Yep, I’m officially tired of it 21 months in!
We had a tantalizingly brief window back in early July when it seemed it might actually be under control and on its way out. BC moved to Step 3 of 4 in its “Restart” plan and masks became optional. Everyone (well, almost everyone) was getting vaccinated. Cases were down to a few dozen or so per day and heading toward single digits.
Then the far more contagious Delta variant hit. And in August the mask mandates came back. Step 4, originally set for September 7th, was postponed indefinitely. Today we are still seeing 300-400 cases per day–and that’s actually reflecting a downward trend! And just as it starts to go back down, the new Omicron variant arrives, which seems to be rattling a lot of scientists, though no one really knows much about it.
For me, the masks are how I gauge progress. When masks become optional (again), I will consider the pandemic to be actually winding down into something managed like the flu. I’ve asked people when they think masks will go back to being recommended rather than mandatory, and no one will even venture a guess.
But I will!
I think the soonest will be in March 2022, or roughly three months from now. But that’s only if the current trend continues, and I have no confidence that it will. A safer bet will be by summer–June 2022, or about seven months from now–more than two years after the pandemic started.
I mean, I’m still glad to have not caught a cold or the flu since January 2020, but I do yearn for the good parts of everyday life to return to normal or normalish sooner rather than later.
