Is COVID over now?

For now almost 3 years the COVID-19 pandemic has plagued all of us through measures such as ‘Maskenpflicht’, homeschooling, and various lockdowns keeping us from living our lives normally. This impacted and still impacts students, both mentally and physically.  However, with the recent lift of all  COVID measures by the German government and only roughly 5% of students wearing masks it seems that one could make an argument that COVID is over. This of course is a subjective topic so we at the Muckraker decided to interview some students to see what their thoughts were on this.

One student remarked that, “Since all government COVID measures are lifted, COVID must be over; at least in the government's eyes.” Another student remarked, that “COVID is not over yet, but it doesn’t have the same big impact on people that it used to have.” These are both very thoughtful and interesting statements, and as the first student pointed out in the government's eyes COVID is over, which is why all the regulations have been lifted. I think that the second student also brought out a very interesting and important point with stating that COVID is not over, which is a fair argument seeing as the number of infected people is still steadily increasing. Furthermore, you, I, anybody could currently have COVID as a lot of people, myself included, don’t do COVID-tests anymore, which leads to a huge hidden number of people that could have COVID.

One should also take into consideration that many people simply don’t want COVID to exist anymore, which is understandable after almost 3 years of going through this pandemic. This leads to a certain bias in our society where we have all collectively agreed that COVID is over one way or another that the pandemic is over. In conclusion one can argue in either way and there is no definitive answer to such a difficult question. The most important important is to as Santiago Rivera would have said, “Stay safe out there, JFK!”