The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
When officials announced that the Spanish flu pandemic was on the wane in Seattle back in 1918, people poured into the streets in celebration. It happened to coincide with the end of World War I, giving double cause for joy. But the demise of the disease was a major part of the revelry.
“The Flu Ban is Lifted!” trumpeted a clothing store ad in the Seattle Daily Times, in November 1918, inviting everyone to come back downtown after weeks of lockdowns and quarantines.
“Seattle Now Unmuzzled” read a headline, above an article on how the public had “thrown its masks in the stove, piled the breakfast dishes in the sink and hit for town on the first available street car.”
Now that’s how to end a pandemic. Send it out in a blaze, or a mass doffing of the mask. The hitch, as we now know, is the pandemic hadn’t really ended. Within a few months, Seattle had reinstituted a quarantine, locking more than 1,000 stricken residents inside their own homes, during a new wave of the Spanish flu.
I’m recalling all this because the other day, a top health official in Seattle said what we’ve been pining to hear during this two-year slog: That the coronavirus pandemic is ending.
Christopher Murray, head of the influential disease-modeling Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, said the virus is still circulating at high rates for now. But in a matter of a few weeks, it will be Seattle Unmuzzled once again — and for good this time.
“This is a watershed for the pandemic,” Murray said. “The era of extraordinary governmental and societal interventions to control COVID-19 is essentially coming to an end. The pandemic, in the sense of that societal response, is over.”
These remarks were reported on TV news in Seattle, but passed without much comment, and did not draw all that much attention nationally. Certainly nobody burned their masks or danced in the streets. Is it because we don’t believe it? Or is it that society has already psychologically moved on?
“This framing that the pandemic is ending is really unfortunate,” said Jeff Duchin, the chief health officer for Seattle and King County, and also affiliated with the UW, when I asked him about the predictions.
First, he argues, hospitals are slammed to the brink of rationing care. So by all measures we’re in the thick of a major ongoing crisis.
Second, the thing that makes pandemics so challenging is that they feature a novel, evolving pathogen.
It’s maybe like 1918. They wanted to be done so badly that they pushed ahead as if it were so.
Medical historians say that’s typically how past pandemics have “ended” — murkily, with some gradual but mass cultural or psychological shift that maybe doesn’t have much to do with scientific reality.
Past pandemics have tended to morph, through societal fatigue or amnesia, into becoming “someone else’s problem,” two historians, from Johns Hopkins and Exeter University, write in an essay “How Pandemics End”: “The social epidemic does not necessarily end when biological transmission has ended, or even peaked, but rather when, in the attention of the general public and in the judgment of certain media and political elites who shape that attention, the disease ceases to be newsworthy.”
After two years of dashboards and epidemiological curves and political wars about everything from masks to deaths, this, amazingly, may turn out to be what matters at the end. Is coronavirus newsworthy anymore?
The scientific debate, or even the real-world behavior of the virus, may not dictate the pandemic’s end. What matters is how much disease and death we’re willing to accept as our new normal — concentrated though it may be among those who still, maddeningly, won’t get vaccinated.
It’s a bit like the mass shooting phenomenon: The real end of the pandemic may be marked by the moment we collectively choose we just can’t do it anymore, and we look away.
Morning Briefing Newsletter
Get a rundown of the latest local and regional news every Mon-Fri morning.
