Accepted and Acceptable

...and so, being perverse, I Googled "When will the pandemic end?" and this came up right at the top:  "The End of the COVID-19 Pandemic."  Written by an ethicist. Published yesterday, by the University of Oxford, in a journal called Practical Ethics, which is such a great title that when I'm done with this post I'm going to go ahead and read more of it.

Before I go on, I'm asking you to just read all of the article.  It's short, it's concise, it's comprehensive, it's interesting. I'll probably do some kind of summary, but this article is rich enough to get us to stop and think down a whole bunch of new pathways.

We know the pandemic began on March 11, 2020, because the WHO told us so.*  But when does it end?   According to the authors, Alberto Giubilini and Erica Charters, "Historically, epidemics end not with the end of the disease,** but with the disease becoming endemic – that is, accepted and acceptable as part of normal life."

As you can imagine, this is the part of the article that stopped me in my tracks.  "Accepted and acceptable."  What will it take to get used to that?

The article has a lot more to say, mostly about how we decide when the pandemic is over:

If the end requires societal, cultural, and political agreement on what is a ‘locally acceptable level’ of disease, discussions should include input from those who specialise in understanding society, culture, and politics.  Such discussions will necessarily involve articulating social priorities and cultural values, and calculating risks and benefits, alongside epidemiological data.  Such discussions must therefore involve experts beyond the fields of medicine – ethicists, philosophers, and historians, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and political scientists.

And they've all got to agree on an end date; as you can imagine, much will change when the pandemic is officially over.  For instance, "AstraZeneca is distributing its vaccines at cost, with no profit, until the pandemic ends."  They'll want to know date and time.

There's a lot to think about in here.  How would you approach the question, as a historian?  a sociologist?  Or an ethicist?

But here's what I'll be thinking about:  "accepted and acceptable as part of normal life."  As part of my normal life?

We'll see.

 * - There were many, including me and a lot of other lay dilettantes, who thought, "Well, it's about time!"  To be fair (to us), cases had appeared in 114 countries by that point.

 ** - Only smallpox, of all the diseases inflicted on mankind, has been completely eradicated.  This includes the bubonic plague which, like all the other endemic diseases (in other words, all of them except smallpox), has become "accepted and acceptable as part of normal life."