Excellent state of the union. Wish it were a union! The echo chambers are really valuable, and different tiers of health are emerging between those who listen to experts and those who don’t. But as they say, “no one is safe until everyone is safe.” Staying hopeful amid all the persistent gloom!
I think part of the problem is that regardless of how you feel about our current state of affairs, a "forever emergency" isn't really tenable. What we need to do is move whatever we can from executive orders - which by their nature, are fragile and volatile - to statutes, enacted by competent legislative bodies. We can work towards incorporating as many parts of the PHE as we can into more permanent law, and it's going to be hard. Personally, I think it's something we should have started on a long time ago - anticipating an expiration date.
A permanent emergency is, as you note, untenable. That said, legislating away common public health mitigations because someone claims they're a violation of civil rights, so that those measures can't be used in the future without either legislative repeal or a court battle, is a problem.
I've some experience with warning fatigue from meteorology. I don't want us to keep the PHE forever, because it has already lost its importance to so many people. In the weather world, we're still debating how long a tornado warning should last... anything more than about 60 min and people come out of their safe shelter areas because it must be over. With COVID, that happened as soon as we had vaccines (not as soon as they were in arms) partially because so many news sources intimated the mRNA vaccines were sterilizing when, in fact, that had never been the expectation.
We might have been better expiring the original PHE with vaccines, and issuing a new one with fanfare a week later to lessen the fatigue issue. I just don't know. I'm not that good with population psychology.
Excellent state of the union. Wish it were a union! The echo chambers are really valuable, and different tiers of health are emerging between those who listen to experts and those who don’t. But as they say, “no one is safe until everyone is safe.” Staying hopeful amid all the persistent gloom!
I think part of the problem is that regardless of how you feel about our current state of affairs, a "forever emergency" isn't really tenable. What we need to do is move whatever we can from executive orders - which by their nature, are fragile and volatile - to statutes, enacted by competent legislative bodies. We can work towards incorporating as many parts of the PHE as we can into more permanent law, and it's going to be hard. Personally, I think it's something we should have started on a long time ago - anticipating an expiration date.
A permanent emergency is, as you note, untenable. That said, legislating away common public health mitigations because someone claims they're a violation of civil rights, so that those measures can't be used in the future without either legislative repeal or a court battle, is a problem.
I've some experience with warning fatigue from meteorology. I don't want us to keep the PHE forever, because it has already lost its importance to so many people. In the weather world, we're still debating how long a tornado warning should last... anything more than about 60 min and people come out of their safe shelter areas because it must be over. With COVID, that happened as soon as we had vaccines (not as soon as they were in arms) partially because so many news sources intimated the mRNA vaccines were sterilizing when, in fact, that had never been the expectation.
We might have been better expiring the original PHE with vaccines, and issuing a new one with fanfare a week later to lessen the fatigue issue. I just don't know. I'm not that good with population psychology.