Wednesday, March 2, 2022

I’m not quite ready to declare the pandemic over, but I am ready to stop writing about it every single day


Nearly two years ago, I re-branded the Ohio Employer Law Blog as the Coronavirus Law Blog. It was a bit of marketing combined with the realization that Covid would be all that mattered to employers, at least in the short term.

That "short term" will turn two years old in nine days.

Today, however, I am officially re-re-branding the blog back to the Ohio Employer Law Blog.

I'm not quite ready to declare the Covid-19 pandemic as over (although I think the CDC will declare Covid-19 as endemic as opposed to a pandemic quite soon). Even without that official designation, however, Covid-19 is not just as all-consuming as it has been for the past two years.

Case counts, positivity rates, and hospitalizations are way down. Vaccination rates are up. Mask mandates are disappearing nationwide. Life is slowly returning to some sense of pre-pandemic normalcy, the pace of which will only pick up in the coming weeks and months.

Since March 2020, I've written 320 posts about Covid-19. As the pandemic nears its end, the pace of those updates has slowed to a chubby infant's crawl. Thus, the re-re-branding. I'll still cover Covid-related news as needed, but it certainly won't be daily and it won't be anywhere near the level at which this blog needs to be named after the virus.

This change in no way minimalizes or downplays the significance of the nearly 1 million of our fellow Americans who have died from Covid-19, the millions upon millions who have lost family members and friends to the virus, the tens of millions who are suffering the debilitating impact of long Covid, and the long-lasting impact this virus will continue to have on our economy, our businesses, our jobs, and our lives. But the time has finally come to learn how to live with Covid instead of living in fear of it.

A final thought. For the past two years, we have fought over masks, vaccines, temporary business closures, and remote schooling. Some labeled this as a fight for freedom. Now, however, we are all witnessing live on cable news and Twitter what a real war over freedom actually looks like. It sure makes our squabbles over whether to wear a piece of cloth over one's nose and mouth look silly, doesn't it?