At work, no-one still checks customers at the entrance with thermometers, maintains at least 6 feet distant, wears masks, etc.
So…
Has the Center for Disease Control or some government entity stated…or implied…that the danger has dropped below some critical threshold regarding epidemiology?
Short version is it’s now like flu. It’s everywhere, it’s going to keep killing people everywhere, but as a society we’ve gotten used to it and accept those deaths and those disabilities as just part of the background noise. Same as car crashes and sunrises; it’s just something that happens that we can’t do anything about.
The CDC has already had 18% of its personnel fired by Trump. I wouldn’t consider it a reliable source of information for the foreseeable future, or assume that anything the government does has the intention of preventing diseases. We’re on our own.
As for COVID; the pandemic isn’t over, it’s just become the new normal. With other infectious diseases also expanding to pandemic status. In terms of disease America is rapidly becoming a 19th century country.
I think you mean “won’t” here. We certainly can, whether it’s justified or not.
It has sure made my life more difficult this past 6 months for sure.
Covid isn’t over and never will be. But it hasn’t been an epidemic for years. Just like how the Kansas Flu epidemic ended a century ago, but the flu is still around.
I meant can’t. Even with a fully functioning federal government.
The disease is now endemic, not pandemic. It is everywhere planetwide. There is no place of refuge. It cannot be eradicated. Just like flu. It can be ameliorated by vaccinations. If the public could be persuaded to stay home and isolate when sick (with [whatever]) the transmission of those [whatevers] would be reduced, but still not eliminated.
IMO COVID is not uniquely stoppable or uniquely unstoppable. From a contagions POV it’s now like all the rest of what afflicts humanity. It might be unusually able to create death and disability versus e.g. the common cold. But it’s just as unstoppable.
For sure the current criminal regime’s vandalism of CDC is unhelpful. But that’s US-only while COVID is planet-wide. Even perfect play by the Americans won’t do diddly to quash this disease. It’s here to stay for millennia.
It should be noted that covid is extremely good at spreading. All of those measures we were taking at the height of the pandemic? Those measures work on pretty much any contagious disease. And as a result, in the winters of 2021 and 2022, there was no flu season. Influenza, a disease we’ve been fighting against for centuries, lost the battle (though not the war) against those measures… but covid still spread. That’s actually impressive, in its way.
Seems like a useless dashboard. The US reports 2k deaths in the past 28 days (out of a world total of 2.3k). China+India report zero. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that their numbers are in fact zero or that the entire rest of the world adds up to 300 deaths in a month.
In fact I’d suggest from that that the US is nearly the only country still taking COVID seriously. Most of the rest of the world is likely just categorizing the deaths as generic “old person respiratory deaths” because it’s not worth bothering to test for it.
If that’s the case, then it’s not useless to gauge what’s happening here.
Though I expect that TrumpMuskCo will follow China’s example.
Or such medical hellscapes as… Australia.
At any rate, if the US figures are accurate, we have about 70 deaths/day due to COVID, as compared to ~8500/day total. So under a percent total, and probably many of those are in people with weakened systems that would have died of some other respiratory illness in relatively short order anyway.
Bolding mine. Some medical facilities near me still require that masks be worn. It’s either in San Mateo County or Santa Clara County. I can’t remember which.
So there are some places that still require masks.
At various times the local hospitals update their mask policy, based on the current Covid incident levels.
It’s almost like they use science to inform their decisions…
Even before covid, there were some medical facilities that required that masks be worn. It’s probably more of them now than it was then, but it’s not entirely new.
I know COVID is still around.
It has NOT BEEN ERADICADED.
In an earlier thread I learned that Spanish Flu was just an early strain of H1N1…which is still around.
But the Spanish Flu Pandemic has been “over” for a century now.
I guess where I’ve got questions is really the point when the vaccines were widely available and distributed fully.
Surely nobody realistically expected the world to continue masking and social distancing indefinitely? I mean, the vaccines were the end game- after that, it was always going to be another endemic disease like the flu or the other coronaviruses, right?
That is my non-professional but decently well-informed opinion too.
The original hope of “lock downs” and masking & distancing was that we could contain it to a small region of Earth, and it would quickly die out there for lack of new local victims to spread to. But that was mostly a hope, not a plan. The true spread of COVID was already far wider than anyone knew by the time the global alarm was sounded.
Regardless of whether it would starve out COVID to extinction, those actions would definitely save lives & reduce illness in the immediate term, so they were well-worth doing.
As to the longer term …
Imagine a world (or USA) where one of the outcomes of COVID was everybody had a renewed respect for how public health benefits them personally. The other person being vaccinated helps you, and you being vaccinated helps everyone around you. Every day. Imagine one of the consequences was legislation requiring all employers of every size to provide fully paid sick leave for all contagious diseases. And mandating that all employers immediately send home any employee seen to be suffering from a contagious disease. With real penalties on the employer for non-compliance. Imagine that, like Japan for decades before COVID, it became normal and expected in the USA that if you did have to leave home with a respiratory illness you wore a mask. Not to protect you, but to protect society. Imagine that people would glare at you and drag their kids away from you if you coughed or snuffled in a public place.
All those things could have happened. And would have significantly reduced the disease burden of COVID, flu, RSV, and the common cold. Both in 2020 and in every subsequent year into the far future.
Instead for essentially no-nothing contrarian “you can’t make me!” politics, we in the USA got the opposite outcome. Nothing pro-social; everything anti-social.
And we have now “vaccinated” our populace into being fully virulently anti-social and anti-public health now. And therefore also when the next pandemic rolls around. Which it certainly will. And all of this bad news is before we consider the impact of the trump/musk/rfk predations on the government and the health system.
Yes, the pandemic is over. And yes, various health agencies (WHO, CDC) declared that.
And yes, covid is now endemic, and continues to kill people. I had trouble finding the figures for flu and covid deaths the winter of 23-24, but the best i could find suggests covid remains more deadly than flu.
Many of the hospitals near me publish masking rules that vary based on local wastewater numbers and other indicators of the prevalence of respiratory infections. I just got an email the other day saying one local chain of hospitals was dropping their masking requirement as all of covid, flu, and RSV are below their actionable threshold. And the place i usually go requires patients with certain symptoms to mask.
But we’ve kinda reached steady state, with seasonal variation.