Name: ‘COVID fatigue’?
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‘COVID fatigue’?

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateThe pop of a champagne bottle, then another, and another sounded from a table of three friends at the Pearl on a sunny afternoon last week. They’d just come from eating indoors at a North Side brunch spot, their masks and sanitizer out of sight.Itiel Huerta, 21, had quarantined for months to protect herself and her loved ones from COVID-19. But after a while, she said, the health precautions left her feeeling “depressed.”“To be honest, I just feel like we have no way around it at this point, so I just kind of have to live with it,” Huerta said. “I do feel bad because I know my parents are going to come later today, and I’m like, ‘Dammit, should I go out?’ But I’m like, ‘My sister already got COVID, what’s the worst that can happen,’ you know?”The worst is coming, experts say. In Bexar County, the number of new coronavirus patients in hospitals broke the daily record twice last week as infections continue to climb, rivaling the summer surge.Yet, Huerta’s fatalism is not unique.Nearly a year into the pandemic, even as a more contagious variant of the coronavirus circulates and the death toll rises to previously unimaginable levels, many have lost the discipline — if they ever had it — to follow the advice of public health experts to socially distance and wear masks.“People have seen their world turned upside down for the better part of a year now, and they’ve seen illness and death and economic disruption all around them,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said. “So pandemic fatigue is absolutely real, and I’m sure it’s mixed up with a lot of other psychological effects of a global pandemic.“The sad part, given all of the illness, is that if everyone would just wear a mask and practice social distancing universally, we would see transmission decline rapidly and probably would be able to enjoy a lot more of life that we did prior to the pandemic,” Nirenberg continued. “But those two things have become such politicized concepts that we’ve jumped the shark.”Health experts say what’s driving the current surge is more layered than mere “COVID fatigue.”Past respiratory pandemics, including the influenza outbreaks of 1918, 1957, 1968 and 2009, all brought second waves in the United States that were worse than the first. And while the summer surge of COVID-19 eventually subsided in Bexar County, community transmission of the coronavirus never eased enough to prevent another wave.“It’s unfortunately a normal pattern of pandemics,” said Cherise Rohr-Allegrini, an infectious disease epidemiologist. “It’s normal to see a surge months later. Most of it is math. You’ve got to get below a certain threshold to get to the point where you’re not going to see exponential growth of the disease in the community, and we’ve never been below that threshold. We’ve always been slightly above it.”Nonetheless, the severity of the ongoing surge is within the community’s grasp to control. Many residents are stepping up precautions now and becoming “hyper-conscientious,” Rohr-Allegrini said.“How steep that curve is, how big that curve is, is dependent on our response,” she said. “Pandemic fatigue has been there from the beginning. In my circle, people are being even more cautious now than they were before. We’re all fatigued. We all want to get out of this, but we’re not taking extra risks.”Huerta, for one, was beyond the point of taking personal precautions. She and her friend, Lidia Terraquez, each had a $5 bottle of pink Moscato to enjoy. At the same table, April Hinojosa, 21, had popped a bottle of Brut.“Right now, I still have to go to work to pay my bills,” Huerta said. “Why am I going to go to work and risk my life, but not risk my life having fun?”Terraquez, 22, concurred.“We go to bars when they’re packed,” she said. “I feel like, why should we be holding back if no one else is?”Across an outdoor park at the Pearl from the trio of champagne drinkers, a group of five teachers sat together at a table with coffee and talked.None wore a mask.“I’m over it,” said Erin Merino, 30, a kindergarten teacher who has been giving in-person instruction.Merino said the disconnect between the risk of teaching her students and the safety guidelines in the community was difficult to reconcile.“If (the virus) is that big of a deal, we shouldn’t be going back to school,” she said. “I think I’m less scared of it now, mostly because I’m just over it.”COVID fatigue is not a clinical diagnosis. But it does have “phenomenological validity,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in risk and decision-making.“Worry takes a toll, and decision-making takes a toll,” he said.In the pandemic, people are confronted with new and difficult decisions — whether to wear a mask at their friend’s house, to dine indoors or only outside, to gather a small group for the holidays or not.“The act of decision-making, particularly when it’s a life and death situation for yourself and your loved ones — and the anonymous people you try to be responsible for — that would wear people out under any circumstances,” Fischhoff said.The psychologist blames much of the collective fatigue on mixed communications coming from local, state and federal leadership. A lot of the difficult decision-making would be removed from people’s lives if they had clear directions and health guidance, he said.