The Pandemic Didn ’ t Really Change How Americans Think About Sickness

Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, still remembers an advertisement for cold medicine he saw in late 2019. The ad showed a visibly sick businessman walking through an airport, “and the message was, ‘You can solider through this. You can make it,'” McDade says. That message didn’t age well. Only a few months later, the virus that causes COVID-19 began spreading across the globe, prompting health officials to beg people to stay home no matter what—but especially if they felt sick. Suddenly, soldiering through an illness wasn’t seen as admirable, but irresponsible, selfish, and dangerous. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Since then, countless op-eds and articles have argued that the pandemic would usher in a “new normal” where people were more thoughtful about disease, companies were more generous with sick time, and everyone stayed home when unwell. It looked like it was happening, at least for a while. Millions of people worked and learned from home, many for the first time; comparing symptoms became a national pastime; and photos of at-home test strips crowded out vacation shots on social media. But now, with the pandemic effectively over—at least in terms of the federal response, if not epidemiologically—it seems that the promised new normal never fully materialized. Eric Shattuck, an assistant professor of research at the University of Texas at San Antonio, studies &l...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news