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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Here's the deal. About a third of the population in the United States is now fully vaccinated. And we can presume that a lot of these people were the types of people who were following COVID regulations to at least some degree. Social distancing, wearing a mask, only doing outdoor hangs for a while. And now is their time to get back into the world and celebrate, right? Only thing is, a lot of them are feeling anxious.
--:-- Cosette Gerardo: Hi, my name is Cosette Gerardo. I am 28 years old and I live in Southeast Michigan. As of this week, I'll be fully vaccinated. I'm feeling most anxious about being bad. Like, I know that I'm safe and all my friends are vaccinated or will be very soon fully vaccinated. But I just feel really wrong and guilty. And I don't want people to know that I'm interacting with other people. I guess I'm wondering, is there anyone who can just give me permission? or is there a way to trick my mind into giving myself permission to go out and reintegrate into the world? Or am I wrong for even wanting to?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: With a new stage of this pandemic comes a new stage of pandemic anxiety, the anxiety of returning to normal. To help us work through some of the challenges today, we've got Sigal Samuel, reporter here at Vox, who recently reached out to a ton of Vox readers to discuss this very subject.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: I reached out to nearly 100 people all over the world. People responded to tell me that they are indeed very anxious about going back to normal. And I realized, like, there's actually two different buckets of worry here. One is the kind of worries that we're kind of just going to have to work our way through and get over. So people are worried about whether they're going to be really socially awkward now.
--:-- Georgia: Hi, my name is Georgia. I'm from Athens, Georgia. And the pandemic started my freshman year of college. So I have had no adult life outside of the constraints of living in a pandemic. And to be quite honest, I'm more nervous than I am excited. There's a lot of cool things that could happen, but there's also a lot of really bad things that could happen that I've never experienced, and I have no idea how to deal with them. So, yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi, Sean. So a bunch of people said they're really nervous about whether they're going to be able to kind of act normally in social situations. One guy told me that he doesn't think he'll be able to socialize again. And he said, I think many people will have to take some sort of course to learn how to correctly interact with people. Do they offer that at the DMV or something? I don't know.
--:-- Katie: One tradition I'm looking forward to keeping is the end of handshaking. This is Katie from Portland, Oregon. I will elbow bump, I will air five, but I will never again touch someone's probably dirty hands.
--:-- Paul: Hi, my name is Paul. I'm an emergency department nurse from Chicago, Illinois. Hi, this is RJ calling from Los Angeles, California. And call me crazy, but I kind of liked having masks and social distancing. I did not get the flu this year, which is a huge godsend for me because I get the flu almost every year, even with the flu shot, because I come in contact with so many people.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Well, I think like the first thing I've heard from psychologists is we should really normalize this anxiety. Like if you are worried about re-entering the world, have self-compassion around that because of course you're going to be nervous about re-entering the world, right? We've been through this really traumatic, scary year.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: There's also like really tried and true techniques for anyone who's dealt with anxiety, COVID related or not. Let's say for the first time in a year, you're about to step into a crowded subway car and you're worried about germs and COVID and you find your palms are sweating and your heart is beating really fast. And you might normally interpret those physiological signs as an indication that you're about to choke, you're about to die, something terrible is about to happen. But you can reinterpret them as a sign that, okay, this is just your body saying, hey, I'm ready to go. I haven't done this in a while, but I'm ready to face it. I'm excited. I'm getting pumped.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Let's move on to the second bucket you mentioned, which is that, you know, maybe we don't need to return to that old normal anyway, because it wasn't really working out for a lot of people to begin with. We touched on this a lot on the show last year, but remind people what the idea there is.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So the whole second bucket of worries I heard from the people I reached out to was about, you know, the things that we should remain maladjusted to, right? So one example is like the pandemic has really revealed how badly society fails on disability and mental health issues. You know, I heard from one American lawyer who's physically disabled and pre-pandemic, she was always trying to get her boss to let her work from home some days because commuting is really hard for her. And the boss just said, nope, you can only do your work in the office.
--:-- Erica: Hi, this is Erica from Texas. My business is looking at returning to work throughout the year. and those of us who are self-proclaimed introverts are not exactly thrilled. The commute, the feeling surveilled by their bosses. Our past year has been work-wise better than ever, but now they want to put us back to the chaos and the chatter.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Please let us stay home. It's better this way. Of course, not everyone in the world is lucky enough to pivot away from that kind of lifestyle. What about all the people who have to commute, you know, an hour to a job that doesn't give them benefits or even sick leave? And in the meantime, they're, you know, shelling out much of their money for child care.
--:-- Emma Green: Emma Green, staff writer at The Atlantic, You recently wrote about a very different kind of COVID anxiety. Tell the people about it.
