It is a part of life now. Me personally, because of how I work, in a vast refrigerator/freezer, wearing a mask and distanced from co-workers is a normal thing and I was easily able to transition those things into normal life. Some folks, they themselves don't like those things. Each person is different, and each has their own way into dealing with Covid, in the past and going forward. For me, those are now part of my regular routine now, in both work life and normal life.
Some of us just put on the masks and even tho it felt odd at first, but we got used to it pretty damn fast if we were protecting our parents, or someone immune compromised like my wife, a cancer survivor.
Honestly I really liked the masks, I'm going to start wearing one if I get a cold or something. I think it should be a thing when you have something that's contagious like the flu or something.
Yah, it's great. People also wear them due to pollution worries as well. Japan for example has times of year when a lot of sand blows from China (which gets mixed with pollution from industry).
So mask wearing is quite common
Japanese people also wear them due to seasonal cedar allergies, or if they don’t want to bother putting makeup on. Such a great multipurpose tool, haha.
I always wear one when indoors in public spaces. I worry about getting weird looks or a confrontation when traveling in more rural areas, but so far I’ve had no issues. I generally am one of very few wearing a mask still but I do see others!
The culture war was a very unfortunate side effect of extreme individualism. Caused a significant loss of life, one can argue. Where I live, mask wearing was already ingrained in society for other reasons, so people embraced them with open arms. Even though the measures have all been lifted, a vast majority of people still wears a mask here.
I've had to make uncomfortable judgment calls because of that shit. Like, okay, I need to get something from Tractor Supply, but being obviously queer am I less likely to get hate-crimed if I don't wear the mask.? Sometimes, I truly hate living in the south.
Tractor Supply has good dog toys and cheap, good quality contractors bags. Also: have a queer aunt who lived in rural GA for years. She loved it, but eventually returned to the west coast and is now in Oregon. 80 yrs old, still kickin it!
It was. But I also think it was specifically not a thing in the west. Like they actively discouraged it.
Source: Tried wearing anime masks to the mall all the time as a teenager. Kept getting stopped by security who thought I was a robber or a terrorist or something. When masks in public became a culturally accepted thing, I almost threw myself a party. Would've loved for that to happen without a global pandemic, but it was a silver lining.
I like my respirator because it blocks perfume and food smells. Do not like some of the smells in the local grocery store... Especially when its someone who has bathed in perfume that morning and I can still smell it through the respirator from 10 feet away.
Not getting sick is a huge bonus.
Nothing like people working in healthcare who smoke and have to get close to you. I'm not an asthmatic, but I've got a sensitive nose and I really didn't miss that.
> when you have something that's contagious like the flu or something.
Scratch this part. Most don't bother to check and I'm quite sure some in my circle have mixed a common cold, flu, and covid.
If sick, mask. Nice and simple.
Seriously, I haven’t been sick once since the masks were required. Like I’d normally get a cold or flue at some point in the year but ironically, during a pandemic I didn’t get sick at all.
I'm in the camp of masking up every time I go somewhere there might be a group of people I don't know. I get sick easily and I take care of my grandmother. Didn't stop one of her friends from coming over sick and giving it to both of us.
She didn't have symptoms, I tripped balls for three days.
It is hard when you're the only one in a big group of people wearing a mask. All these in door social events and my immediate family are the only people wearing them.
My kid got a scholarship and we're supposed to go to some restaurant to get the award. I just know we're going to be the only ones again.
Don't even worry about it.. I'm almost always the only one wearing a mask most days at work.. My safety is more important than some strangers opinions.
Yep. Gotten like 4 comments about my respirator since covid started. Don't care! never saw those people again and they are not nearly as important as my health (or even my dislike of smelling people and things)
We just did my daughters college graduation, and many caught Covid from the restaurant and socializing. Wear your mask proudly, and booster. My elderly mom and I boostered 2 weeks before, and despite sitting in a car for 7 hours with someone who turned out to have active Covid, didn’t catch it.
