2022 was the year that - from the perspective of the government and most Americans - the COVID pandemic was "over". Practically speaking, Americans just collectively stopped even pretending to take it seriously. Something like 12-13% of Americans got the most recent booster.

And yet, this year over 4X more people died of COVID than died from the flu in the most recent "bad" year. If you take the average of the numbers in the chart here, COVID deaths in 2022 were 6X what they are for the average flu season.

This is so goddamn ridiculous. Before 2020, if you had said there will be a virus that kills 6X the number of people in a typical flu season, we would have said that's SUPER serious and I think mask mandates would probably be a thing. But we're done with COVID now, no one wants to think about it anymore; just let it rip.

  • TheModerateTankie [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Last I saw you have a 1 in 6 chance of long term health complications from a covid infection AFTER vaccination. Literally Russian roulette odds. And we can be infected several times a year. Those seem like terrible odds to me?

    Now we get to find out how many covid infections you can survive before organ failure sets in or your thymus is gone. Cool.

    I guess not a big deal if you can get paxlovid on demand?

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I'm not too sure on Paxlovid. From what I understand it reduces acute symptoms, but I'm not sure how much it does beyond that.

      There's a lot of people on Twitter freaking out about people in their 30s up and dropping dead from strokes and other conditions you generally don't get in your 30s, but I haven't seen anything that can turn those anecdotes in to data yet. I think there are studies showing that subsequent infections have higher chances of complications though.