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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'm answering twice, but I think the main reason for the rather forced post-Covid amnesia is that the media went all in on lockdownism and that's increasingly embarrassing. It's hard to defend things like closing all schools for a year now that nobody's frightened of Covid any more, so they're whistling nonchalantly and desperately trying to forget it. Nobody influential will try to bring it up again because there's almost certainly public proof that they went all in on it too.
It takes a lot of guts and moral stringency to think back and realise that you panicked and smashed our society to slivers for almost nothing. Very few people, public or private, are capable of that.
But it wasn't for almost nothing. It was the deadliest pandemic in the US in over 100 years. The people who died from it are actually dead. You can argue of course that governments overreacted, but to say that it was for almost nothing is quite a distortion of reality.
COVID really was basically fake. Average loss in life was like 5 years. Only person I knew who died from COVID hadn’t been out of bed in a decade.
If I had to choose between COVID was “real” or “fake” well fake seems far more accurate.
It really depends on what you value. I mean, I understand why some people on this site get more upset by a Confederate general's statue being removed or by some rage-bait that a wokeoid attention seeker with 100 followers writes on Twitter than they get upset by a disease that killed several million people, because I understand that different people value different things over others and have different notions of the possible consequences of events. There are legitimate good arguments in favor of valuing all these things differently in different ways.
But it is exasperating to argue with people who propose the bailey of "Covid is fake, just a cold, and doesn't matter at all" and then retreat the motte of "well it was mostly old people who died". Some people don't think that old and immuno-compromised people losing some years of life is a nothingburger. Some do, I get that. But let's all at least get on the same page and say no, it is not "basically fake". It is not fake at all and saying "fake seems far more accurate" is a rather bad faith use of the words, in the sense that you would not accept a similar use of language to defend a position that you dislike.
I value math. I’m not getting into a what you value thing unless you can make a math argument.
Fair enough, you of course not have to get into a discussion of values if you do not want to, but let me see where you disagree with me here...
Some number of people died from covid. You seem to agree with this.
A smaller number of people would have died from covid if more stringent anti-covid interventions had been pursued. Do you agree with this?
If you agree with both, then we are already basically just discussing values, basically the value of saving some life-years as opposed to the value of other things.
The thing is, we usually think in terms of died / didn’t die, and you’re using those terms We talk about things like “saving lives” when the literal autistic meaning would be “delaying death”. Which is why we talk about life-years. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here but please bear with me.
Problem is, the dichotomy makes sense for a young person. The difference between dying at 20 and at 90 is a big difference, so big that we can think about it in terms of “life or death”. But in the case of someone who’s 90 and bedridden, it becomes increasingly absurd. A big part of the feeling of fakeness came about because authorities used very strong rhetoric about saving lives to describe protecting people who were clearly at death’s door. Nobody was interested in debating the value of saving life-years.
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