The worst pandemic in a century has outlasted our attention span

… For weeks, Congress has been treating pandemic funding with all the urgency of an appropriations bill for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Maybe it will be combined with aid for Ukraine. Maybe it will stand alone. Maybe it will forever dance the limbo. The dominant mood remains: Who cares? COVID-19 is boring.

It is an impressive achievement for 2022 America. The worst pandemic in a century has outlasted our attention span. By this standard, we would have stopped following World War II in early 1944 because all those battle reports from tiny islands in the Pacific were getting so tiresome. …

Maybe it was inevitable that the pandemic would become just another battleground in our polarized politics. But the undeniable truth is that the coronavirus minimizers (“It’s just like a mild case of the flu”) and the anti-vaxxers have won. CONTINUED

Walter Shapiro, Roll Call


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