If I had been regularly blogging for the last year, there would have been a lot more of these rant blogposts – how we could stop the pandemic sans vaccine and why people are stupid. Since March when the pandemic began, we have been hearing some variant of “There is no end in sight [sic] we might as well go back to normal!” While that slant has taken a hyper-aggressive partisan flavor, it fully overlooks multiple past pandemics that humanity has overcome (even without herd immunity). An end has always been in sight, just not as close as we want it to be, vaccine or not.

This oversight isn’t talked about enough. While I personally never believed quarantine would last for two weeks (admittedly, I have a PhD and background in public health), the fact is, quarantine could have lasted two weeks – if the entire population masked up and quarantined.