--:-- Emma Green: So the story started as just a kind of ambient curiosity, the spidey sense that I had that there was something going on. I observed in my own community and among friends, seeing on Twitter, talking to some sources around the country, that there seemed to be this pattern in really progressive areas among really progressive people, a certain subset who, after they had been vaccinated, had been kind of unwilling to adapt their lifestyle and loosen up based on the CDC guidelines.
--:-- Emma Green: And I found this really interesting because it struck me that, you know, among progressives, we have this stereotype, those signs that everybody knows, the multicolored, In this house, you know, we believe. And then it has all of these statements, you know, women's rights are human rights. Nobody is illegal. Black lives matter. And there's usually a line, science is real.
--:-- Emma Green: So it was interesting to meet progressive people who are kind of going against our prevailing scientific authority and how they're acting with the pandemic. And I wanted to know, is there something here? I'm glad you looked into this because we know there's something here, right? This isn't just people, it's policy.
--:-- Emma Green: Well, throughout the pandemic, we've seen a bunch of examples of this Despite the governor easing mask mandates outdoors some Massachusetts communities are still hanging on to face coverings It is a beautiful day to spend time at the beach except Chicago beaches are supposed to be closed and what safety experts are saying is it makes no sense to reopen museums and movie theaters but keep the beaches closed.
--:-- Emma Green: My personal favorite is the fact that the state of California kept playgrounds closed until early December of last year. At Mather Lake Rotary Recreation Area, the playground has been roped off with this yellow caution tape. I wish it wasn't closed. And this was long after we knew that surface transmission is not the primary way that COVID is spread. It's from person to person through breath.
--:-- Emma Green: So, you know, this sticks with me because on the one hand, you think, oh, playgrounds, who cares? Like, not a big deal. But if you're a family who has kids on Zoom school and you don't have anywhere to take them to get out their crazy feelings and run around and go on the slide, that suddenly seems like a really big deal.
--:-- Emma Green: I think the real area policy-wise where this has come to a head has been over schools. Ah, yes. The never-ending debate on whether to bring kids back into the classroom or not. I looked at one scenario of this in Somerville, Massachusetts, which is a little city outside of Boston. And there was this really dramatic, kind of nasty fight that happened within the community over schools.
--:-- Emma Green: The mayor's office and the school committee chose to keep schools closed at the beginning of the school year. They proposed a plan in November for opening, but it continued to get delayed and delayed and delayed. A handful of kids went back in February, but really most kids, and this is only elementary schoolers and middle schoolers, started back in March and April.
--:-- Emma Green: And along the way, there was just a huge fight among these school leaders and certain sets of parents and then other sets of parents who also, because it's Boston, happen to be all very sophisticated scientists and engineers and child psychiatrists and COVID-facing physicians. They were all making the case that evidence showed there's really safe ways to get kids in school if you put mitigations in place. And they were worried about the harms that would come from not getting kids in school.
--:-- Emma Green: But because they argued that, you know, they were accused of being motivated by white supremacy on a hot mic. And I won't say this on your podcast because I don't want to make anybody blush. But a local leader who was unmuted on this school committee meeting appeared to call them effing white parents. Yikes.
--:-- Emma Green: So it was really kind of nasty. And it just shows that, you know, even within these communities where people really believe a lot of the same things in terms of their politics, there can still be a huge amount of tension over the way that people think about the evidence and COVID.
--:-- Emma Green: I mean, I think in D.C. there's still something on the books that says you can't dance at weddings. Some wedding planners say that D.C. is starting to feel like the mythical town of Beaumont in the classic movie Footloose. The town that banned dancing.
--:-- Emma Green: And it was King David. King David, who we read about. What did David do? What did David do? David danced. Where is the line between, you know, better safe than sorry and vital COVID preventative measure?
--:-- Emma Green: Well, that's a situation where there's a regulation put in place that kind of goes so deep into controlling people's behavior that it's almost ridiculous. I mean, if I'm wiggling my shoulders a little bit at my dancing at the wedding, if I'm getting my groove on slightly, I think that's a kind of place where maybe regulation isn't the best tool for us to use.
--:-- Emma Green: But when you're talking about general attitudes in policymaking, I do think that we're in this kind of complicated period where, on the one hand, thank goodness the U.S. is moving slowly towards 50% of the population having a first shot. And, you know, that slowly second group is going to catch up with a full vaccination, those two shots.
--:-- Emma Green: And, you know, especially in really liberal areas, I would suspect that there's going to be a super high rate of vaccine compliance. Right. Because, you know, again, our stereotype is that progressive people have that we believe in science premise on their lawn signs and it's something that they're really proud of.
