Saw a thread about long-term impacts of covid (with the implication that people still shouldn't be engaging in Go Place Do Thing activities as a result) and I kinda feel like there must be something I'm not getting here. Long post ahead.

Like, I'm aware that (re)infection continues to carry risks, including risk of death and disability. I spent over a year as just about the most COVID-cautious person I know, leaving the house a number of times I could count on one hand. I got vaccinated as early as I possibly could, and still stayed a shut-in for months afterwards. I masked religiously for years. I still mask on public transit and in crowded or poorly-ventilated indoor spaces. I get booster shots as frequently as they're available.

I was willing to make extensive, high-impact sacrifices over the medium-term, because I confidently expected that we were going to develop vaccines, antivirals, and treatment methodologies as quickly as possible. I continued to make those sacrifices because once those mitigations were developed, because I knew it would take time for them to be widely deployed and for the prevalence and impact of the disease to drop to its new lower equilibrium. I waited patiently, resigned to give up irreplaceable years of my life, because I was confident that a safer world was at the end of the tunnel.

Today, we live in that safer world. Not a "safe" world, but a safer one. We developed the vaccines, the antivirals, the treatment methodologies. They've rolled out widely (not as widely as I'd like, but widely!), and had a massive impact on the impact of the disease. We've gotten through the tunnel and the light we were promised isn't quite as bright as we'd like it to be, but it shines nevertheless.

There are other things we could still be doing as a society to reduce our collective risk further (requiring better ventilation in indoor spaces, promoting covid boosters more heavily, improving awareness of antiviral availability...), but as far as I can tell, there's no reason to expect those things to happen in the foreseeable future, and there's very little that I can do as an individual to get us there.

So here we are. The world is a little more dangerous than it was 6 years ago. We've had all the large-scale interventions we're likely going to get, and this is our new risk profile. COVID-19 has created significant new risks, with the risk of long-term disability (though not of death) likely exceeding that of motor vehicle collisions. That sucks! This sucks!

But I'm not sure what anybody wants me to do about it. There are costs, both psychological and physical (being a shut-in is not especially compatible with exercise!) to keeping covid risk near-zero, and those costs become extreme when extended out to the permanent-term. Every day, there's a tradeoff between "enjoy my life" and "minimize my covid risk", and I can't turn the dial all the way to the latter every day for the rest of my life.

People take risks to do things that matter to them; that's nothing new. We take risks when we travel on roadways that might have crashes, when we eat food that might get recalled, when we attend events that might have crowd-crush incidents, when we participate in sports, when we exist in public as minorities, when we have sex, when we use drugs (prescription or otherwise), when we open ourselves up to other people, and when we do everything else in life.

Is it really surprising that people would come to accept one more risk — even a large one — when they have seen the alternative first-hand and found it unsustainable?