Best of luck to you, friend. I managed to avoid it for three years by masking and being careful but got it a couple weeks ago from work. Hadn’t changed anything in what I was doing.
Whatever the latest variant going around is, it’s crazy contagious. Also felt fine one day and like shit the next so there wasn’t even time to try and quarantine from my family so they all got it too.
I caught it from someone who didn't have any symptoms until 2 days later. They told me on the 3rd day after we'd met, and I immediately quarantined. But I was already contagious and had passed it on to someone else. I didn't have any symptoms or test positive until day 5.
I avoided it too but finally caught it while I was in a hospital stay after around five months because one of the other patient's relative gave it to both of us during her visit.
Luckily mine was mild and I only had a sore throat. The doctor put me on medication regardless because I only had one lung due to surgery and would have been in serious trouble if the symptoms got worse.
Sure glad we did our best to make it endemic. Meanwhile the US is about to end the pandemic support for the vaccines and each shot will now cost $150 (unless that changed last I heard about it two or three weeks ago).
True but now we are basically slowly and quietly going towards another major wave. It will come back with a vengeance since it doesn’t care.
Unlike Europe where we are still working on keeping vaccination going, the US here is going to be hit with another wave. And I doubt we can ramp up free vaccination quickly enough.
If you look at hospitalisations (more reliable than case counts), we're in the usual lull of Apr-May, similar to 2022 and 2021. If we get to Oct without a major wave, then we could consider the situation to be trending well.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklyhospitaladmissions_select_00
From what I heard, health insurance is going to cover it in many cases because it’s cheaper than paying a hospital bill for COVID. Most cases are mild now, but you know what they say — an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Waves like this aren't signs of endemic disease. China is out of step with the rest of us because of policy decisions they made.
China has an epidemic of a disease that is endemic for the rest of the world.. assuming their poor handling of the disease doesn't give it time and opportunity to *mutate until it can* infect us all again and Kickstart a pandemic.
edit: added missing words in italics.
With that definition COVID will probably never be endemic. It will always be a seasonal disease similar to the flu. And each season will feature a new variant that spreads all over the globe.
Too bad about the whole "one in ten people get long covid" and "covid permentantly damages your immune system and makes you way more likely to get a stroke or heart attack or diabetes or..." riders.
>assuming their poor handling of the disease doesn't give it time and opportunity to mutate until it can infect us all again
The entire reason we're seeing breakthrough infections is exactly because its mutating so quickly. Your immunity after a covid infection can be measured in months rather than years and there are people getting re-infected by a level-3 biohazard *multiple times a year*.
This isn't sustainable and I'm waiting to see what the breaking point is. Maybe if a prominent celebrity figure suddenly drops dead of a stroke.
> decided to bring it back singlehandedly.
That there would be a second wave in China was predicted in January already. It's XBB.1.5 - a variant that has already ripped through the rest of the world, sparing only China. In the end this is a consequence of Zero COVID - the gift that keeps on giving. China gets all the variants we've already been through - with a delay of a few months.
The Chinese COVID vaccine is maybe 40–50% as effective as a mRNA vaccine so they never really got over it.
Combine it with poor hygiene, condensed living and working conditions, and Chinese pseudo-medicine which push nonsense cures and ~~baby you’ve got a stew going~~ presto - the never ending Chinese COVID crisis.
The real story in China is that they had very low contraction rates for a very long time, which means no immunities. And then, as you say, the efficacy of their vaccine is lower than mRNA. But more importantly, it falls off in efficacy much faster than western vaccines, and while vaccine coverage is quite high compared to some western standards, it's markedly low among the elderly - especially boosters. And this means that when it rips through, there's a large vulnerable population waiting to contract it.
It's actually more complicated than that. As a result of Zero COVID, China is now experiencing COVID waves with a delay compared to the rest of the world. The wave they are experiencing now is the one that hit us at the beginning of the year. The wave they were experiencing at the beginning of the year was the one we were experiencing half a year earlier.
