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Using wastewater data- the only data that measures the amount of circulating COVID-19 in an era of inaccessible tests and discouraged reporting- infectious disease modeler J.P. Weiland estimates that the US has yet again crossed the million-infections-per-day mark as of August 9, with about 1 in 33 Americans currently infected with COVID-19.

. . .

I’ve written before about how, in November 2021, nearly a year after the debut of the vaccines, Fauci publicly declared that US COVID cases would need to fall “well below 10,000 a day” for us to get a “degree of normality,” and allow us to return to pre-pandemic life. In the nearly three years since, the US has never had a single day with under 10,000 new COVID cases per day; in fact, we have never had a single day with under 100,000 new COVID cases per day.

  • Wertheimer [any]
    hexagon
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    100-com agreed with your "doomer" paragraph.

    (I would like to read a book or some heavy-duty Theory about this, but I barely know who to trust anymore.)

    • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
      ·
      3 months ago

      I mostly just follow Death Panel and get recs from there, but I rarely have the appetite for it anymore despite being a really good podcast, it all just depresses and enrages me too much. Haven't listened in awhile but they frequently gave good citations to studies and papers and book recommendations and whatnot.

      • Wertheimer [any]
        hexagon
        ·
        3 months ago

        Oh, hell yeah, a podcast with transcripts. Thanks for the recommendation.

      • AernaLingus [any]
        ·
        3 months ago

        I rarely have the appetite for it anymore despite being a really good podcast, it all just depresses and enrages me too much.

        Mood. I listened to it pretty religiously up through the end of the of the official public health emergency, but the bleaker things got the less I could bear to listen to it. I do still tune in occasionally, though: their recent episode about the untold history of Section 504 was pretty neat! But generally, I've been listening less and less to Death Panel, Citations Needed citations-needed, 5-4, and other podcasts along those lines because I already struggle a lot with rumination and it just exacerbates things. Have to try to strike a balance between staying informed and not driving myself mad.

    • miz [any, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      not sure if this is heavy-duty enough but it might whet your appetite

      What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]

      This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.

      from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/