Surrendering isn’t always a bad thing — but it frequently is.

Surrendering is what we, as a country and a state, have chosen to do to the Omicron strain of COVID-19. That’s not a value judgment, merely a statement of fact. Gov. Sisolak has been clear — we’re going to wear masks since the Center for Disease Control says we need to wear masks, but, if your schools, casinos, hospitals and testing centers can stay open, he’s not going to close them. We’re doing this live — we’ll find out in a couple of weeks who lives.

When writing about COVID-19 these days, pundits are contractually obligated to Put It Into Perspective, in much the same way certain nonprofit groups start their meetings with a land acknowledgement and for similar reasons, so let’s get this over with. Yes, COVID-19 is less virulent and less lethal than the Black Death and several other pandemic and endemic diseases throughout the course of human history. Yes, even before the vaccines, the vast majority of those infected with COVID-19 were either asymptomatic or caught a case recoverable enough through bed rest and fever management. Yes, the vast majority of us, our friends, our family, and our loved ones will get through this and continue to live our long, happy lives.

All of this, however, is just as true of industrial-scale warfare. Over a century ago, nearly 70 million soldiers lobbed rolling artillery barrages and poison gas at each other in what remain some of the most gruesome, dehumanizing battles armies ever inflicted against each other. Of those, roughly half of them weren’t killed, wounded, or went missing. They went to the front, got shot at, then went home. Many of the surviving soldiers undoubtedly lived long, happy lives. 

Acknowledging the truth of this, however, is not perspective. It zooms too far from humanity and misses the trees for the forest. The sort of person who thinks a single death is a tragedy, yet concludes a million deaths is a statistic is someone who (probably) thinks like Joseph Stalin. A million deaths isn’t a statistic — it’s a million tragedies, each one felt by friends, family, and loved ones who faced irreparable loss. When faced with a million deaths, the empathetic response, the moral response, isn’t to fatalistically shrug our shoulders and point out we’re all going to die anyway — it’s to ask each other and the universe how to make the tragedies stop. 

Sometimes we can’t, though — not in time.

As I write this, over five and a half million people worldwide have died of COVID-19, at least that we’re aware of — the actual death count in some countries, like India, is almost certainly far higher than what they’ve been reporting. Of those, at least 840,000 were here in the United States. The 350,000 or so of those who died in 2020 made COVID-19 the third-leading cause of death in this country. The 470,000 or so who died in 2021 may not be quite enough to make COVID-19 America’s second-leading cause of death last year but it’s going to be close. Our pandemic death rate of 2,550.91 per one million Americans places us between Argentina (2,585.20 per one million) and Colombia (2,550.02).

In other words, we lost.

Like most countries when they surrender, we’re still pretending we’re fighting the good fight. Like Hitler in the bunker ordering imaginary armies around, our institutions are flailing in order to, at the barest minimum, look like they’re still doing something. The White House recently announced they’ve ordered one billion free rapid COVID-19 tests, of which over half a million will go to Nevada, where they will be distributed, not through the authorization of a wide variety of rapid tests from several vendors, each of which compete on cost, and handing them out like candy like they’ve been doing in Britain, France, Germany, or Belgium for several months now, nor by using the Oddly Specific Kamala Harris Policy Generator as a writing prompt for public health policy, but rather by way of delivery to retail stores run by Pell Grant recipients in disadvantaged communities where the tests will be sold for retail prices — but, if you print and mail your receipt to your health insurance company, your insurance company is legally obligated to reimburse you. Eventually. But first the federal government needs to build a website and the tests need to get produced, neither of which has happened yet.

In other words, if all goes according to plan, we may have a billion tests for 350 million Americans (we each get less than three, apparently) between two weeks to a month after Omicron infects everyone it’s going to infect in this country.

We could have had those rapid tests at the start of the pandemic, by the way, if our nation’s public health agencies weren’t necrotically bureaucratic fifth columns that adopted the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual as their guiding policy. The FDA’s and CDC’s missteps throughout the pandemic — their initial resistance to public masking, their refusal to allow private laboratories to conduct COVID-19 tests at the start of the pandemic, their repeated delays and pauses in vaccine approvals, their initial refusal to approve boosters, their delays in approving therapeutic remedies, their near-total opposition to rapid tests until political pushback was finally overwhelming — are well past the point where we can assume bureaucratic incompetence. 

