On Covid
avc.comI've seen a few posts like this recently and I have to confess: I don't get it. What does "it is time to stop obsessing about Covid" mean? I have small children so I'm still living in some kind of COVID purgatory but for the majority of the population COVID hasn't really been an obsession for quite a while. People are dining indoors, they're traveling, socializing... life more or less is back to normal. Schools are shutting down from time to time but that's because teachers are getting sick with COVID, hardly because of some irrational "obsession". If anything it shows we maybe stopped caring too early.
Of course, a lot more people are still working remotely, something I consider to be a plus but that I suspect venture capitalists like the author do not. So when I see someone like that advocating “unlearning many of the behaviors we’ve learned in the last two years” I'm immediately suspicious.
> We’ve got other pressing matters to deal with. [...] We have other health care challenges to tackle.
One of the most pressing issues with healthcare today is the sheer number of COVID patients overwhelming the ability for a hospital to do anything other than treat COVID. Yes, even with the milder Omicron variant. Again: if anything this suggests that this lack of obsession has come too early, not too late.
And has any call to "stop politicizing" something ever worked? That's simply not the world we're living in (these days, at least). The vaccine is politicized. Masks are politicized. You can’t just wish that away.
It's one out of a large number of propaganda lines or "NPC script lines" where the ultimate goal is to convince the reader/listener to decide that we should simply stick our heads in the sand and pretend the COVID-19 pandemic does not exist.
You are lucky if you have not been exposed to this propaganda very much yet.
You might notice that the editorial reads as if the word "Covid" refers to "that time when the government told us to wear masks and get vaccines and all that stuff." I'm not sure if people actually hold this view or just pretend to, but it's not uncommon.
It's trying to give off the aura of "Oh, remember when all those silly people told us to wear masks, it was just a silly thing that happened one time, why are we still talking about it, we should just forget it ever happened."
People with attitudes similar to the author are the reason there is still a COVID-19 pandemic, in the developed world at least. I'm surprised you don't have experience with them by now.
I'm confused as to why they (or their "propaganda") are the reason there is still a pandemic. Abandoning mitigations means it burns through the population quicker. Eventually we will all decide that the COVID-19 pandemic does not exist, because it will end at some point, right?
If not for propaganda, most of us would've done the things to ensure the virus didn't spread, and the virus would've not spread, and there wouldn't be any any more.
> People with attitudes similar to the author are the reason there is still a COVID-19 pandemic, in the developed world at least. I'm surprised you don't have experience with them by now.
This line of thinking is crazy: variants are getting every 3-6 months more contagious, sure less harmful, but at the same time more evaise of vaccine. I have some friends who had 3 doses and still had hard time with omiron. At some point all the population will have had some sort of covid in the future, probably multiple time if you think on a decade length of time.
Saying "the pandemic is still there because because of the crazy ones who don't want to confine for a year" is just nonsense. look at australia who had the strictest rules ? They are taking the current wave right in the face.
While it's important to protect old and fragile people, i'm really convinced most young people who were not in contact with old people should have not confined. The risk was super low, upside was to get natural immunity and not kill the economy. Half of the world (the < 40) bowed to fear for exactly 0 positive consequence imo.
It’s because the authors don’t have under 5 kids. So they don’t care.
Bitter lesson from last 2 years: no one cares about other’s misfortune at cost of self’s convenience.
Under 5 children are not susceptible to covid by any large measure and this has been the science since the beginning of the pandemic. If you have children without co-morbidities and you're running around in fear of them dying from covid you have health anxiety issues. Your fear is not justified by data whatsoever.
> sheer number of COVID patients overwhelming the ability for a hospital to do anything other than treat COVID
Your statement makes it sound like hospitals are devoting 50%+ to Covid, that is just not even close to reality frankly anywhere in the world.
I don't know where you got 50% from, but between covid patients and hospital workers themselves becoming ill the situation is really not great https://www.reuters.com/world/us/overwhelmed-by-omicron-surg...
> It is time to stop obsessing about Covid. It is time to stop politicizing Covid. It is time to stop tweeting about Covid. It is time to stop reading about Covid. It is time to start healing and it is time to start moving on.
Is it?
I mean, I’d like that to be true too.
…but are things not still a bit too screwed up to be pretending everything is fine quite yet?
> The current 7-day moving average of new deaths (1,749) has decreased 0.3% compared with the previous 7-day moving average (1,754). As of January 19, 2022, a total of 856,288 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the United States.
(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...)
Yeah that part was a bit weird; the Tweets preceding those seemed to indicate that after the omicron wave subsides it will be time to do those things. Then, however, it immediately switches to the present tense and implies that right now we should immediately throw all caution to the wind.
When hospitals are not choked with unvaccinated people, that's the time to stop obsessing. I'm still reading too many stories of people dying of non-covid reasons because they can't get medical care due to unvaccinated people taking up those resources.
EDIT: all parts of each country are not equal. In the Bay Area, the hospitals are doing (mostly) fine.
At what point do we blame our broken health care system that seemingly can’t handle something as mild as omicron? Now.
Why not look at it from the reverse? If our healthcare system that deals just fine with flu outbreaks etc every year can’t cope with Omicron… maybe it isn’t as mild as everyone says it is?
We can blame both. People talking about herd immunity and intentionally filling the hospitals are going to overwhelm any system, and european countries had problems like this too when COVID was at its worst there.
Current logic: There are hospitals that are forcing covid positive staff to work but not letting staff that has had covid already but isn’t vaccinated work.
Similar logic: shutting down nuclear power plants and then complaining that there isn’t enough power.
More similar logic: allowing decades of fuel to build up on the bottom of forests and then expressing befuddlement when wild fires burn out of control.
What’s the common thread here?
> What’s the common thread here?
Your consumption of only hard-right 'news' sources.
The political divisions over masks, vaccines, lockdowns, etc. are a feature not a problem to the political class. Politicians salivate when they find issues that can drive wedges between groups of people. COVID will be over when it's no longer politically useful (i.e. when everyone becomes tired of it and it no longer works as a wedge).
"It is time to stop politicizing Covid." but their argument amounts to "you need to just stop fighting me and give me what I want".
What exactly do we unlearn when he quotes, "unlearn many of the behaviors we’ve learned in the last two years"? What hardships are we going to go through if we continue to wear masks a little longer than necessary? Do I really need to shake your hand when we greet? Believe it or not people don't want to stay at home, not be able to work and they definitely don't like being sick and dying. Know when we'll go back to normal? When people stop dying so much.
