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Notes -
What happened to the “Covid hawks?”
When was the last time you thought about Covid-19?
Perhaps you or someone you knew had it recently and had to cancel plans or were sick for a while. So perhaps I’ll reword it - when was the last time you thought about Covid-19 in a truly “pandemic” sense? For instance, when did you last wear a mask? Or express a strong opinion about masks or vaccinations (whether for or against?)
Odds are, you probably haven’t done much if any of that for at least 12 months. Though the WHO hasn’t formally declared an end to the pandemic, and a few changes like increased remote work have proved remarkably sticky, “back to normal” has clearly happened for the vast majority of people.
But just six or so months prior to that, Covid was much more of a live issue. Vaccination mandates were highly contentious and stories like the Canada convoy protests and Novak Djokovic’s deportation from Australia were big news. Lots of people cared about Covid and the reaction to Covid, and at that time it seemed far from inevitable that this would quickly dissipate.
In particular, there used to be a sizeable portion of people, whom I’ll call “Covid hawks”, who were strongly in favour of both formal Covid restrictions as well as being personally Covid cautious, even after vaccines had become widely available. Matthew Yglesias talks about them at length in his January 2022 article “Normal”.
Covid hawks were very influential in media, in education, and basically anywhere where left-wing views were predominant (including Reddit and Twitter). I personally spent too much time in 2021 and 2022 arguing against them to a fairly hostile reception - even though my own Covid views were if anything a little more hawkish than Yglesias'.
It seemed quite plausible that Covid hawkishness might persist in the long term. Richard Hanaia wrote an essay in July 2021 called "Are Covid Restrictions the new TSA?", arguing that just as the post-9/11 increases in security remained in place, so too could Covid restrictions. This seemed quite plausible to me at the time, especially as I recall many Covid hawks openly being in favour of this. But though some rules did stick around quite a while longer, they’ve more or less all gone now.
Nowadays, the Covid hawks seem to have mostly just… quietly gone back to normal themselves? Sure, there are a handful of holdouts in places like /r/Coronavirus. But I basically never see Covid discussed anymore - even from people who used to talk about it incessantly. This isn’t just anecdotal - Google trends in the US for example show Coronavirus/Covid search results are currently only about 3% of what they were in January 2022.
What happened?
Did Covid pretty much just “go away”?
There’s some element of this. US Daily Covid deaths are now at a pandemic low (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/) at less than 100 a day (though drops in testing may muddy the waters a bit)
But daily deaths have at various times over the past year exceeded the death count seen at various earlier lulls in the pandemic, without seeing a restoration of anywhere near the same reaction. So it can’t be the whole story.
Did Omicron “break the spell”?
January 2022 was the very peak of the Omicron wave in the US (and most of the world), which also produced the highest recorded daily case count of the whole pandemic. It’s hardly surprising that Covid was a relatively bigger issue then.
But I think Omicron had some important features that helped accelerate the end of “Covid hawks”.
Firstly, because vaccines weren’t very effective at preventing infection, the case for vaccine mandates was much weaker, and most places dropped them fairly promptly in early 2022. This took the wind out of the sails of the anti-vax protest movement, which were major villains/points of contrast for the Covid hawks.
Secondly, because Omicron was so infectious, even many otherwise cautious people still got infected by it. This had a few effects. One, it made the “badge of pride” of being Covid cautious less effective if you still got infected anyway. Secondly, a lot of people would have found the illness to be relatively mild and it may have felt their initial fears feel overblown. Finally, the wave resulted in widespread increased immunity, making people feel more comfortable about going back to normal afterward (partly because of cases going down, and partly because of people who felt immune themselves).
Did Covid caution gradually “go out of fashion”?
If you look again at the Google Trends link above, there was a steep fall as the original Omicron wave receded. By March 2022, with cases in a trough, searches were about a third of what they were at the start of the year. But even as subsequent waves of Omicron subvariants reared their heads, resulting in case numbers sharply increasing (though still remaining well below all-time peaks), it appeared to do little to stem back the gradual decline of search interest. Today, search traffic for coronavirus is about a tenth of what it was in March 2022.
So I think Covid “going out of fashion” has to be considered a major factor. My guess is that an “unraveling” of Covid hawkery as a social movement occurred. A number went “back to normal” after vaccination and others after the first Omicron wave passed, but that still left a sizeable enough group for them to feel solidarity with. But the group faced steady attrition as the rest of the world moved on, probably partly due to pandemic fatigue and partly due to becoming an increasingly isolated minority. Being a vocal Covid hawk was still pretty acceptable in certain “blue tribe” circles in mid-2022, but now in mid-2023 you’d probably get funny looks even from many former Covid hawks if you demanded that mask mandates be brought back.
Conclusion
I think the Omicron wave was a precipitating factor in the demise of “Covid hawks”, but it still took a long time to unravel to the tiny minority it is now.
