The culture of COVID safetyism

As the pandemic "comes to a close", many people have taken to doubling down on risk avoidance.

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*Cover image from University of Massachusetts

A few days ago I covered a story in which Long COVID suffers dropped out of a PAXLOVID Long COVID study due to the fact that some of the researchers were not wearing masks.

This is one of many examples of there being an overbearing, and often irrational, need to enforce the idea of safetyism.

Life comes with many risks, and when we venture out into the world we generally weigh our risks and rationalize trade-offs. We drive cars even though we know we can get into an accident, we go to the store even though there’s a risk of being robbed or shot. In general, we take the risk of living our lives if it means that we can continue living.

In contrast, there’s a notion of safetyism that has pervaded our culture since the start of the pandemic, and really started appearing several years prior.

I’ve talked about safetyism before, but the gist is that safetyism infers an ideology in which safety comes above all else, and no trade-offs are allowed if it means coming into contact with risk. It’s an entirely risk-averse ideology, and one that induces fear and anxiety over even doing the most basic of things such as living.

A culture that enforces safetyism is one that enforces COVID lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates in order to allow people to engage in the world.

In the case of the masking zealots such as the ones in the PAXLOVID Long COVID trial, anything that appears to be seen as a possible risk is one that puts these people’s lives in danger, even if such a conceptualization of the world seems wholly illogical. This leads one to fear even taking a mask off to get swabbed because one can become sick within that split second.

In that regard, masking has become somewhat symbolic of an emotional support object, being used more as a conceptual model of safety more than a practical one.

Given that the emergency over COVID is coming to a close, it’s no surprise to see that many entrenched within the ideology of safetyism has come out in frustration.