This is going to have massive long term effects and I'm not talking about anything from having worn a mask. I'm talking about the long term effects of the virus. I'm positive you'll be seeing advertisements for the next 40 years for "Covid treatment centers of America".
If this person really wants to get back to normal maybe we should start by passing legislation now to deny Mediare benefits to anyone suffering from Covid complications who refused to be vaccinated. I'd be happy to support conservatives in saying, "Why should I be taxed to pay for the results of your decision?" or allow covid complications be be considered a preexisting condition for unvaccinated. Why should I have to pay through my insurance premiums for your ER visit?
Sounds like you are a customer for a new type of insurance policy which right or wrong discriminates against unvaccinated. Weirdly enough I think the unvaccinated would see their policies go down in price because we are by and large young. Are you sure you want to cleave populations in two based on that policy change, are you certain it will benefit you in the way you expect?
Ah, discriminates against the unvaccinated sort of like how they discriminate against smokers right now?...ya, I'm cool with that.
Thousands of Americans are losing their lives every day to Covid. New cases are MUCH higher than they were at any point in 2020 or 2021 (though it looks like we may finally have crossed the peak of this wave).
I'm sorry, but it isn't over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn't make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were literally 1/10th as prevalent.
I encourage the "over it" crowd to talk to the parents of young children, a cancer patient, or literally anyone who works at a hospital.
I am a parent of young children, and we probably have more reason to feel "over it" than other folks. I spent the first two weeks of this year balancing full-time work with a kid at home because he tested positive. I got a fever for about a day, but that was it. But the disruption to my work and his education was far worse than any alternative. The entire class ended up getting sick with COVID anyways.
We were triple-vaccinated. Our kid had his first shot in early December. We spent basically all of December in lockdown. All of the little one's playdates were cancelled because everyone was freaking out about Omicron. And we still got sick. What was the point?
I'm absolutely done with the lockdowns, the masks, the strict controls, etc. The older people in my life are sick of it as well; they don't know how many years they have to live, and they don't want to spend the rest of their lives holed up inside a building. We have lives to live.
Hopefully, we as a race start taking into account quality of life in addition to length of life. We have a looming mental health crisis on our hands and it's exactly because of the fear-mongering; who knows how many years we're going to have to spend cleaning up this mess (it will probably be decades).
If you haven't gotten sick from COVID yet, you probably will. At this point it really is just a virus. The time for pulling out all the stops to prevent ICU overflows is over. This might be a permanant fixture in our lives and I'm more sick of the constant fear-setting than I am from the virus itself.
I believe a higher percentage of ICU beds are occupied nationally than at any point in the pandemic: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend
If ICU overflows are when we pull out all of the stops, can we pull out just some of the stops before it gets that dire?
It's already not great. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/overwhelmed-by-omicron-surg...
> I believe a higher percentage of ICU beds are occupied nationally than at any point in the pandemic
According to the data you linked:
So there were 2,939 (or ~11%) more beds occupied due to COVID about a year ago.COVID ICU Beds Occupied: January 17-23, 2022 : 26,236 January 4-10, 2021 : 29,175Sure but that's not what I said. A higher percentage of all ICU beds are occupied today than at any point on the graph. If you need an ICU bed and one isn't available, you probably don't really care if that's because too many covid patients or reduced ICU capacity or a shortage of nurses.
In any event, would you agree that hospitals cancelling elective surgeries is indicative of an overworked system?
Have you talked to the parents of young children? Because those are exactly the people that are over it. A)kids are at statistically zero risk of covid unless they have cancer or something B) we have all already had covid because little kids are germ factories 3)the vaccines have been available for over a year now so you have had ample time to get one if you want to 4)the masks and lack of social engagement for children is very detrimental to their development.
I was completely on board with the first year or so of all these restrictions. But I am done sacrificing my child’s well being to spare the elderly. If the vaccines work, then why are people still afraid? I believe they work, so I am not afraid. I don’t understand why even the most ardent vaccine evangelists are still cowering in fear if they truly believe in their effectiveness.
The case count has exploded so what? Just think how many people actually have it but never bothered getting tested because it was so mild. The death rate is the same/similar to when we had a fraction of the cases we currently have.
Yes, I am myself the parent of young children.
> kids are at statistically zero risk of covid unless they have cancer or something
At risk of what? Dying? What about passing covid on to others? Or covid symptoms that do not go away? What about merely needing to be hospitalized? That still seems pretty bad. My local Children's Hospital has more pediatric covid patients than at any time during the pandemic and the city has re-authorized crisis standards of care.
> the vaccines have been available for over a year now so you have had ample time to get one
Kids 5-12 have only had a few months and kids under 5 still have no vaccine.
> But I am done sacrificing my child’s well being to spare the elderly
That strikes me as rather cruel. What exactly are you sacrificing? Isn't every school in the country back to in-person? Is it having to wear a mask?
Look, I'm also tired of covid and don't want to have to think about it ever again. But the problems with the actual virus still far outweigh problems caused by our response to the virus.
Perhaps they meant the impact of the parent dying will be much greater if they have young children.
There's a difference between effectiveness against "new cases" vs. heavy illness.
Deaths/severity is not rising even though there are a lot of new cases.
Deaths ( = going down): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Severe cases ( small increase): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
While new cases > x 7 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Additionally, it should be noted that the severe cases with Omicron are almost all unvaccinated ( not even boostered). If you want to check stats, please try to find a source that seperates delta ( which is not gone!) from Omicron.
Edit: And since it's January. An honest comparison would be Januari 2021 with Delta because of family / friend gatherings. It's a pretty busy social time ;)
Thousands of Americans dying a day isn't bad enough? How much worse does it need to get before it's something we should still be very concerned about?
And deaths are in fact rising. According to your chart they were around 6000/day (7 day average) on Jan 1 and are 7600/day in the most recent data two weeks later.
First of all. Not thousands, but 571 as i checked on a population of 320.000.000 in the US and with a reasonable amount of people unvaccinated ( and they chose for this, other people aren't responsible for other people's decisions)
And as mentioned in my above comment.
Can you show me how many are dying because of Omicron specific and how many are related to previous Delta infection that were already admitted in the hospital?
