Friends of mine just contracted it last week. One's an pulmonologist and the other is a career professional horse trainer.
On the plus side, the pulmonologist tends to keep us abreast of what's going on at the local hospital. And cases are nothing like they were at the start. Between the vaccinations and paxlovid, the mortality rate is on par with any other respiratory illness. Relatively few people are experiencing extreme symptoms. If you're going to get it, now's hardly the worst time.
They both quarantined. They both recovered inside a couple of days. I'll be back to business as usual by next week.
But the desire to just not talk about this thing is deeply weird. One of the bigger challenges of COVID tracking, at the start, was building up the information infrastructure to identify and report cases as they became known. We never really did this properly, and it shows, as we still struggle to report out of rural areas or in communities that don't have large standing clinics and hospitals.
Rather than taking this as an opportunity to scale up domestic health care access, this seems to be one more step along the path to being as unprepared and understaffed as we were when the outbreak originally occurred. Over three years of this shit and we refused to learn a god damned thing from it.
Yes, 35,000 is a vast undercount, that's how many people were dying in the US every few weeks at the beginning of 2022 with the first omicron wave. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00
1 death is too many, for COVID-19 OR Influenza. Any sane, rational, non capitalistic society would work to completely eradicate these diseases, no matter how Quixotic it seems.
Eradicating disease used to be a serious goal, even in Western states. The eradication of Small Pox, for instance, was historic. Utopian, even. Vaccination campaigns to eliminate measles, mumps, and rubella changed the nature of the world we live in.
I don't really expect COVID to go away. But at least take it as seriously as we take influenza. Christ.
It's an improbable task, but so was the first vaccine. I'm tired of settling for half measures and getting even less. I will graciously be locked in my house for a few weeks if it means ending the plague. I'll just start gnawing on the raw lasagna sheets I bought five years ago.
But the Chinese basically tried that for years. And while they curbed the spread, limited mortality, and eliminated the risk of new variants for a time, as soon as they relaxed regulations it flared up again.
At some point, the solution has to be pharmaceutical. It can't just be holding our breath and hoping enough people don't harbor infection past an arbitrary cut off point.
My Comrade in christ, the solution is political. Zero covid is class struggle. Sure vaccines are important, but it's the same fight we've been fighting. It's Capital pushing the anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-lockdown movements. If you're waiting on Capital to give us a pharmaceutical solution you're going to be holding your breath anyway.
It’s Capital pushing the anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-lockdown movements.
Japan is capitalist af, and I've never seen this level of adherence to masks, sanitizers, and vaccination. They've got this shit locked down.
Not incidentally, rivaling China for low rates of contagion and spread.
The social reaction in relative nations has far more to do with domestic confidence in good government. Japanese capitalists aren't courting the same political forces as their America peers. The Japanese elites see COVID as a real threat to their wealth and power. The Americans don't.
Friends of mine just contracted it last week. One's an pulmonologist and the other is a career professional horse trainer.
On the plus side, the pulmonologist tends to keep us abreast of what's going on at the local hospital. And cases are nothing like they were at the start. Between the vaccinations and paxlovid, the mortality rate is on par with any other respiratory illness. Relatively few people are experiencing extreme symptoms. If you're going to get it, now's hardly the worst time.
They both quarantined. They both recovered inside a couple of days. I'll be back to business as usual by next week.
But the desire to just not talk about this thing is deeply weird. One of the bigger challenges of COVID tracking, at the start, was building up the information infrastructure to identify and report cases as they became known. We never really did this properly, and it shows, as we still struggle to report out of rural areas or in communities that don't have large standing clinics and hospitals.
Rather than taking this as an opportunity to scale up domestic health care access, this seems to be one more step along the path to being as unprepared and understaffed as we were when the outbreak originally occurred. Over three years of this shit and we refused to learn a god damned thing from it.
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300 per day at its lowest
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What does it mean?
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Ah I see, thank you!
Yes, 35,000 is a vast undercount, that's how many people were dying in the US every few weeks at the beginning of 2022 with the first omicron wave. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00
pretty sure you are missing a digit
I have no idea where you got 35k for the number of covid deaths in 2022, but for America it was over 250k deaths in 2022.
I saw it somewhere. Can't find the link anymore. Mea culpa. That number was totally wrong.
1 death is too many, for COVID-19 OR Influenza. Any sane, rational, non capitalistic society would work to completely eradicate these diseases, no matter how Quixotic it seems.
Eradicating disease used to be a serious goal, even in Western states. The eradication of Small Pox, for instance, was historic. Utopian, even. Vaccination campaigns to eliminate measles, mumps, and rubella changed the nature of the world we live in.
I don't really expect COVID to go away. But at least take it as seriously as we take influenza. Christ.
It's an improbable task, but so was the first vaccine. I'm tired of settling for half measures and getting even less. I will graciously be locked in my house for a few weeks if it means ending the plague. I'll just start gnawing on the raw lasagna sheets I bought five years ago.
I mean, ditto.
But the Chinese basically tried that for years. And while they curbed the spread, limited mortality, and eliminated the risk of new variants for a time, as soon as they relaxed regulations it flared up again.
At some point, the solution has to be pharmaceutical. It can't just be holding our breath and hoping enough people don't harbor infection past an arbitrary cut off point.
My Comrade in christ, the solution is political. Zero covid is class struggle. Sure vaccines are important, but it's the same fight we've been fighting. It's Capital pushing the anti-vax, anti-mask, and anti-lockdown movements. If you're waiting on Capital to give us a pharmaceutical solution you're going to be holding your breath anyway.
Japan is capitalist af, and I've never seen this level of adherence to masks, sanitizers, and vaccination. They've got this shit locked down.
Not incidentally, rivaling China for low rates of contagion and spread.
The social reaction in relative nations has far more to do with domestic confidence in good government. Japanese capitalists aren't courting the same political forces as their America peers. The Japanese elites see COVID as a real threat to their wealth and power. The Americans don't.
Now they get to worry about heart disease, strokes, organ damage...
Viruses never ever have consequences far after infection, nope