Gone are the days of scrubbing surfaces, sudden school closures, and social distancing.
Where a positive COVID-19 test once wrought panicked contract tracing and guaranteed two weeks of isolation, these days, a diagnosis sparks relatively little worry for most people.
Even amid a summer spike in cases — everyone from President Joe Biden to the 2024 Summer Olympians seems to be battling the virus — the general public’s attitude toward the pandemic that upended our lives more than four years ago is more relaxed than ever.
The federal public health emergency for COVID expired in May 2023, officially ending the crisis, at least in name, more than three years after it was first declared. Since then, thanks to high infection and immunization rates, the country has continued climbing toward the herd immunity doctors so desperately sought in the early days of the pandemic, four medical professionals told Business Insider.
“The risk perception and anxiety around acute COVID infection has definitely lessened,” said Dr. Anita Chopra, an internist at the University of Washington medical system. “People are interacting and mingling more like in pre-pandemic times.”
Healthcare professionals told BI that the public’s more relaxed attitude toward COVID is ultimately a good thing. A return to normality was the goal, after all.
But COVID is still very present and very much a potential threat, especially for the immunocompromised and those unlucky enough to develop long COVID symptoms — up to 10% of patients, according to some doctor estimates. Meanwhile, relaxed masking and declining vaccination rates, while to be expected at this point, could be linked to the rising case numbers doctors are seeing in clinics around the country, medical professionals told BI.
“We need to acknowledge that we’re in a very different place now than we were at the height of the pandemic,” said Dr. Eric Chow, chief of communicable disease epidemiology and immunizations at Public Health Seattle and King County. “But so long as COVID-19 continues to circulate, there are health implications to getting infected.”
Evolving behaviors and beliefs
Many of the early-day pandemic precautions have all but disappeared in 2024. Chief among them, according to doctors, are masking, isolations, and vaccinations.
Soon after the pandemic emerged, medical professionals emphasized masking as a key way to slow the spread of the virus.
The face coverings quickly became a contentious cultural topic and among the most politicized aspects of COVID. But these days, even many who once championed masks have ditched the deterrent entirely. An August 2023 Yahoo News/YouGov poll of 1,665 US adults found that 12% of respondents said they were masking — down from 60% in January 2022. And doctors told BI that they’ve seen a steady decrease in masking since then.
“I think the public has appropriately adjusted their attitudes to what they hear in the news and what they see around them,” said Dr. Edward Jones-Lopez, infectious disease specialist with Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California.
More worrying to medical professionals is the decline in vaccinations.
While early immunization rates helped bolster immunity, vaccination uptake has been on the decline in recent years, and fewer and fewer people are keeping up to date with their booster shots, a preventive step the CDC recommends in its COVID guidelines.
Most medical professionals also recommend a yearly COVID-19 vaccine. There’s a new shot coming out in September. But Chow, who previously worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the height of the pandemic, said most people aren’t aware of the recommended vaccine schedule — a challenge that is indicative of a larger problem doctors are trying to navigate in this new COVID age.
“People are much more fatigued by COVID messaging,” he said. “We’re trying to right-size the appropriate message to make sure people continue to acknowledge the health impacts of COVID.”
The long COVID scare
Relaxed attitudes are not necessarily a bad thing, according to doctors.
“I think it’s to be expected as we learn more about the virus over these four years and as we’ve developed these other COVID countermeasures to address infection,” said Dr. Jessica Bender, a primary care doctor at Harbor View Medical in Seattle and the co-director at the university’s long COVID clinic.
On the one hand, people are generally not getting as sick as they once did when ill with COVID, medical professionals told BI. On the other hand, this summer seems to have brought yet another COVID surge with a spike in cases.
People don’t typically equate respiratory illnesses with the warmer months, but an increase in summer socializing combined with the general decrease in preventive measures is likely fueling the uptick, Bender said.
For an unlucky subset of patients, a COVID diagnosis — even in this new relaxed era — could mean long-term challenges.
Doctors define long COVID as any infection related to the virus that is present for at least three months, said Chopra, who treats patients at the UW long COVID clinic. The often debilitating condition is indiscriminate in who it affects. Up to 10% of all people who get COVID are susceptible, according to Chopra, and patients of all ages, genders, races, and vaccination statuses can present with long COVID.
Even as the country relaxes its COVID response, doctors said they are still seeing many new patients presenting with long COVID each day. The condition has at least 200 known signs and symptoms that range from shortness of breath to chronic fatigue and brain fog.
Doctors told BI they’d treated several patients who have been forced to stop working or rendered unable to participate in any physical activity because of a long COVID diagnosis. A 2023 study published in the National Library of Medicine explored a possible link between long COVID and the risk of suicide because of the condition’s tendency to inflict depression, anxiety, posttraumatic symptoms, sleep disturbances, fatigue, and cognitive deficits.
Medical professionals are doing their best to understand long COVID, but admit that there’s still much to learn. According to the CDC, about 17 million people reported having long-term COVID-19 in March 2024.
For these people, the pandemic is still very real.
“When I treat people with long COVID, they are always masked,” Chopra said.
The future of COVID
As doctors look to the future of COVID, little is for sure.
“We always say the one thing that is predictable about COVID is its unpredictability,” Chow said.
But medical professionals told BI they are optimistic that even as the virus continues to evolve, the next few years will continue to look like the past year, with small seasonal surges and hopefully less intense illness.
While lax attitudes may be a welcome sign of a cautious new normal, doctors said it’s important to remember the lessons we’ve collectively learned from COVID. The precautions that proved useful against the virus protect people from other illnesses, too.
Just because the world has adapted to COVID-19, medical professionals say, doesn’t mean we should drop the hygiene, ventilation, and masking lessons learned along the way.
“We’ve learned so much about how we can protect ourselves,” Chow said. “It’s hard to see people leave some of those precautions behind.”
Doctors recommend people gauge their individual risk, as well as the risk of those close to them when considering which precautions to take in this new COVID age. Most medical professionals still recommend masking, testing, and visiting a doctor after testing positive.
“We’re aiming to get to a state where COVID is not a threat to our healthcare system,” Bender said. “And not a threat to our lives and livelihoods.
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