I'm not saying people aren't dying. Lockdowns aren't in place for the flu and that has also 52 k. deaths per year ( = 145 per year) and is much less contagious as Omicron. Also, Delta is not gone yet.
You have to compare numbers with reality. Otherwise I can ask you at how many deaths per year you would reduce restrictions or at what death/severity rate.
0 is definitely impossible as some people will remain unvaccinated. You could have the same argument that 10 people are dying per year...
PS. Compare it with December 2020/January 2021 which would be comparable with visiting family/friends multiple times. We aren't anywhere near that peak with *7 infections.
Most states don't report deaths on the weekend, which is why you should look at the 7-day average. It was 3,866 deaths on Friday.
Sure. Compare cases vs deaths over a 7 day average with a comparable timing ( eg. January 2021)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Lots of more new cases, less severe ones.
It works both ways to have a fair comparison.
Deaths per day is higher on the chart you linked than it was not too long ago.
Did you take end year meetings into account?
We are just out of the busiest social time of the year.
Thousands of people die everyday during bad flu epidemics like 2018 when 80,000 Americans died over a ~6 month flu season.
We didn’t keep kids from school, we didn’t panic when hospitals were overwhelmed, we didn’t shut down businesses.
That many people are dying a month right now. It’s nearly an order of magnitude different situation.
> when 80,000 Americans died over a ~6 month flu season
Where are you getting that number? CDC estimates 27k:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
which puts it below current COVID numbers by a big chunk.
> We didn’t keep kids from school
At this point schools are largely closed because there are too many teachers out sick to teach effectively. There isn't a particularly simple answer here.
Weird, here's another CDC source that cites a non-finalized estimate of 61k (45k - 95k)
The lower bound itself is higher than the 27k estimate.
Flu season doesn't lead to insanely high excess death rates, and overwhelm hospital capacity, making things like biking now a much higher risk activity as any visit to a hospital due to a broken bone or something is far more likely to result in a lack of proper treatment. That we are in 2022 and still discussing this leads me to, very grimly, believe that we are in some period of hyper-darwinism, where this train of thought will only go away once the virus has incapacitated/killed those who seem to not understand what the word "excess deaths" means.
Yes, maybe after that it will come for people who can't tell plural from singular. I am all for grammatical punishments of the most grim variety.
Willful missing of the point. Also not implying that the outcome is anything approaching a good outcome, just a grim Darwinian one, where thinking responding to covid in any way to improve life expectancies is just some sign of weakness. Our further atomization and slide towards a individualist society will leave us living shorter, less collaborative lives where we will try and treat cancer with a juice fast or some nonsense, instead of transforming our fundamental relationship to healthcare away from a not-for-profit one. But one is something a consumer can do, the other requires collective action, and that's only for the hysterical weaklings to dream of, so instead we will just virtue-signal our way towards dying at 30 on a bowflex machine after taking unregulated gym substances or whatever in a failed attempt to steel ourselves against our lack of societal fabric and collective ability to combat anything.
Feel free to hide under a rock avoiding covid while ignoring all the other risks you take everyday.
Hospitals hit capacity during flu seasons - did you wear a mask everyone, keep your kids home, work from home and cancel all travel plans? I’ll bet you didn’t even know they were at capacity.
I’m vaccined, I’m moving on with life.
Risk mitigation whilst hospitals are at capacity? Nah, gotta live my life! Otherwise they might perceive me as weak-willed, and more important than my continued existence is to ensure I am not perceived as a weakling! Anything else is others being hysterical! Fuck doctors, am I right!
Hospitals hit capacity during flu season all the time.
Did you stay at home, keep your kids from school and cancel all travel plans last flu season when hospitals got overwhelmed?
You probably didn’t even know they were overwhelmed, did you?
Last flu season a bunch of my family friends did not die from flu, nor did any relative suffer long term consequences from flu.
My coworker from 5 years back died yesterday. He is 2 years younger than me. I am not even 40.
So it doesn't affect you so those tens of thousands dead from the flu don't matter?
Not sure what your point is?
Straw man argument.
How is it a straw man, when it pretty much repeating what you said?
You're talking about consequences of regular flu. I'm talking about consequences of covid.
So, even by your inflated number, 20 times fewer than COVID-19, if we assume we are halfway through the pandemic?
maybe we should have
What kids are being kept from school?
800000 people have died over the past two years in the US alone.
That’s an order of magnitude difference.
That’s why the response was an order of magnitude more substantial.
I’m baffled you think this is somehow surprising.
I’m baffled my point went over your head.
We have tens of thousands of thousands of deaths every year. In the past decade 300,000 died of the flu and nobody notices.
People did notice. Pre-pandemic this was the major reason most people got flu vaccines: it's nice not to get the flu, but even nicer not to kill grandma when you visit the nursing home. Bad flu seasons were heavily reported, and people were aware that, while mild to most, the flu can be very deadly to at risk populations.
In pre-pandemic years if there was a flu as contagious as omicron people would be in a panic.
I'm sorry you don't like reality, I've never been a huge fan myself, but what's happening is happening.
And in the next decade, based on current death rates, 4,000,000 Americans will die of COVID-19. Are you saying there's no difference between 3x10^5 and 4x10^6? Well, the difference is not that large, but apparently it does cross our arbitrary threshold for "this is actually quite bad and we should probably stop it from happening"
Huh? You’re extrapolating two year of a pandemic, most before a vaccine out 10 years?
That’s ridiculous right?
> It is time to stop obsessing about Covid. It is time to stop politicizing Covid. It is time to stop tweeting about Covid. It is time to stop reading about Covid. It is time to start healing and it is time to start moving on.
2,000+ (and increasing) Americans are dying every day from this disease—as bad as the bad old days of Spring 2020. Why is this attitude so pervasive? It doesn't seem to be backed by anything aside from boredom of dealing with living in a pandemic.
> We have vaccines if you want them. We will have anti-virals if you need them.
> And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway.
This is the individualistic thinking that's caused us so much friction. It's no different than "if you want to be a safe driver, don't drink and drive!". The drunk-driver and the unvacced/unmasked put all of us at risk. It's selfish behavior, and should be treated as such, instead of described as "personal freedom".
> We’ve normalized mask-wearing in the US now and that is a good thing.
Have we, though? Across the country, people will harass and threaten you, for no reason other than they've seen you wearing a face mask. I've been mocked in NYC—the bastion of progressivism in the US. What do you think it's like wearing a mask in Kansas?
