I’m not sure that case levels are ever going to get ‘low’, not as we enter the winter months and respiratory virus season anyway. Endemic doesn’t mean ‘low’ or ‘gone’, it just means stable without large peaks. It will always be there. Being in favour of masks while cases are high could well mean advocating for them every winter, or even permanently. Is this really what people want? As immunity wanes, which we’re already seeing with the first to be vaccinated (hence boosters), or the virus drifts a bit, people become a bit more susceptible again, and this is then balanced by the immunity gained from more recently vaccinated and recovered people. Overall we’ll probably end up catching it every year or so, but it will be less bad each time as immunity builds up. There will also probably be a few thousand deaths each year as there is with flu, in those very vulnerable, which we’ll try to mitigate with boosters but won’t be able to completely avoid. This is not what we were sold when we were promised that we could eliminate it, but it’s the reality.
Suppressing the virus through increased measures puts it off for a few months, but you then get bigger peaks when you do relax and these peaks are what threaten the NHS (see Scotland over the summer). All of these measures, like distancing and perhaps masks, also have all manner of costs, including on people’s health. Paediatric wards are currently chock full of small children very ill with RSV, including children slightly older than usual, because they have not had the chance to build any immunity to it. This is a virus that does actually harm children, with thousands of hospitalisations each year. The measures taken to stop spread have implications far beyond the economic and educational problems we’re all familiar with, and are far from neutral. It really is time to have one of those ‘grown up conversations’ that Sturgeon purports to like so much, and explain to people the reality, and the costs of ‘keeping us safe’ from COVID.