World War C is officially over in Hawaii as state and county elected leaders are allowing Covid-19 regulations to sunset, travel restrictions are fading and masks are finally coming off.

The daily reporting of local Covid cases has also transitioned to weekly reporting, a decision that matches a trend started by many other states last summer.

One could say that this allows better accuracy and offers a more strategic picture of how the coronavirus is affecting the community, but let’s call it what it is and just say we ain’t got time to think about the pandemic anymore.

While it is insensitive to suggest that the world is in a better place right now after 6 million deaths, we also cannot overlook the fact that technology and science have granted us better capabilities in fighting Covid. Long gone are the days – for the most part – that a Covid infection meant a possible hospital visit and one had to worry about inadvertently exposing one’s close friends and family to a deadly disease.

To be honest, I personally never liked wearing face masks. I felt like mask use was more of a pre-vaccine gimmick to justify people being out and about in public when they should have been staying home.

The whole pre-vaccination masking, social distancing, and so-called “Safe” Travels thing to me had the stench of thumb-sucking, safety-blanket holding, security theater compromise rather than the dynamism of political leadership that knocks out a threat quick before it can take root among a public that can’t be bothered to change even the slightest aspect of their daily lives.

I personally would have preferred that we had handled Covid-19 like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention handled the hantavirus outbreak in 1993, but Covid came to our shores some two years ago when America was politically divided, morally restless and intellectually distracted.

We can argue about “the science” later, but the need for masking and even vaccination is essentially moot because we have mostly settled on a consensus that it doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do right now. America and Hawaii will be open no matter what.

And that’s totally fine, but it’s fine in 2022 not because of the power of positive thinking, but because of millions of people who fought a silent war behind the scenes to push back the pandemic in whatever way they could. Their sacrifices made it possible for us today to believe whatever we want and do whatever we want, as if this whole thing never happened.

Most people won’t remember the early days of the pandemic when doctors and nurses didn’t know what they were dealing with and didn’t have enough protective equipment to wear, but still made do. To many people, that was somehow a “fake” event that never existed, despite the deaths of thousands of health care personnel.

After all, what was really a tragedy was not the loss of so many courageous people, but the fact that some of us wanted to attend a football or baseball game and how dare government tell us not to, right? (I say this with sarcasm, in case people don’t get it.)

That is the real danger. Covid may have been reduced to a nuisance rather than an existential threat, but mankind’s fight against deadly diseases is only just beginning. Various elected officials have suggested that one or two major pandemics threaten the world every century, but that assumption doesn’t take into account the effects of novel diseases spreading as a result of globalization, climate change and even war or terrorism.

I quake for humanity when I think about the possibility of a post-Covid generation encountering another deadly pandemic because the experience of the past two years is going to color decision-making to make responses to future threats difficult.

Are we going to hesitate to stop an even deadlier disease outbreak because politicians may want to roll the dice on herd immunity by mass infection or because the economy is too weak to take action? I wonder if our experience with Covid’s disruptions to society or the economy will cause us to do nothing in the face of future threats from disease, or even biological weapons.

Remember how Iran got away with casually bombing U.S. military bases or shooting down U.S military aircraft because no one wanted a war.

We’ve always operated under the assumption that in the United States there’s always someone looking through a microscope, manning a radar or standing guard somewhere, ready to sound the alarm for decisive people to act against a threat before it can unravel our collective way of life. Now we face a future where alarms are set to silent to avoid panic and avoid disruption – until the day we can’t avoid having to act.

Enjoy the end of the pandemic. But let’s not ever make the mistake of thinking that the next time something bad happens, we should just do nothing.