I’ve never met Fred but I’ve read his articles, particularly the Ives mba series ones multiple times.
Like any intellectual, they push to grow their knowledge and sometimes venture outside their area of competence. They don’t realize they’re living in a relatively healthy area of society surrounded by people with easy access to medical care and without comorbidities.
omnicron is less lethal than the other variants but it still threatens significant lives, takes icu beds and takes an enormous toll on the nurses working with a still steady stream of dying patients.
We all want to move on, and Omnicron looks to be peaking soon— the nature of the beast is omnicron has only affected half the people it will.
I guess I agree there’s reason to be optimistic. But I don’t think now is the time we stop talking about it.
I don’t think it’s fair to say we ‘have antivirals’ yet, the supply is so low and is not expected to really ever be enough for worldwide demand on the current ramp plans
We really need another warp speed project to produce these antivirals
Things look good now because omicron is mild, but no guarantee that all of the next variants will be mild . If one of them is severe we will really wish we had warp speeded the antivirals
worldwide? Only The West is important.
(sarcasm, obviously, but unfortunately a common undertone with a lot of conversations in general but specifically on covid.
I feel like I'm being gaslit. By blog posts, the media, Twitter, social media, my work - everyone.
I keep up to date with the latest studies on Covid. Sars-Cov-2 is not a respiratory virus; it's a circulatory virus. And its long term effects on the body are not widely understood.
Everyone is acting like because Omicron doesn't make you cough that Covid is over. But scientists are finding deeply concerning long term effects - neurological effects, telomere and biological aging effects, autoimmune activation, long Covid, micro blood clotting - in a non-trivial percentage of Covid cases. Even asymptomatic and vaccinated individuals.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that having Covid will result in a lifelong disability for at least some percentage of survivors.
But we just ignore that so we can go back to normal? Because Covid is "endemic?" Endemicity was the failure state - it means we gave up. Covid should have never gotten to that point.
It's not everyone. The people with views like this editorial are the minority of people, but they are a very loud minority. If they would put as much effort into not spreading COVID as they put into convincing the rest of us to convincing the rest of us that COVID isn't a big deal or doesn't exist, there would be no pandemic today.
> First, we have less severe variants now.
Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It's what we all want to hear, but this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.
>this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.
Can you back this up? It's my understanding that our actions now have almost no bearing on what happens with future variants.
I would imagine that it's a fairly simple matter of probability:
The more cases the greater the chance of mutations. The more mutations the greate the chance of nasty variant.
The broad logic is more infections = more variants. Which makes sense in a purely statistical way, since variants are happened upon by chance on infection.
It seems the messaging from the experts is different in the US and the UK. The message in the UK broadly is: expect to be infected with COVID multiple times throughout your life, vaccination and prior infection should protect you from serious illness.
The chart shown at time code 7:55 https://youtu.be/FYIeL8XxluQ?t=476 is the best representation I've seen of this.
One of the hard things to talk about is the difference between: exposure, infection, disease, and infectivity. Headlines and news coverage of these has been almost universally terrible. There are rules of thumb thrown around like they are proven truth. The experiments to actually show at what time and how much infectious agent is produced are very difficult and as far as I know, none have been done. There are some studies on household spread, but to really know what's going on you need to do challenge trials - which means exposing people to the disease - which is highly unethical to do in humans - and challenge trials in animal models can be highly deceptive.
But generally speaking, yes, I expect to be exposed to Sars-Cov-2 many times in my life, and will probably be infected and may develop disease and infectivity. But as a vaccinated person, the period of disease and infectivity will be reduced.
That's probably the more realistic expectation. Especially when the west is doing very, very little to help curb infections elsewhere in the world. Until they become interested in that there will always be a fresh supply of variants arriving.
Heck, the west isn't even doing very much to help curb infections in the west.
no, this can't be backed up, not even with models which post-hoc 'describe' other outbreaks of other diseases/virii outbreaks
New variants of viruses can arise at any point in the future, regardless of what we do. Any flu season in any previous year in history could have produced a deadly variant, and yet we went on with our lives.
I think this is simply about reassessing our risk calculus with the fact that the current Covid variant is mild enough that it can be gradually folded into the background noise of seasonal viruses that we deal with every year.
I remember at least two flu seasons where flu variants named after certain animals caused people to not simply go on with their lives. Do you remember those?
If you don't have any cases you won't get any new variants, because variants arise when the virus mutates while reproducing in the human body. More cases = more opportunities for a mutation that produces a more dangerous variant.
Covid is here to stay, and you can be expect to be infected with it every few years. You probably won't even know it's covid because we will have stopped routine testing. Talk about having zero cases is ridiculous and fanciful.
> Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe.
Future pandemic waves will be less and less severe.
It doesn't matter how virulent the variants are, they're all about the same within a factor of 2 or so.
The thing that moves the needle is the human immune system. >90% of the population everywhere has T-cells now one way or another. People who are boosted have T-cells that have gone through affinity maturation and been boosted which should be a mature immune response that will keep them out of hospitals permanently (barring compromise of their immune system of course, but that's a risk with influenza and everything else).
As the unvaccinated/antivaxxers manage to get mature boosted immune systems the hard way then the impact of each successive wave will be lower. Once we hit the point where the unvaccinated percentage in the hospitals roughly equals the unvaccinated percentage in the general population then the pandemic is probably over.
So with 90% unvaccinated in the hospitals right now with 64% fully vaccinated, then at some point another Omicron-sized wave of infections should result in only 15% of the overall hospitalizations. Of course it won't be perfect, but the trend of each successive wave should move the needle more to that level. Each successive wave should asymptotically approach that burden.
Eventually its likely that the waves become smaller as well, due to mature boosted immunity against infection and transmission.
And Omicron probably isn't significantly less severe of a virus, the studies in culture and in mice attempting to show that have large problems. The less severity of hospital burden in the Omicron wave is showing that the human immune system (and vaccination and boosting) works.
We have the technology to make COVID just a nuisance to broad swaths of the population. Let them live their lives. Now is absolutely the time to quit the tut-tutting.
I don't understand why people are so against taking an easy W like this.
Immunocompromised people are allowed to tut-tut until they can actually go outside without significant risk of death.
Personally, I would lock my children in a cellar for 15 years if that's what it took to protect those who have compromised immune systems. Talk about not being able to defend yourself!
