Covid fatigue

After the two weeks to flatten the curve, some people found it more difficult to continue doing what was expected from us during those two weeks. This was frequently described as COVID fatigue.

COVID fatigue gave the government a simple excuse for the ineffectiveness of their policies. It wasn't their fault. It was the fault of the people who didn't maintain a high level of compliance.

In many ways this makes sense. The pandemic definitely would have played out differently if people kept doing whatever they were told beyond the initial two weeks. You can even argue that non-compliance was the fault of those who didn't push through the challenges of indefinite compliance.

The overlooked component of this is that COVID fatigue was predictable. The idea that people were going to treat two weeks identically to indefinite compliance was unrealistic from the beginning. If our solution to the pandemic was indefinite compliance, it was never going to succeed.

It's easy to point the finger at those who stopped complying, but we shouldn't let those dictating policy off the hook. They never should have depended on policies built around indefinite compliance. Their approach should have taken into consideration the certainty of increasing resistance. If that's all they had, of course the pandemic was going to persist longer than most. In that regard, policymakers deserve some of the blame themselves.