To the dismay of many, COVID-19 is still among us. Nearly 4 months after the US federal government ended the public health emergency (PHE) declaration,1 new cases and hospitalizations are rising as they have risen every summer since the beginning of the pandemic.2 For those following the scant data available, this wave, due to more transmissible new variants,3 comes as no surprise.
Nothing miraculous happened on May 11, 2023.1 It was an administrative decision. Although ending the PHE was destined to happen, the decision seemed premature to some and long overdue for others. As with any divisive issue, the weeks that followed saw social media swirling with reactions. For public health professionals, the decision to end the PHE was epidemiologically meaningful in that it affected resources for testing, personal protective equipment, vaccines, and the infrastructure required for accurate and timely data on the virus.
Among those who celebrated the end of the PHE, there has been consistent misuse of many (now well-known) terms in the public health lexicon, including lockdowns, mandates, and closures. In some cases, the misuse of these terms was more than likely accidental. But in many cases, the misuse appealed to individuals’ emotions in a deliberately provocative way. Posts on social media, usually originating from politically motivated sources, seem to refer to any public health mitigation as a lockdown or a sign of more lockdowns coming. Regardless of the intention, the misuse of public health terminology has caused an uptick in online misinformation.
Cut to the early summer’s seasonal respite, which had individuals thinking that COVID-19 was out of sight, out of mind. But as students across the country go back to school, outbreaks of COVID-19 are starting to reappear.4 It does not help that protections against COVID-19 in schools are few; the COVID-19 vaccine is not a requirement for any child to be enrolled in any school district, most states have not provided proper indoor ventilation solutions,5 and mask wearing has become mostly voluntary in the context of schools and classrooms. With fewer mitigation efforts, less than a month into the school year, 3 school districts have had to cancel in-person learning because of “drastic drops in student and teacher attendance attributed to COVID-19 and other illnesses.”6 It’s likely that more school closures will follow but not because of the misinformation that is currently being spread about them online. Revisionist history of the COVID-19 pandemic prevails on social media and certain mainstream media outlets with suggestions that we “never needed to lock down,” which furthers the myth that the United States had a true lockdown and discounts the fact that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had no vaccines, no known treatments, and a deadly virus circulating.
What You Need to Know
The end of the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration in the United States led to the misuse of terms like "lockdowns," "mandates," and "closures" in public discourse, which has contributed to the spread of misinformation.
As students return to school, outbreaks of COVID-19 are occurring due to minimal protections in place. The COVID-19 vaccine is not mandatory for students, many states lack proper indoor ventilation solutions, and mask-wearing in schools is often voluntary.
Using precise language when discussing public health measures and policies, such as lockdowns and mandates, is crucial for increasing public health literacy and combating the spread of misinformation.
One such rapidly circulating claim about reinstated lockdowns has recently gained momentum on platforms such as social media and cable news. Although a handful of companies and universities have considered increasing mitigations amid the surge (eg, encouraging mask wearing to curb the spread of COVID- 19), there is no indication that the federal government will implement any nationwide restrictions related to COVID-19, let alone a lockdown. The source of the erroneous claims seems to be an episode of The Alex Jones Show, in which Jones claims that an anonymous “high-level manager” whistleblower at the US Transportation Security Administration warned that new mask mandates were imminent with a return to “full [COVID-19] protocols” in effect by December.7
Before we go further on how we can discuss COVID-19 policies without causing more distrust, the term lockdown deserves special attention. The United States never enacted a lockdown. The term has been used colloquially to refer to the days in which states—not the federal government—issued varying shelter-in-place (SIP) orders with minimal enforcement. It has also been manipulated and used as a dog whistle to discredit and demonize public health mitigation efforts in the spirit of autonomy, individualism over community, and liberty, thus breathing new life into an ideology captured in the wildly controversial Great Barrington Declaration.8
There is no denying that SIP orders disrupted day-to-day life, the way we gathered, and the way businesses functioned, but a true lockdown such as those that took place in countries such as China,9 Australia,10 or New Zealand11 never occurred in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, a tool developed by the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford12 in the United Kingdom compared pandemic policies globally and found that within 2 months of the pandemic being declared, the United States was among the least strict places in the world. Additional research published by the Royal Society, which analyzed thousands of studies to determine the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)—measures such as isolation, quarantine, border controls, mask mandates, testing, contact tracing, and lockdowns—found that NPIs were broadly effective in reducing the transmission of COVID-19.
