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.
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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.
And even as shitty as they are on an individual basis, they actually really helped when we had near universal masking at the beginning of the pandemic which significantly reduced the amount of virus in the air! The more people who are masking, the less perfect any individual's masking has to be. Amazing what we can accomplish when we all work together to protect each other's health!
But of course, we live in "personal risk assessment" hellworld, so you'd better have an N95 or better and make sure it fits perfectly or you'll get got thanks to everyone else blasting their aerosols into every cubic inch of the environment.