This commentary is by Dr. David McKay, a retired physician from Middlebury and past president of both the Vermont Medical Society and the Vermont Psychiatric Association.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.” — William Shakespeare.
Maybe we can end the pandemic now if we simply call covid “endemic.” Maybe that will stop the current rise in infections, hospitalizations and deaths in Vermont due to this pernicious virus.
Instead of wearing masks, maybe we can all just close our eyes and pretend, and that will make it all go away. Maybe if we just click our heels three times and murmur “I want to go home!” we will suddenly find that everything has gone back to normal.
But maybe — just maybe — we would be fooling ourselves. Maybe — just maybe — we should be looking to Vermont’s politicians, administrators and public health experts for just a little bit more of the remarkable leadership they demonstrated in the early days of the pandemic. Back then, they put safety first, especially the safety of Vermonters most at risk for serious disease and death from Covid.
Over the past two years, we have made important progress with our efforts to understand and manage this extraordinarily elusive and destructive virus. We have manufactured vaccines — although the vaccines don’t seem to confer immunity, but only mitigate against hospitalization and death, thus increasing the chance of spreading the virus to those of us who remain vulnerable to serious disease and death in spite of vaccination.
And we have developed treatments that appear to provide at least some qualified effectiveness against severe disease — although the availability and efficacy of these treatments, particularly to the most vulnerable patients, is dubious at best.
And we have refined strategies to limit the spread of the disease so we could protect the specific groups who remain at very high risk for serious illness or death — specifically the elderly and the immune-compromised — although public policy has shifted sharply away from implementing those strategies (masking, social distancing, quarantine, and isolation) for the general population.
Maybe it has become acceptable to cull out the vulnerable ones. After all, they are elderly and/or immune-compromised anyway. Maybe we really would all be better off without them. Then maybe — just maybe — we could achieve that long-sought goal of “herd immunity” that would let us all get back to normal.
Just maybe.
Covid is no rose. And it doesn’t smell very sweet to me.
What’s in a name? Let’s call Covid Covid. That’s what it is. And it is still very dangerous, whether we call this a pandemic or not.
