Feb 2022 is when they started transitioning from pcr's for everyone to home tests.
May 2023 is when they declared an "end to the public emergency" and ended the emergency and stopped requiring hospitals to test people.
This year they stopped requiring hospitals to report much of anything.
I guess this is just how it's going to be from now on, and we'll have to figure out what damage it's doing by analyzing excess death rates
BTW many parts of the US (Hawaii and SF, and my little town apparently) and world are experiencing a pretty sizeable covid surge at the moment. Most likely from the FLiRT variant, and there is also a different variant coming up called kp.3, so that's fun.
So COVID is literally just forever? It mutates too fast for vaccines. What the fuck. Is there anything that could be done at this point?
Lol we could still just do an actual lockdown (worldwide) for a few weeks and be in vastly better shape, but it would ruin capitalism.
If every country adopted China's zero covid policy we'd probably have been fine.
If the US had an actual legitimate pandemic response like other countries, with checks and supplies being delivered on the regular, I think the chuds would be much more manageable. Of course, it would require any media pushing anti-whatever rhetoric would need to be taken to Central Park. But I think those first couple months of unified 'flatten the curve' discourse shows how powerful they are in shaping public response when they're not trying to commit social murder to make the line go up.
Obviously, this is never happening again under capitalism, which makes the anti-mask, 'back to normal', "leftists" all the more... mind-blowing.
End capitalism, global co-operation, lockdowns, mobilise emergency forces and army to help, strict enforcement. Pandemic would be over in 3 years max
There's plenty of things we could be doing to make the world safer from covid (and other respritory viruses), but only very marginalized peoples are fighting for them. Better air filtration. Widespread use of Far-UV technology (UV lights that are harmless to humans, but absolutely destroy viruses and mold). Better sick time policies.
None of these are a solution, but we could probably live in a world with even less viral influence than 2019 if we really tried.
Yeah, the pandemic is "over", now it's just endemic, so you can get COVID randomly in the same way you can catch the flu.
even the WHO disagrees, you have been successfully propagandized and are now repeating it
From what I could understand, while it does indeed mutate very fast (like the common cold), it tends to select for milder symptoms.
There is no evidence that I'm aware of stating that milder symptoms reduce long covid susceptibility.
To add to this, the vaccines and (to a much lesser extent) prior infection immunity are reducing the dangers from a single infection. The virus isn't getting any weaker. And transmissibility is way up, thus your chance of getting covid is much higher. As research suggests that one's chance of long covid is 10% per infection, more infections are only going to increase one's risk of serious, long term problems.
instead of almost dying and then being handicapped now you get to not notice the illness and become handicapped
Which partially explains why even where it was taken seriously there's no alarms going off due to the new variant.
There's no selection process for milder symptoms. Think about it. Regardless of symptoms people aren't masking and long covid only manifests itself after months.
I wish for fucking god damn once some of these politicians would kick it from fucking around with Covid. I know why they don’t (medical care and concern for me and not for thee!) but like, I know more than plenty enough of them drink their own Koolaid enough and they’re all malnourished fossils. Fucking die already! Give them the Herman Cain already!
I definitely do too. Sadly the poor and marginalised are probably hundreds of times more likely to die from covid than a Western politician.
Honestly saw the writing on the wall since the 2000s. How many people denied climate change not necessarily because they weren't sure it was happening, but argued from consequence.
"Climate change? Environmentalism? BUT MUH FREEEDUMBS!"
Point is, anglo culture is too focused on its pleasures to sacrifice anything even for its own survival.
The climate change thing is the number one reason that I still keep up precautions. Like oh how did ignoring scientists for the last 70 years go for us?
: "Yeah, but, have you considered just how COOL we looked ignoring those nerds!?"
Point is, anglo culture is too focused on its pleasures to sacrifice anything even for its own survival.
You can't blame this one on anglos (other than in the sense that they engineered it), everyone is non-masked and pretends it's gone
Fort Detrick lost containment briefly right before the “vaping disease” which proceeded Covid. In reality we will probably never know where Covid came from, but if we were going to blame a specific group, the only one we have significant evidence in favor of would be the United States government. Additionally, the first cases in China only appeared after Americans visited in a large number for the Olympics.
The Beijing Winter Olympics were in 2022, so I think your timeline's off by a few years?
On another note, the virus almost certainly originated naturally in China due largely to chance and the fact that 1/6th of the global population lives there, meaning the diceroll of something jumping the species barrier is happening more frequently. As far as I'm aware, Chinese researchers (and the Chinese government) also agree on this.
It was the Wuhan military games. It took place October 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games
You’re probably right. I’m just a stupid dog. I probably should talk about politics honestly.
Still lolling at how "China is under-reporting their COVID deaths" and "China is pretending there is no pandemic" ended up being pure projection
The spike is happening in Australia too but the state media is saying its because of colder weather as we come into winter and that there is nothing to worry about.
Yeah, capitalism created the conditions necessary for a new endemic disease. It's forever a part of the human environment untill after a global revolution/rebuilding and advancement in how we treat medicine in general.
Endemic means predictable seasonal patterns, which isn't happening because of our constant mass incubation of new mutations. The pandemic phase won't end until universal zero covid is implemented by communists, or a magic sterilizing vaccine covering all possible variants appears
The graph at the top is odd. It's specifically from Santa Clara County, CA. The biobot data nationally, and in my region never looked like that. i.e. the waves following omicron were much more mild in concentration.
