Talking in Absolutes Has Ruined Our COVID-19 Response

Everything must be opened! Everything is already open!

Everyone dying of COVID is unvaccinated! What about long COVID?

The first two months of 2022 has been an absolute disaster when it comes to the media narrative, and thus public perception, of the COVID-19 response. It’s a continuation of the same thing I first wrote about in December 2014 in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

At the time, I was focused on the racism tearing our country apart, without realizing the hell that would await us with the election of Donald Trump and the rise of white nationalism. I only knew our country was splintering apart because we absolutely could not speak in anything but absolutes.

As we come upon the dreaded two-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic washing ashore in the United States, we are again stuck in that same awful situation where the extremes on both sides of any debate are the loudest, and thus the most amplified.

On one side, you have the “everything must open!” side, who is railing against any and all COVID-19 restrictions, which in most cases is really just an anti-mask position. I live in Washington, D.C. and I cannot stress enough how everything is open. I went to two pro wrestling shows in mid-January surrounded by thousands of people. The notion things have been closed is a right-wing fallacy. They rely on anecdotes of things closed in certain cities, despite ignoring those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Yet, there are also the so-called “doomers” who are fighting any ease of restrictions like it’s the literal end of the world, even though COVID-19 case numbers are dropping and it’s been firmly established that vaccines really, really, really work. They rely on anecdotes of the vaccinated getting sick or dying, despite ignoring those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Through it all, there is no legitimate ability for any rational discourse on what a post-COVID-19 world actually looks like. Every day on cable news, there’s only people on each extremes yelling at each other, or in the case of Fox News, just at the camera to the viewer. There is no thoughtful debate or introspection by either side.