Christian Dubé clearly expressed what many Quebecers have known deep down inside for a long time: we will have to learn to live with COVID.
Since collective immunity is invisible on the horizon, we will therefore have to integrate this disease into our society for an indefinite period of time. That is to say that it will make victims annually, but that we must no longer give it the right to confiscate social life, to take existence hostage.
Vaccine
What to say? That we need to get out of COVID psychologically. It should no longer serve as a backdrop for current affairs. As long as it doesn’t blow up the health care system, of course. But he will have to adapt to this disease. It will finally be necessary to find real treatments against COVID.
And the vaccination policy too. If the vaccine has to become annual, so be it. The neurosis which surrounds it in a very small, but very resonant fringe of the population should not make us forget that the vast majority of the population submits to it with good grace, and with good reason.
I do not see anything dramatic in receiving an annual dose of vaccine, if it allows our societies to return to life in the long term.
Confinement
It will also be necessary, I sincerely believe, to relearn how to live intensely, to touch each other without guilt, to kiss each other without embarrassment, to free us from Covidian nervous tics. In fact, most people already do it.
We must also banish forever the simple mental possibility of an upcoming confinement, which should no longer be considered as one method among others in the service of public health.
Living with COVID does not mean living forever with strict health rules, but on the contrary, accepting that freedom always comes with an element of risk, and that it does not have to submit to stifling fantasy of absolute health security.
