I think many of us who are still being cautious have thought about letting our guard down at some point. Hell, I kind of did that briefly during the summer of 2021, after I got "fully vaccinated" and bought into the fantasy that the vaccine rollout would end the pandemic. And then I stumbled onto COVID cautious twitter and got exposed more and more to disability justice, and got very cautious again shortly after that, a few months before the first wave of Omicron hit.

In general, though, I do understand why some well-meaning people do give up their precautions and go "back to normal". There is definitely a social pressure to conform and get "back to normal" from family, friends, acquaintances, etc. I'd argue that there is an economic pressure to do so, too. I've heard increasingly more stories of people getting fired for still taking precautions or being threatened with termination for doing so. So it does feel like there is increasingly more coercion to get "back to normal".

I'm not sure if I can keep this level of caution up in perpetuity. I'm still holding out for a nasal or sterilizing vaccine, if such a thing is even possible. But idk how well that would work, since I'm assuming not everyone would take it and some immunocompromised people would probably be unable to take it. I'm waiting for that and/or an actual treatment/cure for long COVID, but again, not sure how practical that is, and even if it comes to fruition, I'm guessing it would cost an arm and a leg and fuck over a bunch of vulnerable people because of the expense.

Then again, there's a part of me that honestly thinks that we're going to get more and more pandemics, since climate change and animal agriculture, among other things, are increasingly upping the risk of that happening. And that I should just get used to living like this because, whether from COVID or forest fires or some other pandemic, I think society will face a reckoning that makes them finally acknowledge that masks are effective. And maybe leftists should adopt them anyways for privacy/surveillance reasons.

And I also just think it's extremely fucked and depraved that most people are now okay or indifferent with living with a disease that disproportionately kills disabled and immunocompromised people. And shit like the CDC director passing it off as good news that most people dying had multiple comorbidities. Just straight up eugenics shit getting normalized in the mainstream. It is extremely depressing to me that most people are seemingly okay with accepting yet another cause of mass death and suffering (one that is actually much worse than usual, COVID is still like the #4 killer in the US), as if nothing can possibly be done at all, and that we have no choice but to accept it.

And I'm sorry to tell anyone who thinks they're immune to bad outcomes from COVID, but no, you're not. Many people who were previously "healthy" are now suffering from long COVID. And basically no one is permanently able-bodied--almost all of us are going to experience some disability in our lives at some point. And it's up to you if you're willing to roll the dice on a novel virus that has already killed and disabled millions, is still killing about 1,000 people per week in the US during a pandemic "lull" (and even that is certainly an undercount because we stopped giving a shit about tracking data), has only short-lasting immunity at best, and lots of evidence that each reinfection increases the likelihood of adverse health effects.

The head of the WHO has literally been on record saying that 1 in 10 infections leads to long COVID, and that hundreds of millions of people in the world, at this rate, will need long-term care in the coming years from that alone. Just extremely grim stuff.