Sitting here in my 8th day of isolation with symptoms barely abated, let me say that "living with Covid" in the sense now being used in the US and UK – i.e., dropping even the pretense of fighting the disease – is not going to mean "a return to normal." It will mean a permanently diminished world with chronic uncertainty in every aspect of life: in the supply chain, the healthcare system, in schools, business, arts & entertainment, in personal life. It means surrendering to a disease that kills people at 10 times the rate of the flu and infects far more, every year, year after year. To really "live with Covid," as opposed to simply surrendering to it, we would have to transform our societies in the most profound way, at almost every level. It would be a million miles away from the old “normal.”
Just in practical terms, we would have to expand and upscale public health infrastructure to an extent unfathomable before now, so it would have the flexible capacity to deal with the flood of Covid cases that will strain the system year after year, “endemically,” from now on. And this expanded public health system would have to be a genuinely public one; it could not be concerned with “value for money” (UK) or profit margins (US), because it would need to have large-scale (“inefficient”) redundancies built into it, reserves of resources and personnel to meet the cyclical crises caused by living with a disease that is much worse than the flu.This healthcare expansion would also have to include provision for dealing the effects of Long Covid in an increasing numbers of people. And massive funding for research into disease prevention and treatment – again, on a non-profit basis to ensure the widest possible reach for any breakthroughs.
“Living with Covid” would also mean restructuring the economy to accommodate constant interruptions to the supply chain, to services, to all normal business operations due to constant staff shortages from recurring Covid outbreaks. It would mean vast restructuring of educational systems, with resources built in to deal with endemic teacher shortages, particularly in winter, with new infrastructures for ventilation and spacing, with mental health provision to support students who lose classmates to Covid (a small number, but something that will become routine as the living-with-Covid years go by). It would mean an expansion of sick leave provisions for employees who will face the likelihood of repeated Covid bouts throughout the year, and any cumulative effect these might have on their longterm health. It would entail transformations in government budgeting priorities, to ensure there was always funding to step in and provide effective support for individuals and businesses, schools and other institutions during waves of outbreaks, and in the constant, general attrition that will result from Covid being a constant fact of life.
In short, if our governments genuinely intended to “live with Covid,” these are just some of the profound transformations we would have to see in our society, our government and our individual lives. These are the kinds of things that we’d be seeing governments beginning to address right now. But take a look at the United States. Take a look at Great Britain. Do you see anything even remotely like a serious attempt to come to grips with what “living with Covid” would really mean? No you do not. What “living with Covid” means to the UK government, to the US government, is, in essence, simply this: “We don’t care if you live or die, or what quality of life you have, as long as a sufficient number of you keep going to work and buying things to maintain our elites in their monstrously unjustified domination of society.”
It is impractical, impolitic and undesirable to live in some clamped-down “biosecurity state” on a permanent basis. If Covid really can’t be eradicated (we haven’t even tried to do this, of course, but still), then yes, we’ll have to learn to “live with it.” But this will in no way be a return to “normal.” The “normal” is gone and is not coming back. The question is whether we will re-order our societies to provide the best possible life for the greatest number of people in these altered circumstances or just meekly accept a vastly diminished, unjust world geared to the greed of the privileged few. The bipartisan elites of the US and UK are showing us clearly which of these futures they prefer.
