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Analysis: Americans Struggle for New Balance and face contradictions as the Covid Pandemic lingers
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...life has in many ways returned to something like the Before Times. Restaurants are packed, and cultural performances sold out. Children are sitting in schools, and workers are trickling back into offices. Masks are no longer required in public, even in New York City’s subways.
The summer travel season was a blockbuster. Even cruise ships — derided as floating Petri dishes early in the pandemic — were filling up with eager passengers.
Most Americans want to get back to normalcy and are unwilling to let Covid rule their lives any longer, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, said in an interview. “Those two sets of goals are achievable,” Dr. Jha said, so long as Americans keep getting vaccinated, test when necessary and wear masks in crowded public settings.
“We shouldn’t act like it’s 2019,” he added, “but we also should not act like it’s 2020.”
But the coronavirus has not gone away. While deaths have plummeted since the beginning of the year, about 315 Americans are still dying of Covid on the average day. This year’s toll has so far exceeded 219,000.
More than 27,000 Americans with Covid are in hospitals on any given day, and an uncertain number face lingering complications, so-called long Covid. Declines in test positivity and hospitalization are flattening, hinting at a possible reversal.
Roughly half of Americans eligible for boosters have not gotten them, and just 10 percent have gotten the most up-to-date bivalent booster. Experts are warning that waning immunity and the arrival of new subvariants may lead to another surge of cases and hospitalizations.
“The pandemic is over — we still have a problem with Covid-19,” President Biden recently said. That is the needle that Americans are threading right now, and it makes for a strange national disequilibrium. On any given day, half the country appears to be relieved that the worst seems to be over, while the other half seems gripped by the persistent fear that the nation may never really be free of the virus.
Most Americans are eating out again, visiting friends and returning to offices, according to recent surveys by Axios-Ipsos. Only 5 percent of respondents said they considered those activities to be high risk.
But fewer than one-quarter of them thought there was no risk at all. Close to half said they had returned to their pre-Covid lives — even as two-thirds said they believed the pandemic was not over.
“It’s a weird moment we’re in, and a confusing one, I think, for a lot of people,” said Debra Caplan, an associate professor of theater at Baruch College in New York, who added that she was mystified by what she termed society’s “collective shrug.”
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Holding two contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously — the pandemic is over, we still have a problem with Covid — is intensely discomfiting, psychologists say. It is a form of cognitive dissonance, experienced when one’s behaviors or actions are at odds with the information or understanding they have.
People are driven to reduce the discord by reconciling conflicting thoughts and behaviors, but the process is not a conscious one, said Elliot Aronson, a professor emeritus of social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
People who smoke despite the known risks, for example, may tell themselves that they plan to quit in five years, or that their health is otherwise excellent.
As people tire of Covid precautions, for example, “they try to convince themselves it’s OK not to wear a mask,” Dr. Aronson said. “We all know people who had light cases and recovered quickly, and then it does feel foolish to be worried about a light case.”
People also don’t like to stand out, he noted. We are uncomfortable wearing a mask into a work meeting or social gathering, only to discover no one else is wearing one. “It creates the illusion that maybe we missed something, like, ‘Maybe I didn’t read The Times this morning and maybe they declared the whole thing over,’” Dr. Aronson said.
He advises people who want to make more rational decisions to think about the thing they least want to think about — perhaps the more than 300 people still dying daily of Covid in the United States, or that many people who had a mild illness went on to develop long Covid, he said.
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