probablyasocialecologist:

Rather than make the case for renewed Covid protections, the Biden administration has normalized illness, avoided telegraphing a sense of urgency to the public, and stayed mostly silent about long Covid and Covid mortality. Repeating the catchphrase “We have the tools”—yet not working to make sure everyone has those tools—public health leaders have been resting on unearned laurels. While the president was ill and convalescing—and modeling the staying-busy, back-to-work ethos that the administration is pushing to all Americans—Covid response coordinator Ashish Jha commented, “We are now at a point, I believe, where we can prevent nearly every Covid death in America.” That’s a bizarre claim on its face, given that 5,900 Covid deaths were recorded in the US that very week.

Over recent months, official efforts to steer messaging away from the pandemic and roll back Covid protections have been justified with claims that could seem like common sense: that the public is “tired” and “burned out” and experiencing “pandemic fatigue”; that we find Covid measures “burdensome.” Figures on both sides of the political spectrum have endorsed these assessments, including many Democratic leaders. Amid efforts to roll back pandemic protections, the Biden administration and its allies have leaned on the talking point that the public is “tired, worried, and frustrated”—in need of concessions, fewer rules, and being met “where they are.”

In a sense, this might seem convincing. After all, if politics is “the art of the possible,” isn’t public health the art of the possible too? If people are tired, shouldn’t they be allowed to have a rest? Yet the idea of Covid fatigue or burnout deserves a closer look—not least because it has been used to accomplish so much ideological heavy lifting.

[…]

A tired public is not an argument. In fact, pandemic fatigue is a reason to do more in public health policy—suppressing disease transmission as efficiently as possible to keep morale from fading. The tired-public hypothesis is also an excellent argument for implementing less-obtrusive interventions at the levels of policy and institutions, such as improving indoor ventilation and funding paid sick leave—yet somehow the administration and the CDC are reluctant to connect those dots.