Good lord. I know this is hyperbolic but do you have any idea the affect that 15 years of isolation would have on children? And you are willing to place the well-being of random strangers over your own children? You seem to think that your comment is morally superior, but that idea is abhorrent and evil to the idea of being a parent. You should be ashamed to be a parent.
I would love to see how your children feel about that.
Don't feed the troll.
You don't have to lock your kids in a cellar, but measures like mask mandates and temporary school shutdowns are the sorts of things that are necessary to keep covid under control so immunocompromised people can live their lives, instead of having to stay at home because it's incredibly difficult to avoid exposure due to states just going 'eh I'm done with these lockdowns' and repealing mask mandates.
Because it's not an "easy W" and treating it like it is causes more deaths.
Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave.
I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get on with their lives.
Since the beginning we've known that Omicron is both less deadly and more transmissible. I don't know how anyone with an engineering background can not see the problem here.
There is a balance where less deadly x more transmissible == more deadly x less transmissible, ie the total deaths during a wave are the same. We can't really control the death rate of omicron, but we can to an extent impact how transmissible it is. If we fight to reduce the transmission rate we have a much greater shot at lower overall deaths. But if we actively encourage people to ignore safe behavior and "live their life" we end up increasing the transmission rate therefore increasing the total number of deaths.
0. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths
The solution is to get more people vaccinated. Not to ask more of people who are already vaccinated. Vaccinated people have done their part effectively removing themselves as burdens on COVID wards. The leverage point is in getting more people into that protected population.
Remember what this was called in the beginning? Novel coronavirus. The problem was that we were all immunologically naive to it, which resulted in bad outcomes. Vaccines (and to some extent prior infection) make us no longer naive. That's the way out.
We have vaccines. Take the damn win.
> We have vaccines. Take the damn win.
Unfortunately it's still not that simple. If you look at the death rates in very high vaccination rate states/countries you see the same pattern. For example, VT has the highest vaccination rate in the country, at >90% with at least one dose, and is experiencing this as it's worst wave [0].
There's no doubt that vaccination helps and reduces overall severity, but it is by no means an "easy W"
Additionally we are starting to see diminishing returns in Israel's 4th round of shots [1]. It is increasingly looking like, even if we're will to do a life time of booster shots, this strategy may not be effective.
0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/vermont/
1. https://healthpolicy-watch.news/israel-fourth-covid-booster-...
You have to disaggregate those statistics to account for vaccination status. Here's NYC's dashboard. Huge differences in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths between the vaxxed and unvaxxed population. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily
Again, this is very simple. Given that the vaccines work, then this pandemic is over for those who are vaccinated. I'm quite happy to change my tune if it turns out vaccines don't work though.
It's not over until the unvaxxed stop crowding hospitals, or we build more hospitals.
Prior infection gives far more protection than vaccination, and a combination of both is as good as it gets (although the addition of vaccination to prior infection gives much less additional protection than prior infection alone): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm
Only if prior infection doesn't kill you or hurt you more than the later infection would.
I thought the general theory of "virus evolution" was towards less severe variants.
Of course, more severe variants can always develop. Holds same for flu, HIV, ... not just COVID.
Not really. Evolution just causes viruses to optimise for their own spread.
Often that selection pressure works towards less dangerous variants because that gives them more opportunity to infect others.
Sometimes a virus kills off everyone who is susceptible to it. So it's now less dangerous to those who remain.
In the caae of Covid, it is infectious long before it kills, and so there is no great selection pressure for it to become less dangerous.
Not really. The virus, lacking feelings, doesn't particularly care how sick you get.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...
In declaring the statement 'false', the Facebook fact checker confirmed there is a longstanding scientific theory it is true and provided confusing would-be counter-examples of variants of viruses exhibiting treatment resistance and cross-species leaps. Omicron demonstrated that treatment resistance is really incidental to severity, and COVID already is a problem for humans -- the question clearly was not asked by a pigeon or monkey for whom cross-species leaps of a human virus could be problematic. The would be fact check was not especially illuminating.
I personally credit the prediction attributed to Luc Montagnier back in 2020 that because COVID exhibited unnatural characteristics that exacerbated the severity of illness, he predicted that over time the characteristics would evolve out of the virus and result in a more benign illness. This is a reason why it would have been useful to have a scientific debate over the lab leak theory, because the origin of the virus informs our best guess of the path it may take in the future, which has so far confirmed to this prediction.
If you have an article or paper explaining how viruses evolve to be less severe, I'd be interested in reading it.
over <1yr time frame, severity hurts the virus spread. consuming resources and triggering sneezing etc does. Therefore random mutations tend toward mild severity (symptoms like sneezing, not instant death).
HIV is an interesting case because it is "just a flu" for a few weeks, then remains contagious but isn't severe at all, until it develops into AIDS years later.
Woah, this politifact.com fact check sorted that out. I had gotten really confused into thinking the virus did have feelings.
Thank you politifact.com political fact check fact check for checking that.
The article actually specifically endorses anthropomorphizing viruses, because "feelings" are just a human metaphor on top of real biologic and physical processes, as how water likes to flow downhill.
Apologies, the snark is mine not theirs. My point was that the evolutionary pressure on viruses doesn't necessarily make them less serious and there are counterexamples to support that.
Evolution is not about, or caused by, feelings.
> I thought the general theory of "virus evolution" was towards less severe variants.
That's probably only in the case where the disease is so severe it kills the host before it can spread very easily, not some general rule.
Let's say you have a virus that's super contagious for two weeks with no symptoms and nearly everyone who gets it dies within a month. What evolutionary pressure would it be under to change as long as it has fresh hosts to infect?
Since nothing we've done has prevented the evolution of variants, why do we think we have any control over whether there will be more?
Reducing infections reduces variants
please stop being alarmist
loving the downvotes, again for being respectful on this.
Lets retry:
Please stop with the anti-intellectualism and fear-baiting based on personal feelings!
* I am not a doctor, this comment is for entertainment purposes only *
I do think it's time to start thinking about what the end of the pandemic looks like:
1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever. People will continue to get sick and die from it.
2. There will be more peaks on the infection and death charts. These are real people with real families. It will suck for them.
3. At some point one of the peaks will be the highest. 6 months or so after the highest peak is reached, the pandemic will be over. We'll only see this in hindsight. It may take a year to tell that the last peak was the highest. The disease won't be over, but it won't be the single most important thing in everyone's life. It will drop from the #1 or #2 cause of death down to #10 or #20, eventually. This may be different around the world. Countries that have had low numbers of infections and deaths may have huge spikes of infection and deaths.