However, this essay might have given the impression that I think the reactions of “Covid hawks” were always too strong, which isn’t the case at all. I’ve always thought that an individual or society’s response to Covid needed to take a cost-benefit analysis into account, and depending on the circumstances that could justify quite strong reactions (e.g. I generally supported (my home country) New Zealand’s lockdowns and border restrictions, if not necessarily every element of their scope or length). Even today, I think the highly vulnerable should be at least moderately Covid cautious, and even the less vulnerable might want to be selectively Covid cautious leading to an event where it could really suck to get Covid (e.g. if you’re about to climb Mt Everest).
Still, I wouldn’t deny it - I’m still a little sore from being heavily attacked on Reddit and Twitter for daring to suggest that some reactions to Covid may go a little overboard. To see that many of the people who used to insist that masking forever would be no big deal are no longer masking themselves does make a feel more justified in my past positions.
I don't know to what extent I count as a covid hawk... but certainly people like me gave covid hawks political strength during the pandemic.
In the early stages when dealing with very limited information, I thought it made all the sense in the world to treat it seriously and do what we could to combat it. Early on I assumed that we wouldn't be able to stop it, but "flatten the curve" made sense to me as a practical way to reduce the negative impact. In countries like yours and mine, those efforts were surprisingly successful and made me see it as plausible that the virus could be heavily suppressed until effective vaccines were developed that would then be able to essentially eliminate the virus.
Obviously that's not the way things turned out. New variants became more transmissible (and thankfully also less lethal). The vaccines were kinda sorta effective, but not in the way that I had hoped they would be. It became clear that there was not going to be a covid-free future and the best we could do was get vaxxed and get on with life. At this point I strongly oppose any sort of restriction - we're done with full measures and there's no point in half measures.
I do think that there's a strain of covid dove - well represented on this forum - that badly misread pandemic politics and got quite radicalised. They didn't really grok that support for covid restrictions was both strong but also temporary and conditional for a critical mass of people. We were willing to make sacrifices when we saw a point and a purpose to them, but they were still sacrifices. We were never going to continue them forever for no reason.
I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.
To my knowledge, current circulating covid variants are not causing excess mortality, so that's as good of an outcome as being covid-free? It seems a bit convenient and too-many-degrees-of-freedom that the vaccines prevented death, and then the variants independently became less deadly and now covid's not an issue, but I think that's what happened. So I don't think that our current situation is particularly non-ideal, or that the vaccines failed in some significant way.
This is immense amount of cope given the original claims of herd immunity and all the rest. The vaccines were supposed to make all the severe lockdowns and immense damage they brought upon our society "worth it". If people knew that the result of a year-long anxiety, isolation, interruption of education and so forth would be cutting deaths of very old and very ill people somewhat - and all that after the epidemic already took its toll year before, this would not be accepted. Hell, we have CDC advocating for adding COVID vaccine as mandatory schedule for kids. I think this decision is more about saving face for these experts than based on actual merit and prevention of severe illnesses among adolescents.
I won't be surprised if a requirement for the original COVID vaccine remains a part of immigration law for decades. Imagine marrying someone in the US after having come over to visit them dozens of times (vaccine-free), only to be told that you have to get a shot that has been obsolete for ten years... just so that some folks can save face about the political positions they took back in the day.
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Really? Compare it to the vaccines for Measles, Polio, smallpox, or all the diseases that have fallen out of the public consciousness because they were (largely) eradicated due to vaccination campaigns. I was hoping for success at that scale, and the vaccines we have are not up to the task.
Considering coronaviruses in general are seasonal respiratory viruses and this is a new variant, spreading to humans either naturally from animals or from a lab escape of virus collected from animals, I think the flu (animal hosts, new variants, seasonal disease) is a closer analogue than measles - and seasonal flu vaccines don't successfully eradicate the flu, but are useful and successful despite that.
"Useful" is a far cry from effective at "the only really important thing"
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Not when the Covid hawks spent two years arguing (baselessly) that "zero Covid" was within our reach if we just did this One Neat Trick.
Sure, they were wrong, but that doesn't make the vaccine not great!
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There is no way I can believe this argument us being made in good faith. You know preventing transmission is another important thing that actually working vaccines do, and you know it was explicitly argued that the COVID vaccines do it as well.
The only reason we care about COVID-19 is severe illness and death. There are many other circulating coronaviruses that didn't cause unusually high rates of severe illness, and we do not care about those.
(low confidence) That was argued, and seemed plausible at the time! It ended up not being true. But, since it still prevented severe illness and death, people who got the vaccine died a lot less! And most people in high-risk groups got the vaccine. Which is, I think, a success, since the one bad thing was prevented!
It's weird to imagine scenarios where covid doesn't mutate to become less deadly but the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission. Why couldn't it mutate to become more deadly? I vaguely think there's a trend to become less deadly to become more transmissible, but it's clearly not universal given the many deadly diseases of the past.
It could, but its a random process and if it mutates to kill you quicker it prevents its own spread.
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And an important part of preventing it, is preventing transmission, therefore lowering the severity of the illness was not the only important thing for a vaccine.
Why did they argue it, if lowering the severity of the illness was the only important thing?
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