On Tuesday, the BMJ (British Medical Journal) published a Christmas 2021 feature article titled “The end of the pandemic will not be televised.” The article asks the rather important question, “By what metric, then, will we know that the pandemic is actually over?”

Personally, I think that depends who you ask. The article’s main point is that all the charts and Covid dashboards probably aren’t the best way to tell when the pandemic is over. The researchers explained that “the notion, reinforced by dashboards, that a pandemic ends when cases or deaths drop to zero is at odds with the historical evidence that substantial influenza morbidity and mortality continues to occur, season after season, between pandemics.”

In other words, we’re ALWAYS going to have Covid cases and deaths. Forever, that’s like Forever, so we’d better figure out when to pull the plug on the hysteria.

The writers pointed out that in previous — worse — pandemics, things got back to normal a lot faster than this time. “Even for the catastrophic Spanish flu — which killed three times more people per population in the US than Covid-19, with an average age of death of 28 years — lives returned to normal in a short time, perhaps only because there was no other option.“

Maybe the dashboards and the daily media updates aren’t the solution. Could they be the PROBLEM. According to the article, “dashboards—which do not measure mental health, educational impact, and the denial of close social bonds—are not the tool that will tell us when the pandemic will end. Indeed, considering how societies have come to use dashboards, they may be a tool that helps prevent a return to normal.”

Bang on, great point.

In other words, Covid will be over when the news stops hyping it. “Some historians have observed that pandemics do not conclude when disease transmission ends ‘but rather when, in the attention of the general public and in the judgment of certain media and political elites who shape that attention, the disease ceases to be newsworthy.’”

They concluded with:

“Deactivating or disconnecting ourselves from the dashboards may be the single most powerful action towards ending the pandemic. This is not burying one’s head in the sand. Rather, it is recognising that no single or joint set of dashboard metrics can tell us when the pandemic is over.”

I’ve discussed before how this “24 HOUR FEAR PORN” isn’t benefiting anyone but the media and tyrannical politicians. Now, that the idea has been picked up in the prestigious BMJ, perhaps we can get more folks advocating for its end. Perhaps now we need to start focusing on news media instead of just politicians alone. Maybe the message now should be: “quit covering Covid.” Perhaps we should tell our state governments to just shut down the dashboards and quit reporting the numbers to the media.

Easier said than done, I know, but desperately needed for everyone’s sanity!