Many of my family members and friends are sick of all of the precautions and worries associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. They want it to be over. No more masks. No more social distancing. No more of life’s disruptions from this insidious riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, an invisible ghoul that has dominated our lives for nearly eight months.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you want to throw caution to the wind because of what we now call “pandemic fatigue,” be prepared to suffer possible life-altering consequences not only for yourself but for your loved ones and society, too.

I did extensive research on the virus when it first showed its hand in the United States, and I have been keeping track of its scientific and unscientific twists, turns and impact. I said early on that based upon my research I did not see a return to a type of pre-pandemic normalcy until 2022 at the earliest. I hope I am wrong, but, regrettably, it is now looking more and more as if this prediction might be accurate or perhaps even a little too optimistic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 36 years, and the most visible and trusted source of information during the pandemic, was in Philadelphia earlier this month and delivered a sobering message to physicians at Thomas Jefferson University.

“The battle is far from over,” Fauci told them. He said the safety protocols such as mask-wearing, social distancing, strict personal hygiene observance and other virus-prevention precautions will likely need to be observed into 2022.

Fauci followed this up by an appearance on 60 Minutes, the venerable long-running CBS newsmagazine, in which he said he was not in the least surprised that President Donald Trump contracted the virus because of his resistance to safety protocols.

In the days following Fauci’s comments, Trump called him “a disaster” and labeled other epidemiologists who have been cautioning about the virulence of the novel coronavirus “idiots.”

In the face of the recent alarming increase in coronavirus cases and deaths, including record-breaking numbers here in Pennsylvania, Fauci said one answer might be a national mask mandate. This flies in the face of what the president said as recently as Monday during a rally in Northampton County: “We’re rounding the corner on the virus.”

Fauci also cautions us not to expect an overnight miracle cure from a vaccine. He predicts a safe vaccine, which will probably not be available until the first or second quarters of 2021 at the earliest, might be 70% effective at best.

Add to this the number of Americans who have already flat-out said they will not take the vaccine, or the anti-vaxxers, you can figure out that precautions will still be needed to ward off contracting this highly infectious virus.

The ray of hope, according to Fauci, is that the public-health measures that were put into place when Gov. Tom Wolf declared a public health emergency in March will ultimately pay rich dividends in the long run.

State officials are concerned but confident that they have learned much in the eight months since the virus showed up on our radar. Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said health officials and the governor have no plans for a return to previous drastic measures such as the lockdown of nonessential businesses and stay-at-home orders.

The spike in cases has not meant a correspondingly huge spike in deaths in Pennsylvania, although this is occurring elsewhere. Hospitalizations, however, are steadily growing, but there are no fears at the moment that Pennsylvania hospitals will run out of treatment capacity or face a shortage of ventilators as was experienced in the spring. This fear, however, is prevalent in some other states, such as North Dakota and Texas.

Although it will be difficult to predict what the future will bring, Levine said that knowledge of the disease’s characteristics is much better known now than at the start of the pandemic.

She said the state is better prepared to target hot spots through contact tracing and other surveillance strategies. There also is a greater supply of personal protective equipment than there was in the spring.

“It’s hard to predict what the future will bring,” Levine said. She noted that while stay-at-home measures and business closures were utilized as mitigation strategies in the spring, there are now many more alternatives available.

As of Wednesday, there have been nearly 201,000 cases of COVID-19 and more than 8,700 deaths reported in Pennsylvania. In our local six-county area of Carbon, Schuylkill, Monroe, Northampton, Lehigh and Luzerne, there have been about 20,000 cases and nearly 1,050 deaths.

Worldwide, COVID-19 has infected an estimated 44.1 million people, with the United States showing the most cases, 8.78 million. There have been 1.2 million deaths globally, including 226,750 in the United States, roughly the population of Richmond, Virginia.

The influenza pandemic of 1918-19, known as the Spanish Flu, was the most deadly influenza outbreak in recorded history as it killed nearly 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States, 60,000 of them in Pennsylvania, one of the hardest-hit states.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com