“The communications have been so bad that everybody has been worn down needlessly, because we haven’t been given clear evidence about what are the big risks, what are the small risks, what are the effective things to do,” he said. “Because there hasn’t been clear, coordinated communication, people have scattered to different information sources, so we’re not on the same page.”Samantha Espinoza, a teacher and friend of Merino’s, summed it up succinctly: “It’s like, who do you believe?”For Tim and Tiffany, an unmasked couple at an indoor bar on the packed downtown River Walk, the answer to that question was definitely not “the media.”“No offense, the media lies,” said Tim, who declined to give his last name. “I do not believe a thing the media says.”Tiffany, who also declined to give her last name, said she thought COVID-19 was “fake” at first.Then, briefly, she was afraid.“We canceled a vacation,” she said. “And then, all of a sudden, we were like, ‘Oh my god, if we have to wear this mask any longer, we’re going to lose our minds.’“Now I’m just annoyed,” she added.An ardent supporter of President Donald Trump, who has downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, Tim scoffed at the science that has proven COVID-19 a highly contagious killer.“It scared me for three days,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s fake, but, c’mon. It’s the flu.”Last week, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff received his first of two doses of a vaccine that will help protect him from COVID-19.As hundreds of thousands of residents wait for what will likely be months to receive the same protection, Wolff lamented a lack of policy tools to keep them safe. Despite his belief in the “positive effect” of curfews, that option is no longer politically feasible, he said.The Centers for Disease Control and Metropolitan Health District both have recommended against imposing curfews. Nirenberg isn’t much of a supporter — “the effects were mixed at best,” the mayor said — and Gov. Greg Abbott has shown he’s eager to fight any local orders of the kind.“There’s not much more you can do,” said Wolff, 80, adding that Abbott’s own mask mandate is “not enforceable.”“The mask mandate the governor put in, there’s a $250 fine, but you have to give a warning,” he said. “Now, how can you do that? You see someone without a mask. Do you ever think you’re going to see the same son of a bitch twice? Of course not.”Officials still have options to ease suffering, said Dr. Vince Fonseca, who served as the state’s chief epidemiologist during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. They should double down, he said, on the same strategy that experts have been urging since the start of the pandemic: more testing.The rising percentage of positive COVID-19 tests in Bexar County — nearly 20 percent — is a red flag.“That’s not COVID fatigue,” Fonseca said of the positivity rate. “That just means we’re not testing enough, meaning we as a city — not just the government, so there’s private testing, TexasMed Clinic, all of us together, Community Labs — we just need to do more.”Overall, Fonseca was skeptical about the validity of so-called “COVID fatigue.” He pointed his finger more at the partisan divide that encourages people such as Tim on the River Walk to eschew health advice, as well as the worsening financial stress on low-wage workers as the pandemic grinds on.“They go to work more,” Fonseca said of those with no paid sick leave. “That’s not fatigue. They go because they have to. The more your resources have been depleted, the more risks you’re going to take.”Nothing, however, was forcing John Goodroe to attend the Alamo Bowl.A high school science teacher from East Texas, Goodroe had stayed home whenever he wasn’t teaching through a mask for most of the pandemic. But that got “real boring,” he said, considering he lives alone.So he finally shucked off his self-imposed isolation as soon as the federal government began shipping the vaccines. Never mind that Goodroe himself isn’t vaccinated yet, and that he might get infected before receiving a dose.The vaccine rollout, he said, means the pandemic is “over.” That’s why he made the trip to San Antonio last week to watch the University of Texas battle the University of Colorado inside the Alamodome alongside more than 10,000 other fans.“I get out a lot more,” Goodroe said, wearing a mask. “I get out and eat at restaurants. I get out and walk. I get out and visit with people. I feel real good about it because the vaccines are on the way.”Also at the football game was Robert Garza.This summer, hospitalized with COVID-19, Garza’s oxygen levels were so low he was on the brink of death. He said the doctors told him to say goodbye to his family, which he did.Then he recovered.Realizing the severity of the threat, Garza, 54, said he tries to “stay away from people.”In the next breath, he laughed.“We broke that rule today!”

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateThe pop of a champagne bottle, then another, and another sounded from a table of three friends at the Pearl on a sunny afternoon last week. They’d just come from eating indoors at a North Side brunch spot, their masks and sanitizer out of sight.Itiel Huerta, 21, had quarantined for months to protect herself and her loved ones from COVID-19. But after a while, she said, the health precautions left her feeeling “depressed.”“To be honest, I just feel like we have no way around it at this point, so I just kind of have to live with...

‘COVID fatigue’?

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