THE PANDEMIC ISN’T ABOUT COVID ANYMORE:

“The pandemic is potentially driving another national crisis related to its effects on behavioral health,” a recent Government Accountability Office report to Congress began, “with people experiencing new or exacerbated behavioral health symptoms or conditions.” Among the many “behavioral” maladies plaguing the public as we approach the pandemic’s third year are depression, exhaustion, and hypochondria.

That seems to have been confirmed by a New York Times dispatch this week chronicling the “overwhelming anxiety” suffered by those who do not have Covid, but who obsessively behave as though they do even when “they actually have a more mundane illness.” To hear some in the public health sphere tell it, those mundane illnesses are as much a menace as a disease that is responsible for taking 800,000 American lives. “If it is not Covid, we still don’t want these other viruses spread around,” said New York State Department of Health’s Dr. Emily Lutterloh. “It is still prudent to stay home, and the same mitigation measures that will help Covid from spreading are likely to help stop these.”

It wasn’t all that long ago that Dr. Fauci was, like so many of his colleagues, aware that the public’s tolerance for extraordinary interventions into their day-to-day lives was finite. “This will end,” the doctor said. “I promise you.” Apparently not. The groundwork is being laid to extend the pandemic’s emergency measures in perpetuity and apply it to conditions that were once a banal part of daily life. At least they’re being honest about that now.

There is an alternative, of course: The COVID emergency is over. Get back to life. “Even as certain Democratic governors attempt to lock down and impose mask mandates on their states once again, their hearts are no longer in it. They know that nobody is going to respect these rules, and indeed, in most places, they do not. This is why governors such as California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Kathy Hochul acknowledge that they will not be enforcing their own bans this time around. People simply wouldn’t accept it. Moreover, even hospitals and medical providers are realizing they cannot afford to enforce vaccine mandates on their employees. Ideological rigidity on this question could leave no one in place to care for the sick or even to administer much-needed vaccinations and treatments. The emergency is over. So is the excuse for soft tyranny.”