The Post-Pandemic World

“…Together with guarded hopes that the decline of the omicron COVID-19 wave marks the beginning of the end of the pandemic comes the question: what happens when it has finally run its course? What will the post-pandemic world be like? The most likely scenario is that it will unleash the greatest political jailbreak since the end of the second world war. Only a few months after Hitler’s armies surrendered, the British electorate, eager to put the restrictions of war behind them, handed Winston Churchill a landslide defeat and replaced him with Clement Atlee. Once victory removed the rationale for all the regulations they had willingly accepted, they set about removing them. With the end of the current pandemic, the justification for lockdowns, masks, mandates, tracking, and restrictions on the public will similarly vanish and the desire for a new world will be unleashed.

This may expose the bureaucrats who’ve spent the last three years building ’empires of fear’ to a widespread political backlash. What will make it worse is that the bureaucrats cannot even claim victory over the virus for their policies. It just seemed to have run its course, with omicron representing the final stage of the viral evolution to an endemic disease.

A tailing off of COVID-19 cases in parts of the U.S. has raised hopes that the Omicron variant has peaked, as calls grow in Europe to switch the designation of the disease from pandemic to endemic. Top U.S. infectious-diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday the highly contagious variant that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says accounts for 95 percent of new COVID cases, “will find just about everybody.”

But with the U.S. reporting nearly 1 million new coronavirus infections a day, there is hope that things could soon turn a corner.

That is to say, the pandemic may soon be over or at least tolerable. While this development is good news, it will raise questions over whether many of the powers assumed in the name of scientific authority were inflated in retrospect. Its one undoubted legacy has been to damage the reputation of the ruling class. As Daniel Henninger writes in the WSJ, “Omicron has killed certitude. People no longer care what government or ‘science’ tells them about Covid-19.” The public has concluded that officials have overreached, and this has — at least temporarily — ruined their credibility…”