Today is Monday, June 26, 2023. Since it’s late here already, I thought I’d just summarize an online article that has appeared in The Washington Post on a subject most of us would prefer to forget: the situation with COVID-19 in the country as of Sunday, June 25. The article is by Fenit Nirappil, Aara’L Yarber, and Sheila Regan entitled “Covid isn’t over, but even the most cautious Americans are moving on.”

There is very good news within the article: COVID is fading into the background as Americans in large numbers abandon mitigating measures with regard to the virus such as wearing masks and taking the latest booster shots. This rule-eschewing by innumerable Americans has been spurred by the government’s recent lifting of COVID as a public health emergency sometime in May.

Our current period is now characterized by officials not warning of scary new variants, which caused us much trepidation all throughout the three years before our current situation in June 2023. Free tests are harder to come by too. The White House coronavirus team has disbanded, and “the virus is increasingly erased from public conversation.” It’s worth noting that “after 2020’s summer of isolation followed by 2021’s ‘hot vax‘ summer and last year’s summer of revenge travel, this summer, the fourth since Covid arrived, marks a season of blissful ignorance – or begrudging acceptance that the rest of society is moving on.”

One person interviewed for this article, Carol Morris, says she has seen a “sharp shift in covid safety protocols since last summer, when many events required masking, vaccination or negative test results and made announcements when attendees became infected.”

Available metrics do suggest the virus is declining. However, no one knows how much the coronavirus is circulating, given a drop in data collection.

Brenda Jackson, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention’s incident manager for its COVID-19 response, indicated, “We are in a relatively good spot.”

Another positive interviewee, Issara Tan, 50, said, “Covid is already done. Move forward,” as he was taking photos of monuments on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with his family while on vacation from Los Angeles.

Jorge Ospina, visiting the Tidal Basin, said he might wear a mask in a supercrowded situation. But he feels less pressured to do so.

One woman who has witnessed friends still succumbing to the virus, Susan Eschrich, feels ostracized for wearing a mask to protect her 89-year-old terminally ill father, who she cares for at an independent living facility in Sarasota, Florida, where no one else masks up – not even her dad.

Eschrich opined that “I felt it wasn’t going to make a difference because if he goes out and he’s not wearing a mask, what good is it really doing?” She confesses, “Wearing a mask is not fun. Nobody around here is wearing a mask.”

Experts now say that even when transmission rates are low, coronavirus is one of the most common respiratory viruses, infecting tens of thousands. Public health officials say the best thing Americans can do to protect themselves is stay up to date on their vaccines, especially when new booster shots designed to target the latest variants are rolled out in the fall.

As for the most recent bivalent booster doses, Americans remain relatively unboosted, where overall numbers taking the shot is particularly low; just 17 percent of all Americans – and 43 percent of those 65 and older – had received the shots as of May 10, according to the CDC.

A bookseller in Minneapolis, Angela Schwesnedl, the owner of the Moon Palace bookstore, is one of the rare business owners in the nation who still maintains a mask mandate. She does this to protect workers and their immunocompromised relatives, but she’s encountering more resistance from customers who don’t even have to mask up at their doctor’s office anymore. “I would love for covid to actually be over,” Schwesnedl said. She added, “But that’s just not the reality.”

Despite the recognition that COVID is still not fully over, some infectious disease physicians are now encouraging patients to set aside their anxieties and have fun this summer. “Social isolation is not good for us, and it’s really important that we get back to some of our activities,” Stephen Parodi said. He managed the COVID-19 response for Kaiser Permanente Northern California.

To conclude the mostly upbeat article on the pandemic, the experience of Julie Garel is recounted. She had contracted the virus during a vacation to Denver last year, but she indicated she plans to stop thinking about coronavirus this summer, as she enjoys dancing in bars, seeing people’s smiles, and attending concerts without feeling like the masked outsider. For her, it had become untenable to keep up precautions when the rest of her family refused to do so.

In my case, I can say that I’ve abandoned wearing masks indoors. I might wear a mask at a theater or at a concert, though. I’m still obsessed with taking one or two masks with me when I go out, even though I resort to not wearing masks altogether. One action that I still practice is washing my hands for 20 seconds after coming back inside from running around outside. This, I believe, has helped me avoid getting the virus again after I came down with a mild case last July. But no one really knows if I cannot succumb to another case sometime in the near future. I worry about this much less these days, which is a good sign of my more positive attitude toward contracting the virus, I think.

So I can safely say then enjoy the summer and get out there with friends and family. We all deserve to finally enjoy ourselves, given the situation here for over three years with COVID.

Stay safe and be well.