4. There will be more variants, and they are not guaranteed to be milder, especially to individual infected people. There may be variants that affect children more. I personally don't think that is likely, but there are no guarantees.
5. Early in the pandemic, there was a lot of judgment on people who got sick. We'll have to let go of this. Speaking down to people doesn't help. Judging people doesn't help.
6. Some people will continue to wear masks for a long time. Some people won't feel comfortable in groups. Give them time. Don't force the issue. Give them space. I will probably wear a mask in crowded public places for a long time (grocery stores, airports, public transport).
7. We'll be learning about this disease for a long time. Hopefully government bodies learn how to plan and communicate better. Hopefully we step up our disease vector surveillance and tracking efforts
8. We won't get common understanding back unless people work for it. Dividing people with moralistic and righteousness-based messages is currently a winning strategy. I won't call this a "both sides" thing, I call it a "human nature" thing. I don't really understand why some people are standing on "their rights" - I guess it plays better than saying "I'm scared"
Your point 1 is missing a big disclaimer.
1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever because the population votes for it to be that way.
The virus spreads to other animals - no disease agent with an animal reservoir has ever been eradicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir
I wish it were otherwise, and maybe in the future it will be so.
Measles is also not eradicated. In 2019 in the U.S. there were 1282 cases, about 4 per day. Most people get Measles shots for their kids and basically never think about it again.
There are currently about 700,000 cases of COVID per day in the U.S. There is an enormous difference between these two viruses that are not eradicated.
There are states in between uncontrolled spread and total eradication. When COVID in the west has the same status as, for example, TB in the west, we can easily declare that the pandemic is over in the west.
A)wasn’t hard to see covid coming, no insider info was needed. 2 years ago I, an insurance adjuster with no inside info, was freaking out about what was happening in China. B)The unwinding of the covid trade has nothing to do with the current stock market implosion. Peloton and Netflix aren’t down because covid is ending. All stocks were inflated because of a decade of quantitative easing and 0% interest rates. Some were further inflated more due to covid. But the money printer has stopped going brrrr and interest rates are going to rise soon which is being priced into the market. Buckle up, we are heading for recession. Also not hard to see if you are paying attention.
> And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway. We’ve normalized mask-wearing in the US now and that is a good thing.
I really hope he's right and it's normalized, but I do fear that many people will go back to not staying at home and not wearing masks when they feel sick. And people who do wear masks, will do so catching lampooning gazes from others.
> And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway.
My understanding was that mask-wearing was mostly to protect others. Has that changed?
Masks always provided some benefit both ways, but the benefit is maximized if everyone is wearing them. N95s and similar have started to become more common, and those have substantial benefit to the wearer, even in a crowded room of unmasked people. If I am wearing an N95 and you are not wearing a mask, I am more protected than if both you and I are wearing surgical masks.
This was my understanding about surgical masks pre-covid, but I plan on wearing a better-sealing (KN95, KF94, N95) on public transportation, airplanes, and in busy places like supermarkets for the rest of my life. If I can avoid even 10% of the colds or other viruses over the course of my life it seems like a very worthwhile tradeoff.
Every year I travel to the east coast for Christmas and every year except this year I've gotten sick during travel. I'm happy to normalize masks cause I want to wear them on planes to avoid feeling miserable the whole time.
You can actually get some protection wearing and N95 mask. Though those aren’t popular in the west because they often have exhalation valves that make people paranoid (the CDC says they are ok since they allow for a better seal and are filtered).
The change has been the realization that anything less than a properly fitting KN95 mask is basically useless.
According to this large randomised trial [1], simple interventions to increase the use of surgical masks reduced infection by 11%, and by nearly 35% in over 60s.
That doesn't seem useless.
Of course, if you're only talking about protecting yourself from others, then a KN95 mask is clearly the way forward.
[1] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
"you can" critical and very clear wording, would never stop someone wearing them. But we never addressed a) how to wear them or b) the advertising that they're the be-all end-all solution is wrong and shouldn't have presented them this way.
Mask wear becoming a normal thing is one of the few good things to come out of the response to Covid.
I like them, they provide privacy from people and cameras, while also increasing protection from many viruses and bacteria (provided you don't take it off to scratch your nose).
Common cold and the flu has gotten way less common since 2020. Freaking amazing, since the symptoms can literally incapacitate me for a week or two. I hate the cold and flu.
>Covid was terrible, we are scarred from it, but we cannot let it divide us and we cannot let it drive us crazy. There are more important things facing us and let’s go deal with them now.
C-19 is still very fresh in our minds. Let's use that to drive action to learn from it and try to ensure the next one is less catastrophic. If we turn our attention away too quickly, this won't happen.
Even as we speak, we have school districts in the US closed indefinitely* and many nations around the world without testing, vaccines, antivirals or proper healthcare. The future may be here (let's hope that this is the beginning of the end while being healthfully paranoid that it may not be), but it is definitely not evenly distributed.
* https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/01/21/flint-public-schools...
There's one interesting thought in the article: that financial markets could be correctly predicting the end of the Covid pandemic phase.
The unwinding of the Covid trade doesn't necessarily correlate with that, but it's a reasonable proposition.
Most of the other stuff is opinions and I agree with the sentiment of many of the other commenters: You might be right, and I certainly would like you to be right, but there's little hard evidence that you are, and June 2021 was a nice cautionary tale that you very well might not be.
> The unwinding of the Covid trade doesn't necessarily correlate with that, but it's a reasonable proposition.
It's certainly an interesting thought, but why would it be true?
Or it could simply be the collapse of the financial market as it fails to be propped up for much longer than it was supposed to be.
What worries me more is the next time, when there's multiple different viruses and the death rate is much higher.
Given that there are two possible scenarios for the origin of COVID; natural transmission or lab origin, I find the former to be a far more terrifying prospect. If it were a lab outbreak, that's a protocol problem that can be addressed to prevent it in the future. If it was natural transmission, why hasn't this happened before? Why isn't it happening again right now? Why isn't there 10 different viruses at once, that are much more deadly? What happens when that occurs? If this happened naturally, it will happen again. And I just pray that we are prepared.
It has happened plenty of times. HIV, for one? But such transmission is quite rare and only seems to occur every few decades.
