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Late Stage Covid

It is a weird moment.

By Charlie Warzel
surgical mask with greenery
Iryna Veklich / Getty

A rather remarkable thing happened on Tuesday and Wednesday: My Twitter timeline and TikTok “For You” page proved to be a useful epidemiological barometer. It started as a trickle of anecdotal tweets. Wow, like half the people in my group chat have COVID. People began retweeting photos of COVID testing lines sprawling down sidewalks. By Wednesday, my TikTok page was an endless series of videos from total strangers that looked like this:

After a weekend of vaccinated and boosted holiday party-going and general life-living, the Omicron variant appears to have made solid landfall in major American cities, and things are moving quickly:

Very quickly:

A steep increase in cases was, of course, expected and follows trends from the United Kingdom and South Africa. Even so, the rise feels stark. The chart that stood out to me is this one, from Cornell University:

What the chart doesn’t show is that 97 percent of Cornell students are vaccinated. As of Thursday, none of those cases featured severe illness. And because the school does comprehensive surveillance testing (including of asymptomatic students), it's likely that a number of those positives came from people who didn't know they had it. And so the situation feels a bit different than many of us are used to. Scary-looking hockey-stick graph. Almost all breakthrough infections. So far, reasonably mild illness. Changes in plans (exams are moving online), but no real panic.

This is where I’d like to remark that we are in a super-weird moment right now. This isn’t an earth-shattering observation, but I still think it’s worth acknowledging how, 20 months into this pandemic, we’re entering a new phase with different dynamics. Even the culture-warring around COVID is of a different flavor.

There’s a familiar sense of foreboding and exhaustion as Omicron makes its way through the country. But even among many who take the pandemic seriously, this foreboding is mixed with a sense of resignation—that Omicron is coming for everyone. This reality, coupled with early (though not definitive) reports that Omicron is producing seemingly milder illness in many fully vaccinated or previously infected individuals, has led to a shift in how many Americans are thinking about COVID risk. They are, for lack of a better word, a bit more chill. They are (understandably) tired of rearranging their lives around the virus. They feel they’ve taken the precautions (vaccination, mask-wearing in many indoor areas) and must now go about the business of living their lives.

There are those in vulnerable groups who are (also understandably) worried about Omicron and resent those who are dismissive. These are the immunocompromised individuals and those in their close circles who are worried about the apparent decreased effectiveness of vaccines against the variant. They are the people who’ve drastically changed their lives to stay safe and are staring down another devastating setback. There are the parents of children under 5 who have not been vaccinated and feel a sense of confusion and paralysis when it comes to making the right decision for their family right now.

There’s the subset of people who are (again, understandably) traumatized by the last two years. They are still furious at their fellow Americans for reckless behavior. They are distrustful of leaders and institutions who’ve failed them over the course of the pandemic. They are sad and angry—about lost loved ones, lost years of their childrens’ lives, lost jobs and incomes. As my colleague Ian Bogost articulated, there are those who feel a nagging despair about the future and “wonder if our present circumstances might persist endlessly.” There are the health-care professionals, burned out and terrified of a surge that might topple an already overwhelmed hospital system. They know, as my colleague Ed Yong wrote, that “America is not prepared for Omicron.”

Then, of course, there is the familiar cohort who deny the seriousness of the pandemic or dismiss it completely. They are the unvaccinated or the selfish ones who simply have never cared about the virus. Many of them are, at this point, sitting ducks—the people who threaten to bring a strained medical system to its knees.

Every one of these groups is being dropped into the same uncertain scenario: an extremely transmissible, still not fully understood COVID variant that is arriving in the U.S. in perfect sync with one of the year’s busiest periods of travel, vacation, and socializing. In this scenario there seem to be reasons to be worried, hopeful, exhausted, nonplussed, angry, not-panicked, and cautious—sometimes all at once. It’s disorienting.

I got some version of all of these responses on Wednesday when I fired off a mostly silly tweet about feeling some social paralysis about going to a friend’s holiday party in the coming days. Some people implored me, using stern language, not to go, while others expressed a lightly exasperated confusion, similar to mine. I woke up on Thursday morning to a string of angry direct messages and replies calling me a freaked-out COVID “codependent” (who is also clearly no fun at holiday parties). These weren’t pandemic deniers; they were vaxxed and boostered people who resent the COVID-cautious as irrational barriers to normalcy. They told me they were boosted and happily going to live their lives however they pleased. One Boosted Tough Guy asked me over DMs if I was going to be “triggered” by his eating indoors at a restaurant. Spoiler: I am not!

I've seen this type of argument on Twitter a fair amount lately. A minority of people out there see frequent rapid testing or plan-changing as an anxious behavior and want to excoriate people for it. But, as New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci points out, responsibly testing before interacting with others in an unmasked public setting is the opposite of an anxious behavior—it’s carrying on with one’s life. (And due to the ridiculous expense and scarcity of rapid tests, it’s a privilege to be able to choose when you want to see others and to be able to afford to be responsible about it.)

These types of internecine, mostly pointless online arguments are a symptom of this weird moment, which I’ll call late-stage-COVID behavior. It’s the product of having enough information and experience to feel righteous in your personal approach to COVID risk while also staring at enough uncertainty to feel anxious or angry. Late-stage COVID behavior is taking precautions and trying to live as normally as possible. Late-stage COVID is being vaccinated and boosted and feeling a little guilty about trying to live as normally as possible. Late-stage COVID behavior is being vaccinated and boosted and still being extremely cautious. Late-stage COVID behavior is having an unvaccinated youngster and seething at a world that’s going back to normal in a way that seems too fast. It’s a bitter cocktail of justified and semi-justified feelings and responsible and irresponsible behaviors.

Should you go to that holiday party or travel to see your elderly folks in the next few weeks? Depending on your politics, personality, media diet, and social circles, you can probably talk yourself into any outcome! Now, layer on varying levels of vaccination, public trust, general fatigue, and the fact that Omicron information is evolving by the hour.

Things are moving so fast that, by the time this newsletter publishes, it's possible that most every point I’ve made will be totally irrelevant. In that sense, there's a bit of mid-March 2020 in the air. But, in another very real and very important sense, the individual risks have changed dramatically thanks to the wonderful array of vaccines.

In a pandemic full of confusing moments, I’d argue this might be the most confusing. After almost two years, we are all meeting Omicron where we are personally at. And while the pandemic has affected us all, its impacts on our lives are not evenly or fairly experienced or interpreted.

I don’t think there’s a broader lesson here. I don’t presume that we’re all going to get along or find our collective spirit as the new variant picks up. I don’t think many behaviors or risk tolerances will shift remarkably. I’m not sure that this deep into the slog we’re going to tap into new reserves of grace and humility toward each other. I suppose I’m mostly writing this for myself, as a reminder to not forget how strange it feels to live in a moment where we know so much and have so many resources at our disposal, but also remain forever at the mercy of basic, elemental forces of nature. Right now, I'm not all that worried about my safety. Nor do I feel deep despair. But I'm also concerned — for the vulnerable in my life and in the world and for all that I don't know. The strangeness of the moment is humbling. Tomorrow I will feel different, I know. But that’s all I know.

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.