It's a really hard position that we find ourselves in. In the beginning when we believed that there was a chance of containing Covid-19, many people I knew(myself included) thought that we would finish with this pandemic within a year. Due to a variety of reasons including poor over all handling of the pandemic by world governments, people refusing to wear masks or respect social distancing guidelines, or to get vaccines, that path was closed to us. We are now two years into this, and for people like me who are vaccinated and boosted... Who have spent the entire pandemic following guidelines, avoiding social gatherings, watching others flout the rules... Getting Omnicron and riding it out at home for supposed "super immunity" is looking pretty attractive. I'm exhausted from dealing with the pandemic, everyone is. My heart hurts for the people who can't get the vaccine and want to, but my sympathy is running low for folks who have simply refused. I experience shame when I catch myself thinking, "We can't let this run our lives forever!", knowing that it was the rallying cry of people early on in the pandemic who refused to cooperate with CDC recommendations.
I very rarely share personal anecdotes involving my family, but here goes:
I have been watching my mother care for my grandmother whom is in hospice care for about a year now. My grandmother was already sickly enough that they chose not to get her vaccinated when the vaccine came out. This in part because my grandmother has a bad enough grasp on reality at this point that she becomes confused when she leaves her house and my mother is trying to avoid her having a panic attack and possibly hurting herself or straining her already damaged heart. My grandmother is housebound and mostly bed bound, and my mother mostly works at home and takes care of her. In the beginning my mother wasn't letting people into the house to see grandma, but my mother thought that there would be time for the pandemic to pass for my grandmother to see her other family members before she passed. Now grandma's health is declining and there is a growing sense of urgency. My mother is distraught... Does she let grandma pass without seeing her family members again(Really more for the family members than grandma at this point, but maybe not in my mother's mind), or does she risk bringing covid into the house and ending grandma's life potentially a bit prematurely and frankly awfully? My mother is caught in the very non-enviable decision between quality of life and length of life... For her own mother. I know this is a decision that many families have to make for their loved ones, but in the midst of a global pandemic when so many have lost their lives it feels even sadder somehow.