Yes, There Is a COVID-19 Spike. No, It’s Not a Cause for Panic.

If you weren’t aware, there is a spike in COVID-19 cases around the country. It’s all over the place. Part of it is the return to schools, part of it is that it’s really warm in parts of the country, so we’re staying together indoors more, and part of it is that it’s a communicable disease that isn’t going anywhere.

Every flu season, we get flu vaccines. Those vaccines are developed based on predictions of what the strain of flu is most prevalent that season. We don’t worry about flu season because we as a society have internalized that it comes as we have taken preparations.

There is no more COVID-19 pandemic. It isn’t some major outbreak that is killing a ton of people. We get sick, we go through (largely unproblematic) symptoms, we get better. It isn’t the flu, but at this point, the pattern is very flu-like. It is serious for some people, but not nearly as many as it was in the beginning. As viruses mutate, they tend to get weaker because the whole point of any living organism is to live and replicate, and it can’t do that if it is killing all its hosts.

There are some folks out there who have a level of Covid Paranoia equal to their Trump Paranoia (that COVID-19 became a pandemic under his watch, though not his fault, is certainly enough for these very volatile people to have similar reactions to the two). They think we still need to be worried about it. That we should be doing more to mitigate spread. Hell, some folks long for the days when Dr.  Anthony Fauci was still in charge.

And there are reporters who are in this camp. They want us to still be worried about the virus. Take this story at POLITICO today: “Democrats and Republicans greet Covid spike with a collective shrug.“

Infections are running rampant after the Democratic confab in Chicago, with staffers on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, reporters and other convention-goers all stricken — and in at least one case claiming the positive test was “worth it.”

Cases also cropped up after the Republican National Convention in July.
And yet the single most-animating issue of the 2020 election is an afterthought for the major-party nominees coming out of two of the 2024 campaign’s biggest milestones — even as the virus remains an ever-present threat that’s shaped broader debates over key electoral issues like strength of the economy and the future of families’ health and child care.

Both campaigns have struggled with how — and how much — to address a pandemic that the U.S. never fully defeated, but that few Americans still want to dwell on.

This really shouldn’t be a story. But it is because there are people invested in keeping COVID-19 panic alive. They want us to be worried and they want to be able to use it to force certain societal changes – changes Americans don’t want.

On our side, there is a growing number of people who point to reports of the spike as a sign that the Biden administration is going to steal the election from Trump. I don’t think it’s that complicated. I simply think the people who care about COVID-19 are scared and paranoid and want to shut things down again out of fear. There isn’t anyone among the Democratic political set calling for what they called for in 2020, and I don’t think there’s any stomach among them for that fight again. 

Especially after what it did to Trump in 2020 – it was the biggest factor in his loss to Joe Biden. At a time when the economy is still uncertain, there’s no reason they want to risk that happening to their side.

I also don’t think that the Democrats, if they were trying to “steal” it, would run the same con twice in a row.

Regardless, COVID-19 is the new flu season. It will come in waves, and it’ll disappear again each time. There is no reason for us to panic about it these days because it isn’t the serious disease it was in 2020. The pandemic is over and the world has finally begun to heal. You’ll see people who are panicking about it, but they are an extremely small minority.