That's for "interesting" viruses, by the way. "Boring" viruses probably get transmitted all the time. Most things are boring.
"The current death rate of COVID in the US is about what a bad flu season would be."
Currently 2000 people a day are dying in the U.S. from COVID. That's an annualized rate of 730,000 deaths per year. The CDC estimates that the worst flu season in the last 10 years was 2017-2018 and that Flu caused 52,000 deaths.
That puts the current death rate of COVID at 14x where a bad flu season would be.
Perhaps it is his judgment that the level of attention COVID is getting is still not warranted, but one must start with the basic facts correct in order to make this judgment.
and the definition of a covid death is rather liberal compared to a flu death with no underlying conditions... the whole mess is political
I can't say precisely how these deaths are defined. I can say that I know several people personally who have died of COVID just in the past month. I can't ever remember anyone I know dying of the Flu.
I'm not questioning this. But unfortunately it is by definition anecdotal. I know 3 over 90s who are still going, and a mix of expose risk and health status. I'm sorry for your loss.
Yes, I also know a ton of people who didn't die from it. That does not change the fact that COVID is much more lethal than the flu, which was the original claim to justify the article.
again, as per my comment, you cannot make this assessment based on bad data, please stop insisting on it.
In the UK(Eng+Wales) it has killed <13k total with no underlying conditions as reported by the ONS. https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre... This alone should worry people!
The total kill count is supposed to be 100x this which is a heck of a disparity, and shows there is something bad about the data.
The data for flu is not “with no underlying conditions.” Something like 70% of the u.s. has an “underlying condition.” You’re distorting the statistics to promote an agenda.
No I'm not. I'm presenting a very large discrepancy in the data itself. Any inference you chose to make is therefore based on inconsistent data. The choice on how to understand it is yours, I've led you to water.
Besides you need to renormalize the data based on demographic and at risk population as well as taking into account frankly several years of good fortune with regard to flu seasons and being prepared with working flu jabs ahead of time.
I'm not saying your wrong I'm just explaining how the data your using is faulty. Go away find a trusted source who can help understand the details and not just compare 2 big flat numbers that don't reflect the actual situation.
2 big numbers make for nice headlines though. Which again for agendas very well.
Ironically nobody listens to my point that we should have been innoculating at risk people as early as may 2020 when trials started, so frankly I'm not bothered with being accused of fitting an agenda. I'm not, only really to say that the politicalisation of this has distorted data and people's thinkings in a way that's needlessly cost lives. Please stop reading sensationalist numbers without understanding what it means in context.
If you're comparing to the flu you have to compare apples to apples, you can't just exclude people who are more likely to have a bad outcome from covid. You are the one who is creating the discrepancy.
OK, here we go.
You make a statement that X number of people die from the flu in a year. This number is where flu is put down as a primary cause of death. i.e. this does NOT tend to include someone who was in hospital with the flu who had a stroke/heart-attack. (As you so strongly point out with a 70% estimate the US is defined to be unhealthy). Taking some leanway on this we'll be optimitic and say only 67% of the people are unhealthy at time of death from flu. This means we can triple the likely number of flu deaths if every death involving the flu was counted toward this. (pre-existing cases likely not included in this metric)
This gives an estimate of 150k flu deaths for 2017-18: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
Total covid deaths are 900k, so 450k/yr average.
Given covid is a novel (new) virus that is attacking a population with (zero) innate immunity or pre-existing mechanisms to cope with this new virus. (i.e. every 60yr old didn't encounter this in the first 30 years of their life and have some pre-existing natural way of coping with this) we expect the death toll to be even higher, even if it were just as deadly as the flu. The fact this is a novel virus also means it will spread through the population much quicker given there is by construction and definition zero host-based mechanisms to slow it's spread.
We will call this metric F as we don't have a good handle on what this number is, other than it's probabilistically >1.
An F in this case of =3 matches the 2 sets of data we have. i.e. 150k die normally, 450k died now.
The big question is this, which of the following statements are more likely to be correct:
1) Covid is 3x more deadly than the worst of the flu! (With an in-built, and wrong, assumption that this is not due to having something to do with the population not having an in-built immunity of some form.)
2) Covid is a new virus, be careful because this can be deadly! (This has an in-built assumption that covid is deadly to some people... and it is).
Now we can again use the data to answer this question, which is more correct. The data says that mostly at-risk people are dying. This confirms more of statement 2 that covid is killing people, but it raises a concern about statement 1).
Naturally things like the flu kills the young and the old at about the same sort of rate due to their immune systems. There is no real mechanism which explains why covid doesn't kill the young so much other than it doesn't. Because flu deaths in the young in developed world are so low due to treatment we don't have good statistics to compare between young deaths from covid and the flu other than to say they don't appear to be significantly worse. (This borne by the covid stats/testing of young patients)
Unless there is a mechanism discovered to say why covid doesn't impact the young so much we can assume it follows the general age profile of being a transmissible seasonally variant contagion.
Here is the 2nd problem.
If covid is more deadly, then by how much? This would be <=3.
The final amount covid is more deadly is some factor G.
The way G would/could* enter is that F+G explains the increased number of deaths in covid years compared to flu years.
i.e. F+G<=3 (covid could be, but is very unlikely to be less deadly, so we'll take F and G to be positive)
If the population had some normal natural immunity then G=3 by construction which means covid is 3x more deadly. This is bad, but frankly still not bodies piling in the streets bad.
We know F has some likely non-zero value and my bet is a lot more research is needed to explain it, but I doubt it's close to 0 as that implies that there is no such thing as herd/natural immunity which doesn't match reality.
Conservatively I think we can now say covid is likely between 1.5 and 2.5 times less likely assuming that the chance of the true value being somewhere in this range.
This obviously is different to decisions made around healthcare availability and reliability and correct approach to treat, but I'm going to pretend in both cases that the flu and covid have been optimally treated for the sake of argument. This is incredibly generous to your argument as it implies additional deaths can't be explained by bad healthcare availability or decisions. Unfortunately given some of the poor decisions in treating covid I think this alone could being 3 down to 2.5 by explaining, oops, we should have been treating them this way after 2 years experience.
Anyway, I don't regard 3x as being a huge multiplicative factor, which isn't to say 3x more people dying is a good thing. It's not, but obviously informed steps can and should have been taken to reduce this.
