Similar returns to so-called normality across the country have been supported by data from abroad, where such policies have increasingly become the norm. The success of many Western European and Scandinavian countries in safely returning to pre-COVID life has been a particularly powerful driver for politically diverse calls for America to follow suit. Consider that the omicron variant is now less lethal in the UK than the flu variant circulating there.

But it doesn’t take much research to find that the divide between the US and the European countries we want to emulate extends beyond our COVID policies.

COVID continues to be particularly deadly in this country precisely because America is not Europe.

Too many of us still refuse to take vaccines and booster shots. We are unhealthy; 60% of us have a comorbidity that makes us vulnerable to COVID, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We lack universally affordable national health care. Perhaps more importantly, American workers lack strong paid sick leave and family leave policies.

COVID has adapted rapidly over the past two years. America, unfortunately, did not.

Even California’s best sick leave policies seem downright Dickensian compared to their European counterparts that we want to model our public health policies on.

Full-time workers here get 80 hours of paid sick and family leave a year — not bad — but only at companies with 26 or more workers. Part-time workers, gig workers and some food service workers do not receive these same generous benefits. In the UK, meanwhile, you can take up to seven days sick leave at any time, no questions asked. Extended leaves of up to four weeks simply require a doctor’s note, which is free. Sweden’s paid parental leave benefits, meanwhile, are so generous and comprehensive that it would take an entire editorial to explain them. The focus, however, is that parents, regardless of company size, job title or employment status, receive 12 paid days per year to care for their child until birth. 12 years old. This is in addition to sick leave pay which is equally robust. to that of the United Kingdom.

Policies like these don’t just make life better for their beneficiaries. They are the engines of a return to normal. European parents can send their children to school mask-free, safe in the knowledge that neither healthcare costs nor furloughs from work will send them into homelessness if they become seriously ill.

In America, meanwhile, COVID is punishing the poor — who must ride out the disease, put their health at risk, and spread the virus to those equally vulnerable, or they risk economic ruin.

Of course, it is precisely because of the failings of our social safety net here in America that perpetual closures are also untenable. Parents have to work, which many cannot do if their children are at home. And learning loss is tragically real when kids aren’t in the classroom. For more than a year, a parents’ movement has rightly pointed out the societal damage resulting from school closures. With schools now open, we encourage those same parents to push with similar force for the kind of protections that can protect children from the economic ruin that COVID infections can still wreak on a family.

After two years of COVID shutdowns, the seductive allure of moving on with our lives is bringing us back to a place of normalcy whose dangers we know full well. No, the answer is not to wear hazmat suits in perpetuity. But it’s also not about role-playing being Swedish and pretending that everything will be fine.

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