These stories are terribly sad, and no doubt life-altering for the family members losing their loved ones.
At the same time, these articles lamenting that "everyone has just gone back to normal" — what do they think we should be doing instead?
> [Dr. Thomas Yadegar] lamented that other people had become “complacent” and unwilling to take simple steps such as wearing a mask indoors to protect those at highest risk.
>
> “We’ve sacrificed the lives of our most vulnerable for our own convenience,” Yadegar said. “The elderly, the immunocompromised, and the unvaccinated or under-vaccinated — they are the ones that account for the vast majority of deaths due to COVID-19.” As hundreds perish daily, “thousands more are left behind, tormented by the loss.”
Masking is laughably less effective than vaccination, so outside of situations where someone can't be vaccinated, (like say, if I'm going into an assisted care facility or something) why are we bothering with this? I just don't get it.
What made Covid such a crisis was not the average rate at which people were dying, but the peak rates at which they were being hospitalized, which threatened to overrun local healthcare infrastructure to the point where the death rate would skyrocket. Once vaccination became widespread, while the infection rate didn't massively decline, the hospitalization rate did. That's why the crisis is over, even though the pandemic persists.
The "X kills more people!" arguments were always missing the point, as is the argument that the current lack of urgency around the ongoing death rate means there shouldn't have been urgency in the past.
This foolish article might as well be titled "Infectious diseases continue to kill many people as they always have" These sorts of things are a fact of life in our world, and unless there are very specific, concrete reasons for taking special measures during specific time frames (as could be perhaps justified for COVID during a certain time), nothing except for "moving on" can be asked of society. The human world literally has no other choice, and to insist on draconian disease control measures just because hundreds a day die of X or Y infectious agent is absurd when you simply understand that many, many people have always died daily from preventable infectious vectors.
At this point, COVID is so little different from certain other previously existent viruses that no special measures are justified anymore. Furthermore, those that were applied already with many still unexplored social and health consequences not only worked only ambiguously at best, they also should have been carefully examined before being pushed even further for any reason.
I'm not sure of the quoted doctor's agenda (aside from maybe some self-serving free media publicity by playing into that same media's need for fear-clicks) but he's proposing an absurdity through emotional appeals that he himself should know to be untenable for a functional world.
Omicron is just a flu at this point. IMHO this is just a fear-mongering article in the effort to get people unnecessarily jabbed before the stockpile of millions of "booster" doses expires.
Maybe if they didn't withhold monoclonal antibody treatment people would live. [1]
Maybe if covid was actually treated in the hospital and treatment options weren't suppressed by the medical establishment, more lives would be saved. [2]
its sad that right now, its just a matter of time before any of us become immunocompromised temporarily (after a surgery, or during a cancer treatment), and then snuffed out by the ongoing opportunistic viruses floating around
many immunocompromised people right now are still living as if it is March 2020
so, they live. but need to not be exposed. so, you can certainly beat their track record of 2 and a half years. but the world gets orders of magnitude more dangerous now, than pre-covid, for immunocompromised, and that doesn't seem to have a light at the end of the tunnel.
(some people draw further distinctions by saying "severely immunocompromised", but the concept is the same, post-surgery, cancer, hiv. circumstances a very large portion of society gets into at least once. According to cancer.gov, approximately 39.5% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes (based on 2015–2017 data), chemotheraphy puts them in a immunocompromised state)
Does she need to ride your personal hobby horse in every single article she ever writes for you to realize it's possible for people to care about more than one problem at a time?
If you want a more functional and educated society you could start by encouraging diverse coverage of multifaceted issues instead of doubling down on criticizing a journalist for writing a piece about the still-ongoing global pandemic
At the same time, these articles lamenting that "everyone has just gone back to normal" — what do they think we should be doing instead?
> [Dr. Thomas Yadegar] lamented that other people had become “complacent” and unwilling to take simple steps such as wearing a mask indoors to protect those at highest risk. > > “We’ve sacrificed the lives of our most vulnerable for our own convenience,” Yadegar said. “The elderly, the immunocompromised, and the unvaccinated or under-vaccinated — they are the ones that account for the vast majority of deaths due to COVID-19.” As hundreds perish daily, “thousands more are left behind, tormented by the loss.”
Masking is laughably less effective than vaccination, so outside of situations where someone can't be vaccinated, (like say, if I'm going into an assisted care facility or something) why are we bothering with this? I just don't get it.