“Epidemiologists are starting to hug again. They’re also running errands, gathering outdoors with friends and getting haircuts in far greater numbers than before,” Margot Sanger-Katz, Claire Cain Miller and Kevin Quealy write over at The New York Times. “In a new informal survey this month by The New York Times, 723 epidemiologists in the United States responded to questions about their life now and how they are navigating this in-between phase of the pandemic, when vaccines have become widespread and cases are declining nationally, but herd immunity is not assured and Covid-19 remains a threat. We have surveyed these public health experts periodically throughout the pandemic. As a group, they remain conservative in their choices about how to behave safely, and are more cautious than many Americans. But their increasing willingness to return to more prepandemic activities shows that even people most aware of what could still go wrong are starting to become more optimistic. ‘Vaccines have given me freedom,’ said Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, who leads the epidemiology division at the University of Minnesota. ‘I was very strict all year but am now returning, slowly, to life.’ What was making them most comfortable, they said, was vaccines. ‘I am feeling very hopeful about the prospect of Covid-19 being controlled as a result of public uptake of vaccination,’ said Lindsey Ferraro, an epidemiology graduate student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.” Margot Sanger-Katz, Claire Cain Miller and Kevin Quealy, How U.S. Epidemiologists Are Returning (Carefully!) to Everyday Life,” The New York Times.
