Anyone who has ever watched a horror movie knows that the serial killer lying lifeless on the floor is about to spring upright and commence with more slaughter.
COVID-19 is a horror movie with an almost-two-year run time and, like Michael Myers in the “Halloween” horror classics, it is just waiting for us to turn our back on it and go blithely about our business.
Dropping COVID-case rates are convincing cities and towns, including Lynn, Salem, Saugus, and Swampscott, that the time has come to end mask-wearing mandates. Gov. Charlie Baker sounded a loud “all-clear” on COVID on Wednesday by lifting the school-mask mandate.
Spring is still weeks away, but 2022 is starting to feel like late-spring and summer 2021 when a COVID-case drop sent us back to restaurants, concerts and parties. The holidays came gift-wrapped with omicron; and boosters, testing, and mask-wearing became the watchwords for people intent on not denying COVID, or attempting to ward it off with conspiracy theories and hackneyed rants about freedom.
Massachusetts will have a new governor this time next year and time will tell how harshly or favorably Baker is judged on his response to the pandemic. His quick action to shut down the state and his measured, albeit complex, phased “reopening” plan represented rational approaches to guiding Massachusetts through COVID.
Of course, the pandemic threw one curveball after another at even the most well thought-out plans, and business owners, parents, teachers, mental-health workers, renters . . . we all can recite the list . . . complained about too many restrictions or not enough safeguards.
All of this adds up to warranting a slow, measured approach to easing restrictions. Mask-wearing is a minor inconvenience that should not be abandoned until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declares that COVID-case numbers have dropped sufficiently for safeguards to be relaxed.
In the meantime, vaccinations should be made available to everyone, along with boosters and testing. We can’t just think we have killed COVID and go on our merry way. We need to make doubly-sure it is dead and then bury it deep in the proverbial ground.
