The harm reduction phase of the pandemic

Right or wrong, people are fed up with lockdowns. So how do we best protect public health going forward?

Protesters and Trump supporters.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

This past week, as I was leaving a newly re-opened restaurant, where wait staff wore masks and half the tables were marked for disuse to ensure distance between patrons, I saw an older man with a disposable mask wrapped around his upper arm. "They said I have to wear it," I overheard him say. "They didn't say where!"

This is the attitude a significant minority of Americans now hold toward public health measures intended to curb the spread of COVID-19: They are nonsense to be flouted, and they were nonsense — perhaps intentionally totalitarian nonsense — from the start. That perception of vindication and the behavior it produces, like wearing your mask on your bicep, is why we've reached what should be the harm reduction phase of the pandemic.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.