*(Could, enter this way, the unknown above is now linearly separated to first order into 2 unknowns, this is ignoring higher order effects for the sake of clarity and explanation here)
Even taking this at the worst case scenario for my case of you being wrong (50k was the true number of deaths with the flu), we end up with (F+G) < 9 with the same leniency, covid is likely between 6 and 8 times worse than 2017/18, but frankly given we don't tend to shut down society based on the numbers this is only really a concern in a healthcare setting and not massively at a population level. Esp given it's at the same level of people dying from heart attacks at a worst-case spin. We don't shut down mcdonalds because of that though...
apples to oranges gets you 6<G<8, apples to apples gets 1<G<3.
So it pays to decide on your priors carefully and given there has never been a count of "number of sick people who had flu at time of death" we can't get more accurate at resolving this.
The page you linked to estimates 51,646 deaths from flu in 2017-2018, not 150k. Again it is obvious that your reasoning is motivated, and even with the motivated reasoning you still have to change the data to make your point.
Anyhow, the original claim was "The current death rate of COVID in the US is about what a bad flu season would be." This is obviously wildly false.
I'm sorry have you actually read my reasoning for making this small change and the following argument where the results without even this additional multiplicative are discussed?
I don't know who has educated you in the field of mathemetics but I'd maybe go speak with them about comparing orders of magnitude and the number 8, I'm too tired...
I've presented to you good reasons for these numbers, not biases, but scientific logically consistent reasoning. You've glanced and cherry-picked. There isn't a conversation happening here so I'll leave you be.
Frankly I tire, you can proceed to profess to lecture me on my reasoning, my biases and how if infers the way I obviously vote politically all you like, I'm done.
No you can’t just triple the estimated flu deaths just because. Come on. The claim as stated is false.
Stop being facetious. I offered solid based on fact reasoning and presented results even with this removed from the starting assumptions and the difference in the end being it's between 2 and 8 times worse. aka an order of magnitude which is how much seasonal flu's tend to vary with their impact.
It really doesn't seem we have other 'pressing matters' , unless those matters are manufactured somehow. Can the world return to its habits of consuming recklessly, traveling like there's no tomorrow, office routine every day, low tech schooling and ignore the fact that it's largely unprepared for a new pandemic? Maybe, but it would seem more like reckless yoloers than future-thinking people.
"low tech schooling and ignore the fact that it's largely unprepared for a new pandemic"
Unfortunately our education (comparing US and UK) are both not going to be solved by increased tech imo (not in the sense of tablets for all). But as I've said for years we should be seriously looking at airflow in educational establishments, as well as improved buildings.
Having been on both sides of the lecture hall and teaching environment, a well ventilated room helps huge amounts for concentration and informed debate. Air quality can drag down the room and atmosphere as well as being unhealthy.
Most of the discussion in the threads is around whether covid is over as a pandemic.
I think this post gets something else wrong.. The economic story. The claim in the post is "covid is over, so everything will reset to precovid levels." I think there's a much bigger correction happening potentially that will be worse than "we're right back where we started".
People have come to realize a few important things:
- Omicron is comparable to a really bad cold for most people
- The vaccines reduce the risk of death for only a very short time, then the effect wears off, and they have unknown long-term sequelae
- Living like it's 2020 is not sustainable
Maybe he’s right. Hopefully he’s right. But personally, I feel like this is just more shortsightedness. I’ve lost track of the number of times my employer thought it was time to get back to the office - only for restrictions to be increased a month later as cases rise. This cycle repeats and people seem to not learn. They get overly optimistic and then kicked in the teeth. Yes, things are better than they’ve been but 4 months ago we also thought it was over until Omicron arrived. How long until another more serious variant comes along that escapes vaccines? Predicting the end of Covid when the world is in the middle/late stage of a huge wave seems super shortsighted.
Exactly -- remember this past summer when the pandemic was over? Or how about after fall, when the pandemic was also over?
If there's one thing predicable about the the pandemic, it's that it is unpredictable. I, too, hope that omicron is the much-hyped final wave, just like delta was supposed to have been. But to declare that it definitely, totally, is the final wave right now seems a bit premature.
I think there is reason to be a bit more hopeful in America at least when you consider a few things:
1) Natural immunity is quite robust: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
Now, that is according the CDC whose governance has sought to give the impression that natural immunity is not so great (perhaps for generally good reasons). But now they see fit to give the impression that natural immunity is pretty substantial, clearly giving much more immunity weight than vaccine alone. So that is some clear signal just reading between the lines.
2) Seroprevelance indicating natural exposure is quite high overall in the U.S. and especially so in some regions, see for yourself what that looks like in your own region: https://covid19serohub.nih.gov/ (nucleocapsid is proxy for exposure and recovery)
Now, you might look at those numbers and see only 30% or so, but realize this is end of October statistics. Many (dare I say all?) regions in the U.S. have seen en exceptional wave since those statistics were collected. I would be confident to say 50% - 100% increase in statistics of recovered.
edit: I'm just some guy on the internet so if you think this stuff is wrong or misrepresented, call my ass out. If you are not capable of parsing the references I give you, assume I have bad intentions.
...and then comes BA2.
I'm not very optimistic about that one.
> I’ve lost track of the number of times my employer thought it was time to get back to the office
This has nothing to do with employer thinking and trying to predict covid.
This is all about some managers feeling lonely. And even as it sounds cynical, I really mean it and think it is factor in this. The other factors are also some management feeling less in control or thinking it will be more productive. But imo, them feeling lonely, especially those who have no real social life outside of work, is a factor.
People love to pretend that companies and management are all about rationality, but they are not. Their emotions influence their actions a lot (so are developers emotions etc).
Exactly. COVID has made very clear humanity’s amazing ability to play make-believe, making failed attempt after failed attempt to get “back to normal”. We have this idea that “life as it was in November 2019” is the One True Normal, and we must keep trying to return to this Normal lifestyle, despite that pesky, stubborn reality.
Every time restrictions relax, and we rush back to capital-N Normal, cases rise, deaths rise, hospitals fill up, and it’s nothing but “Surprised Pikachu” faces from politicians! We keep not learning, over and over.
I don’t know what it’s going to take to snap us out of this trance and accept lifestyle changes. A “9/11 quantity of deaths” every 3 days is apparently not enough.
We could get back to normal if people would stop thinking that we could just declare it, as if the virus could read and follow government proclamations. All it takes is to not spread the virus for several weeks.