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Thrice is enemy action — and we are well past thrice now.

Even now, the FDA, when faced with data suggesting that rapid tests provide more accurate results if used with a throat swab as well as a nasal swab, reflexively told everyone not to do that due to unspecified safety concerns. Even after nearly two years of missed opportunities, our nation’s public health agencies refuse to accept that the cost of inaction is that more Americans contract and fail to recover from COVID-19. If our state public health officials could simply comparison shop between peer country public health agencies, we could opportunistically copy and paste from Japan’s, France’s, Britain’s, or Germany’s homework when our nation’s public health agencies choke on their own self-importance.

But alas, this country remains governed by the ghost of John Nestor and we pay extra to live in neighborhoods where we can control the shade of beige our neighbors paint their houses with. Why should we act surprised when our bureaucracies are staffed by the same intractable busybodies who are militantly hostile to change we ourselves aspire to become? Besides, let’s not kid ourselves — if somebody says we should do something, whether it makes sense to do it or not, one in five Americans will reflexively do the opposing thing out of spite. Imagining a guy 3,000 miles away, tricking ourselves into believing he exists, and then making it our life’s work to oppose his very existence with our dying breaths is every bit as American as measuring the height of our neighbors’ lawns or checking everyone’s garages for houseguests.

So, as we’re not going to do what we’re told and as half of the people telling us what to do are too neurotically change-averse to tell us to do anything useful anyway, we’ve surrendered. Utah is going back to remote schooling because there aren’t enough healthy teachers to monitor classrooms. California, meanwhile, has told medical officials to get back to work, even if they’re infected with COVID-19. Closer to home, both Carson City and Clark County school districts are taking an extended weekend, while Washoe County considers its options on a school-by-school basis. Meanwhile, hospital staffs are evaporating and COVID-19 testing sites and businesses are closed due to a lack of healthy workers.

It’s okay, though. The CDC is protecting us by telling us to avoid traveling to Canada, lest we get infected by the citizens of a country experiencing half of our infection and death rate, and the rest of the federal government will protect us all by sending us each a few tests several months after they would’ve done any good, assuming the few FDA-permitted producers of rapid tests can actually fulfill the White House’s promises before the heat death of the universe.

In other words, we’re on our own.

Things could be worse. We have vaccines. Though they don’t work quite as well as we’d like (anecdotally, many of my vaccinated friends have caught Omicron) and younger children are still bureaucratically ineligible to receive them, they’re still doing a pretty reasonable job of keeping most of us out of the hospital and, ultimately, the morgue. If there’s still a doctor or a nurse to talk to in a hospital somewhere, you might even get one of the growing body of anti-COVID therapeutics identified over the past year.

But things could also be better. In many parts of the world, they are. At some point we need to look around and ask ourselves why. 

Yes, we were always going to go back to normal, sooner or later — the entire point of the lockdowns, the social distancing, and the mask wearing was to buy us enough time to develop effective vaccines and therapeutics, which we now have — but we didn’t have to give up like this. We didn’t have to clog our hospitals and infect half of our teachers — that was a choice. Yes, a lot of the blame for our hospital overcrowding certainly lies at the feet of the obstinately unvaccinated, but they’ve always been around and focusing on their hesitancy lets far too many of the rest of us off the hook.

We don’t have control over the wilfully unvaccinated. We might, however — we should — have some control over the FDA, the CDC, and the other public health bureaucracies who have chosen to maximize their authority at the expense of our health. If they can’t or won’t get out of our way — if they can’t authorize vaccines, therapeutics, and tests in a timely manner during a pandemic — it’s time for us to shut them down and choose different public health agencies to listen to.

A lot of our manufacturing is done overseas. Maybe it’s time we manufacture some of our regulations overseas as well.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered non-partisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].