Feb. 25, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relaxed its guidelines on mask wearing and social distancing, saying that 70 percent of Americans no longer need to heed those recommendations. But for a lot of people, like parents of kids under 5 and those who are immunocompromised, this presents more challenges. It’s clear the burden of managing Covid risk increasingly rests on the individual, so what are we supposed to do now?

It’s a lot to contemplate. So on today’s show, Jane puts that question to two experts to help the rest of us.

Dr. Monica Gandhi is an infectious-disease physician whose previous work on H.I.V. informs her assessment of public health messaging during this pandemic. Dr. Aaron E. Carroll is the chief health officer at Indiana University and has spent the pandemic thinking about how to keep his community safe. The good news? Both of them think we’ve got the tools to move forward safely.

Mentioned in this episode:

• “Overcaution Carries Its Own Danger to Children” by Monica Gandhi in The Atlantic.
• “Why Hospitalizations Are Now a Better Indicator of Covid’s Impact” by Monica Gandhi and Leslie Bienen in The New York Times.
• “Covid-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Against the Omicron (B.1.1.529) Variant” in The New England Journal of Medicine.
• “To Fight Covid, We Need to Think Less Like Doctors” by Aaron E. Carroll in The New York Times.
• “Immune Cells Mean Omicron Won’t Swamp Hospitals in Vaccinated Areas” by Michael Daignault and Monica Gandhi in The Washington Post.
• “We Need to Talk About Covid” Part 1 and Part 2 from “The Daily.”

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

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