--:-- Emma Green: So you know policymakers are then left to say how do we deal with this intermediate period where you have some people vaccinated and some people not I think it a tough balance to strike But what is really counterproductive is to have policies in place that clearly don have much evidence behind them or that in fact you know work against COVID but introduce some other harm
--:-- Emma Green: Bringing this back to the people who are maybe being inconsistent with what the CDC is saying, I wonder, you know, you and I are both old enough to remember when Dr. Fauci was telling us not to even wear masks, right? Like, has this been inconsistent to the point where you can't really blame people for sort of being sticks in the mud about wearing a mask outside or about not letting their kids play at a playground that's been open for six months?
--:-- Emma Green: Yeah. You know, one of the things that I heard over and over again in my reporting was this sense from progressives that the CDC might not have all the answers and in fact might not be trustworthy. And largely this argument was made based on the notion that during the Trump administration, the CDC was politicized. It wasn't leading with the evidence. It was being controlled for political reasons.
--:-- Emma Green: And I think that undermining of trust during the Trump administration is carried over in a way that's kind of astonishing. If you think about it, again, the stereotype of progressives, of people who really trust expertise and scientific authority who believe that public health measures and mitigations are important for us collectively, to not trust the foremost guidance body in America around how we should do public health is pretty astonishing and I think just shows how much of a challenging situation this is where there's kind of an absence of trustworthy authority on all sides.
--:-- Emma Green: And I think that leaves people feeling like they have to kind of freelance their own policies. Right. It's kind of ironic because liberals not trusting the CDC puts them in league with, say, conservatives who don't trust the CDC and don't want to listen to any of their mandates.
--:-- Emma Green: Yeah, sort of. Although, you know, I want to be careful not to make a false equivalency here. There was a very clear narrative from the beginning that certain conservative people and populations and policymakers were not going to take the pandemic seriously. They turned masks into a political thing where, you know, they said this is impinging on my liberty. And these kinds of behaviors, a decision to just kind of write the pandemic off, that had really catastrophic effects. That was really damaging.
--:-- Emma Green: And I don't want to seem like I'm saying that, oh, this is just the same but for progressives. I think it's a different story. I think it's a story about trauma, especially in places where progressives tend to live, right? New York City went through something last spring that basically no other part of the country went through, at least not until later. And I think that trauma has stuck with a lot of people.
--:-- Emma Green: And I think the attitudes that people are going to forge during the pandemic, I would imagine, are going to stick with us for a really long time. And the fact that, you know, for some progressives, that means that they're kind of veering away from scientific evidence. You know, that's interesting. It's something to observe. I think it's an important thing to try to unpack and understand.
--:-- Emma Green: But I don't think that it's the same as saying this pandemic, which we know exists and we know we need to change our lives for, we're just going to dismiss it and toss it away. And I just wonder how long these habits and attitudes will stick around.
--:-- Emma Green: I mean, we have listeners calling in and saying they're never going to shake someone's hand ever again. My mom's saying she's always going to wear a mask whenever she goes out. But does it feel like something has fundamentally changed about our interactions, about our society?
--:-- Emma Green: It's possible. You know, I can't see the future and I can't tell you exactly what things are going to be like this summer or next year or in five or ten years. But I think there's been a kind of fundamental shift in perspective.
--:-- Emma Green: I'll give you the example of one guy I talked to in Boston who is a progressive policy guy. He worked on Ayanna Pressley's 2018 campaign. Thoughtful dude. And he was saying to me that the pandemic has kind of taught him that there are two kinds of people in America. There are people who are willing to radically change their lives in order to protect others. and there are people who aren't, who are selfish, who only want to protect them and theirs.
--:-- Emma Green: And when you think about it, that is really something. Because if you believe that other people who are, say, from the Republican Party, are fundamentally selfish people who don't care about keeping other people alive, that makes it so hard to find any kind of commonality or common ground because you think they're grandma killers. You think that they're fundamentally callous.
--:-- Emma Green: So that to me is the thing to track. You know, it's possible that there are going to be people who do those behaviors, you know, the washing of the hands, the not shaking hands, the wearing of the masks, maybe even hopefully not, but maybe even Lysol-ing your groceries continuously. I hope people give that up. But, you know, that attitude shift, I think that's the thing to watch.
--:-- Finn: Hi, my name is Finn. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. You know, before the pandemic, I was really an introvert. I didn't really want to go out too much. I didn't have a big friend group, but now after the fact, after it's all done, I kind of want to go to a party, like a giant party with a bunch of people I don't know. you know, in the dark, light streaming everywhere, music loud, kind of deafening. Maybe make out with a few strangers. I don't know. I want to see where it goes. I want to take advantage of COVID being over. You know, I think other people do too.
