The public health system has been stood down, for political reasons.
The crisis isn't over... many of us suffered a fate worse than death, long covid. I'm one of a huge number of effectively disabled people yanked out of contributing to society in a fully productive manner. The estimates for how many of us there are vary wildly, but we're definitely a cost that hasn't been considered.
In the future, I suspect they'll look back and wonder how we missed the long term implications of this. The closest analogy of this disease is when the explorers from Europe brought a novel disease to the American continent. They weren't all wiped out in a year or two... it took decades. I fear we're in for a long term decrease in life expectancy as a result of the folly of setting the wrong goals in the initial response.
In the beginning, we could have made a far stronger effort at containment, with a goal of Covid zero. Going forward, we need to monitor for cases of Long Covid and other post-infection complications. We also need to implement a social support system for those affected.
Shifting our framing of healthcare from a source of profit, to a vital part of our national security, might not be a horrible idea either.
Disclaimer so I don't sound like a troll: I figure I had what appeared to be "long COVID". I got COVID in March 2020 and within 24 hours, went from very highly cardio fit to perma-tired with what felt like half the lung capacity[1] that, long story short, lasted almost a year and required a significant amount of self-rehabilitation[2] efforts on my part to fix. I seem to be doing mostly fine now.
Now...
I try not to get into discussions about COVID with people, because it's so fraught with politics and misinformation, but when I do it seems like most people I engage with on the topic of COVID claim they have long COVID. Hell, I try not to mention my own "long COVID" experience, but when I do, people are dubious about my claims.
So, how do you quantify those who are affected versus those who've just been inactive during the pandemic and are really out of shape?
> Shifting our framing of healthcare from a source of profit, to a vital part of our national security, might not be a horrible idea either.
This. Yes. 1000%. Treat Climate Change as a national security problem, too. Because it is.
1. Fluid, apparently, because I kept coughing that up for the next 8 months or so. Eventually, it cleared.
2. Very gradual cardio starting with quarter mile walks, pathetically enough. Also, deep breathing and diaphragm exercises.
The number of cases is the least interesting statistic, and almost certainly the most inaccurate. Anecdotally people who get symptoms don't bother to test because, why would you[3]? Most cases are no worse than a common cold.[4]
The really important numbers are hospitalizations, and deaths. And from a personal point of view, I'd like to know the vaccination status and comorbidity status of deaths. If you tell me some significant proportion of deaths are not-up-to-date vaccinated, or that some significant proportion have specific co-morbidities, then I can adjust (or not adjust) my behaviour accordingly.
Put another way, I'm aware of many people who have tested positive for covid [1], and been just fine. Many more who got some level of sick, but not sick enough to bother testing. It's been a while since I heard of a specific death. And I assume [2] that those who are dying are either unvacinated or have some other health condition. And thus I behave accordingly.
I feel like most people are now in the same boat - get vaccinated, or don't, its your choice. Live normally, or don't it's your choice. I'm getting on with life and around me I see others doing the same. I might catch it and die. I might get long covid. But I'm fully vaxed and boosted, so those risks are in proportion to all the other risks I take every day.
[3] tests cost money here. If you're not sick enough to even see a doctor, why spend money on a test. Just stay home like you would (should) for any cold/flu.
[4] yes, I'm aware of long covid. It's not like I'm going around licking sick people.
I'm also aware of TB, malaria, Yuppie flu, and a million other things. I'm aware of road accidents, but I still drive. Life is full of risk.
[1] I'm talking about post-vaccination time scales here, - not 2 years ago.
[2] who is dying is not being reported here. In the absence of data I assume whatever data suits my preferred naritive. I'm sure there's a group that assumes all deaths are caused by booster shots in 20 year old.
I agree with most of what you said but when you compare COVID to malaria (at least in the US) it’s a bit silly. Malaria kills ~5 a year, COVID has killed ~500,000 and had life-long impacts on many more.
Cases are up. Hospitalizations are up. Deaths were falling but have levelled off. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view?list_s... Scroll down to the map and see how much of the country has "high" rates of community transmission, meaning more than 100 new cases per 100,000 population in the last week.
If your news sources are not telling you about it, I recommend Violet Blue's Patreon (free), where she posts a roundup of covid news every Thursday. https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-65708396 It's detailed enough to feel informative, and infrequent enough that I don't feel like I'm drowning in bad news all week.
The CDC page you linked has graphs and stats of patients "with covid". I don't care much about that. I want to know hospitalizations FROM covid. Where can I get that?
If cases are up, and hospitalizations are trending up strongly, why do you think they are uncorrelated? You think covid suddenly got less dangerous, and something else started putting people in the hospital who happen to have covid?
It's almost a given that everyone on the planet will eventually catch Covid. Despite being fully vaccinated and being isolated for the most part, my entire family caught it in the Omicron surge. From what I can tell, hospitalisations and deaths are significantly lower compared to earlier the waves.
This is what living with Covid looks like. A small portion of the population will have at any given time but it won't be overly disruptive.
Since Omicron preventing infection has become almost impossible.
Vaccinations means that for most people this will be like a multi day bad hangover.
And for those who have pre existing conditions, there are medications that can help prevent them from getting seriously ill.
The vaccines are working great and we have great medication. What we need is to get more people vaccinated and make sure every doctor understands when and how to prescribe the medications we have (especially Paxlovid). The fact that so many people are dying while Paxlovid is sitting on the shelves is a tragedy.
I think it's a lot more localized. I read in the Violet Blue link posted elsewhere in thread that the "Bay Area was in a 5th wave" with "numbers higher than the Delta wave from summer 2021" and I couldn't reconcile that with the state-level numbers I had been seeing elsewhere... but then I drilled down into the county-level numbers and sure enough, for SF, Santa Clara, and Alameda, it's back up to August 2021 levels.
But if you look at the data for CA overall, you see a very different picture: yes, things are up, but they're at about 30% of last August. So the bay area trend gets lost in that.
Also, at-home tests are plentiful now, so I'm guessing that a large number of cases are not getting caught up in the reporting system.
(These run about 6 days earlier than test results, and are not impacted by at-home tests.)
So, yes, it's similar to the August surge, but that one barely hit South Bay.
Anecdotally, our kids are in school, so we get all the respiratory diseases. There's a non-Covid cold going around south bay right now that's worse than Omicron (assuming you're fully vaccinated and boosted.)
Hate to be that guy, but can such articles be unambiguously titled e.g. "Is the US in a silent Covid wave?"
The question is still interesting.
The assumption that all HN readership is US based isn't.
Maybe 99.9935 percent survival from infected unvaccinated people, with no long term consequence rate, or whatever it is today, is finally clicking and we can stop panicking? No? Not yet? Alright.
The crisis isn't over... many of us suffered a fate worse than death, long covid. I'm one of a huge number of effectively disabled people yanked out of contributing to society in a fully productive manner. The estimates for how many of us there are vary wildly, but we're definitely a cost that hasn't been considered.
In the future, I suspect they'll look back and wonder how we missed the long term implications of this. The closest analogy of this disease is when the explorers from Europe brought a novel disease to the American continent. They weren't all wiped out in a year or two... it took decades. I fear we're in for a long term decrease in life expectancy as a result of the folly of setting the wrong goals in the initial response.