Here's another showing the January wave, with the current uptick still very small in comparison. Makes me curious what's up with SCC's data. Maybe they didn't capture the omicron wave very well in their rolling average? It looks like a single data point at the peak. If that wave wasn't captured well it'd cause the following waves to look anomalously larger after scaling to case numbers.
The more you zoom out, and the longer this has gone on, the less data points we've had resulting in far less accuracy when averaged at greater scale. At a county level, there's been traveling spikes moving throughout the country in unmonitored counties that are basically feeding the surrounding areas and keeping the floor raised.
Also as this has gone, and with the variety of variants, the synchronicity between people's immunity to any specific variant has become wildly out of step. So you get half your population immune during one wave, and then a few months later their population wanes and you see a sudden spike because the next county over caused an outbreak in your now immune less population.
I'm afraid I don't have the screenshots for it anymore but a really good example was in Monroe county Florida they began monitoring out of nowhere, and then suddenly spiked higher than anything the neighboring (and well populated) miami-dade county saw the entire pandemic. Monroe county (and eventually Miami-Dade) then stops monitoring and we have no clue what's happening down in that area of Florida.
Anyway tldr, the raised floor we're seeing is being sustained by the unmonitored counties spiking that we're not seeing.
Oh, I do have Seminole county which did something similar, but we had much more data. Seminole County neighbors Orange County (Disney, etc) and popped higher than any recorded data we had the Disney area.
Show
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Here's when I noticed Monroe county spiking and saved some of the data. https://hexbear.net/comment/3919179
Oh, this is embarrassing, but you spelled 'most efficient system' wrong.
how so? i remember hearing about how it would become "the common cold"
afaik vaccination and lockdowns were supposed to avoid deaths, but that we wouldnt be able to truly contain it? is the death rate still as high as on peak covid?
You are looking at this like a trip mine when you need to understand it is a time bomb. Deaths and cases are hard to track because we no longer track Covid at all in any official capacity- this is why all of the charts take a nosedive around this time last year and by itself is something we have never done for any medical affliction in the past that we were not positive was completely eradicated, if that tells you anything. We are not doing anything about this, and it is not going to simply get more innocuous over time because every mutation evolves around any measures we manage to take against it thanks in no small part to all of our unvaccinated "friends". It doesn't matter that we have vaccines when only something like a tenth of the population in the US is vaccinated- and this is not even counting that vaccinations for JN.1, the "current" strain, are expected to be available in the fall when Covid has already mutated beyond that, again, to KP.2 or FLiRT variants... this is why it's not endemic. There need to be predictable seasonal patterns to be classified as endemic and because this thing mutates lightning fast, and every infection kills your immune system that much more, we are in a near perpetual wave of infections and re-infections year round. That sounds like a fucking pandemic to me, still!
Even so, the deficit of vaccinations and frighteningly rapid mutations are easily worked around with better air filtration policies across the board and support for PPE education and distribution- prevention rather than treatment- but our institutional ability to keep up with this is not there, nor is the will. I would even go as far to say that the public don't want to do any of it because it's simply inconvenient. We never have to do "lockdowns" (ugh...) we just need to be fucking smart and have an iota of compassion; a tough sell in this economy, apparently. I don't know about you but all of this really does not spell out anything good in future to me.
The long-term effects will largely not be seen all at once like the mass deaths were but gradually over the course of the next 5 to 10 years when, if we continue the course we are on, enough of the working population will be permanently handicapped and operations start to crumble. It is already happening now, in fact. City infrastructure where I live and in many other parts of the country is falling apart. Have you heard about pilots falling asleep in the air and with such frequency ever before 2020? Buses and trains are late more than ever, operators are sloppy and rude more than I have ever seen in my near-decade of living here. Construction has a massive attendance and capacity problem with everyone succumbing to long Covid and other things you really ought to wear PPE for that we decided we just aren't going to do or support doing anymore. Motor vehicle accidents are up astronomically since 2020. Hospitals globally are experiencing critical staff shortages from illness and burnout both. The domino effect will be unprecedented, and like climate, this is a touchstone crisis of our generation that we are completely and utterly bungling because of attitudes like this. It's not a cold. It's not even really a flu. It's airborne AIDS.
this is pretty grim holy shit.
it was rough for me and ill admit i was pretty burned out from it when the media talking heads stopped talking about it
All I can say is to continue to wear PPE whenever you are in public. An N95 mask gives you near 100% protection from harmful aerosols when worn correctly. I will take that over not being able to walk to the grocery store anymore in half a decade…or worse. Everyone likes to say no one else is doing anything so how does me doing something make a difference, but it does. You’re not trying to save the world, but presumably you want to protect yourself and anyone you are six degrees of Kevin Bacon with, as someone here so eloquently put it, and you can absolutely do that. There are things we individually can’t do a whole lot about, but wearing a proper respirator when you’re around other people has immediate material benefits to not only your own health but the health of everyone around you. I am immunocompromised so I understand the burnout, believe me. I had a vibrant social life before all of this, I went to weekly tabletop and card game meetups, fighting game tournaments, I had a tennis league… but all of that is gone now because we won’t make it safe for me, or for anyone. Everyone is susceptible to long Covid or worse, but people like me roll a d4 constitution save instead of a d20, and when people abandon masking and taking any precaution at all writ large like we have it’s really, really despair inducing. So please believe me when I tell you it’s not over and it’s not mild.
