Covid Normal: No Tests, No Isolation, No Masks

Jason Moyer was set to take a family trip to visit his parents in a few days when his 10-year-old son woke up with a fever and cough.

Covid?

This prospect threatened to thwart the family’s plans.

“Six months ago, we would have tested for Covid,” said Mr. Moyer, 41, an academic administrator in Canton, Ohio. This time, they didn’t.

Instead, they checked to see if the boy’s cough was subsiding and his fever had gone — then headed back to Novel Jersey without bothering to tell his grandparents about the incident.

In its fifth summer of Covid, cases are surging, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting “high” or “very high” levels of the virus in sewage in nearly every state. The rate of Covid hospitalizations is nearly twice as high as it was this time last summer, and deaths — despite being down nearly 75 percent from the worst of the pandemic — are still twice as high as they were this spring.

With kids back in school and travel increasing over the Labor Day weekend, the potential for further spread is huge. But for many people, like Mr. Moyer, Covid has become so normalized that they no longer see any reason to disrupt their social, work or travel routines. Test kit Sales dropped dramatically. Isolation after exposure is increasingly infrequent. Masks — once a ubiquitous symbol of the Covid surge — are infrequent, even in crowded airports, train stations and subways.

Human behavior is of course the reason infections are rising. But at some point, many believe we have to live.

“I don’t even know what the rules and recommendations are anymore,” said Andrew Hoffman, 68, of Mission Viejo, California, who developed respiratory symptoms a few weeks ago after his wife tested positive for COVID. He skipped synagogue but went to the grocery store anyway.

“And since I don’t do the testing, I can’t follow it,” he said.

Epidemiologists have said in interviews that they do not support a lax approach, especially for people who spend time around older people or people with weakened immune systems. They still recommend staying home for a few days after exposure and taking newly authorized booster shots that will soon become available (despite needy turnout last year).

But they said some elements of this newfound laissez-faire attitude were justified. While Covid cases are high, the lower number of hospitalizations and deaths during the surge is a sign of growing immunity — evidence that the combination of soft infections and vaccine boosters heralds a fresh era: not a post-Covid world, but a post-crisis world.

Epidemiologists have long predicted that Covid would eventually become an endemic disease, not a pandemic. “If you ask six epidemiologists what exactly ‘endemic’ means, you’d probably get about 12 answers,” said Bill Hanage, deputy director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “But it certainly has some kind of social definition—a virus that’s around us all the time—and if you want to take that one, we’re definitely there.”

Some dangers remain clear. For vulnerable groups, the coronavirus will always pose an increased risk of stern infection and even death. Long Covid, a multifaceted syndrome, has affected at least 400 million people worldwide, researchers recently estimated, and most of those who have had it say they have not yet recovered.

But CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen called an endemic disease last week, and the agency decided earlier this year to withdraw five-day COVID-19 isolation guidelines and include Covid instead in its guidance for other respiratory infections, instructing people with Covid, RSV or flu symptoms to: stay at home for 24 hours after the fever subsided. The updated guidelines were an indicator that the landscape had changed for most people.

Dr. Hanage defended the tough orders from the early years of the pandemic as “not only appropriate, but absolutely necessary.”

“But,” he said, “it’s just as crucial to support people get off the line — to give a clear indication of when we’re no longer going to be tied to the railroad tracks, staring at the lights of trains hurtling down.”

The lack of strict guidelines has left people to manage risks themselves.

“I’m not bothering to test myself or our kids for Covid,” said Sarah Bernath, 46, a librarian on Prince Edward Island in Canada. “My husband isn’t testing himself either. Knowing whether it’s Covid wouldn’t change whether I stay home or not.”

In some social circles, divergent choices can create uncomfortable dynamics.

Debra Cornelius, 73, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, skipped an indoor event recently because she learned that several other guests — a family of five — had returned from vacation and tested positive for COVID-19 three days before the gathering but still planned to come.

“They said, ‘Oh, it’s like a frigid, we wouldn’t stay home for a frigid,’” she said. “I think people’s attitudes have changed a lot.”

But for countless others, attitudes haven’t changed at all. Diane Deacon, 71, of Saginaw, Michigan, said she tested positive for Covid three days after traveling to Portugal with her two adult daughters. She isolated herself for five days before flying home wearing a mask.

“A few people have asked me, ‘Why did you take the test? You could have continued your vacation,'” she said.

For Ms. Deacon, it was about remembering the refrigerated morgues of 2020 and imagining the vulnerable people she might encounter on the way home — people in wheelchairs or on oxygen, she said.

“I try to avoid making moral judgments about people who make different decisions,” she said. “For me, it was uncomfortable and unfortunate, but it wasn’t a tragedy.”

In a Gallup poll conducted this spring, approximately 59 percent respondents said they believed the pandemic was “over” in the United States, and the share of people who said they were worried about getting Covid has generally been withering over the past two years. Of those who rated their health positively, nearly 9 in 10 said they were not worried about getting it.

This may be, at least in part, a result of personal experience: about 70 percent of people said they had already had a COVID-19 infection, suggesting they believe they have some immunity or at least that they would be able to beat the disease again if necessary.

If the Olympics were any barometer, the rest of the world seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, too. In Tokyo 2021, there were daily saliva samples, plexiglass partitions in cafeterias, and no live spectators; arenas were so empty you could hear the coaches’ voices. In Beijing 2022, under China’s zero-tolerance policy, conditions were much the same.

Yet last month in Paris, the 2024 Olympic organizing committee failed to outline any testing requirements or reporting procedures, and so few countries have issued regulations for their athletes that those that have made headlines.

There were high-fives, group hugs, crowds and plenty of broadcasts to show it. At least 40 athletes positive result due to the virus, including several who still won medals — as well as an unknown number of spectators, because French health officials (who once imposed an eight-month night-time curfew due to COVID) didn’t even count that number.

In the United States, approximately 57 percent of people said their lives haven’t returned to pre-pandemic “normal” — and most said they believe they never will. But the current backdrop of American life tells a different story.

Years of social distancing signage have faded and peeled from the floors of an indoor market in Los Angeles. Hand sanitizer dispensers at amusement parks have dried up. A summer camp hosted by Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo requires children to wear face coverings—not to protect other children, but animals.

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the newfound complacency could be attributed to both confusion and fatigue. The virus remains astonishingly unpredictable: Covid variants continue to evolve much faster than flu variants, and officials who want to “box” Covid into a well-defined seasonal pattern will be alarmed to discover that the 10 surges in cases in the United States so far have been evenly distributed across all four seasons, he said.

These factors, combined with waning immunity, point to a virus that continues to elude our collective understanding—with a collective psychology that’s ready to move on. Even at a meeting of 200 infectious disease experts in Washington earlier this month—many of whom were over 65 and had not been vaccinated for four to six months—hardly anyone wore a mask.

“We decided, ‘Well, the risk is OK.’ But nobody has defined ‘risk’ and nobody has defined ‘OK,’” Dr. Osterholm said. “You can’t be more informed than this group.”

When asked how risk perceptions had changed over time, Dr. Osterholm laughed.

“Lewis Carroll once said something like, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there,’” he said. “In many ways, I feel like that’s where we are.”

Article co-authored by Teddy Rosenbluth.