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.
There's a huge gro up of casual "anti-maskers" now who just, you know, don't wear masks because nobody else is and it's "normal" and "safe" now. The CDC avoiding the word "mask" for months helped, I'm sure.
I blame them less than the frothing chuds, as they are, theoretically, swayable by health authorities and those authorities are actively failing them. They don't really comprehend that "the experts" are lying to them, either blatantly or by omission.
It's kind of our job to organize around this and point out the absurdities. It's a shame there are so few of us.