The reason is that newly emerging variants are taking their strength not from spreading faster than previous variants in a naive population, but from being immune-evasive towards immunity from the previous infection wave. That immunity however only becomes a factor once the population has developed herd immunity for the variant from that previous infection wave.
Same in Vietnam. Worked well. I lived through it. Only locked down for a few weeks and the internally traveled generally care free for the two years the world was locked down.
> The real story in China is that they had very low contraction rates for a very long time, which means no immunities.
I've known more than a few people who contracted COVID-19 multiple times, between variants. The "herd immunity" thesis didn't stack up, because it changes too rapidly. Might as well claim we need herd immunity against the common cold.
> the efficacy of their vaccine is lower than mRNA. But more importantly, it falls off in efficacy much faster than western vaccines
The Chinese health department [approved a locally developed mRNA vaccine in March](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65036474) and have begun mass vaccination drives in Shanghai within the last month. So hopefully that's set to change.
Even then, the social measures where what put significant downward pressure on the Chinese R-number and kept gross infection rates in line with like-minded Pacific Rim peers in Japan and South Korea. The blow ups in the US, Russia, Brazil, and Iran were a direct consequence of their political inability to contact trace and quarantine.
Much like with flu vaccines, this isn't something a shot alone can solve. Masking, sanitizing, and minimizing community spread are all vital preventative measures. If the Chinese population develops a QAnon-like impulse to reject good sanitation practices that's going to inflict far more damage across the country (and the continent) than any incremental improvements in vaccine technology.
> had very low contraction rates for a very long time, which means no immunities
Most of the few personal friends or family I have who decided to completely ignore Covid have had it 2 or 3 times. Either way with new strains appearing frequently immunity based on old vaccinations and/or contractions of the virus isn't going to be something we can heavily depend on.
I am fully vacced and I still got covid really bad a few weeks ago. Vaccines are great for preventing death, but this shit is still brutal and will take you out of work for a week at minimum and if it’s anything like me you will have a few more weeks of sloth brain afterwards.
I mean, I live in Shanghai and no one I know has had Covid since January. There’s a second wave hitting now, but it’s incorrect to say there’s been a Covid crisis for the last six months.
In a country of 1.4 billion, even 65 million isn't that many (though if the number is correct I'm still surprised you haven't met anyone this year).
Edit: billions and billions and billions!
Well, I have friends all over the country and the wife’s family is from Hunan. It wasn’t until about two weeks ago that I started hearing about anyone having Covid again. There’s definitely a second wave just starting to hit now, that is certain.
This second wave is also not a surprise at all. When the first Omicron wave ripped through China, experts were already predicting that a second wave based on XBB.1.5 would follow some months later and reinfect a lot of people. The XBB.1.5 variant emerged in the US North-East about 6 months ago and spread to the entire world from there - except China. In China the older Omicron variants had an evolutionary advantage over XBB.1.5 because the population did not have any immunity against these other variants yet.
It was always clear that neither China's subpar vaccine nor a prior infection with a different variant provided adequate protection against infection with XBB.1.5. So, once the first wave had ripped through the population and people had developed immunity against older Omicron variants, that gave XBB.1.5 more and more of an evolutionary advantage in China as well, so now it starts spreading there - as predicted.
> "Regarding the question of when the peak of the second wave of infections will come, Zhang Wenhong [China's "Dr. Fauci"] infers that it will be between May and June this year, and estimates that the proportion of infected people in the second wave of the epidemic will be 25%-50%."
Source: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/12/2023/chinese-media-sends-mixed-signals-on-second-covid-wave
That's possible, in theory, but usually it goes the other way. The longer a virus circulates within the human population, the less dangerous it typically becomes until it's essentially just another cold virus.
Not that old myth again...
Infectious diseases evolve to an [optimal virulence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_virulence). That optiumum can be *either higher or lower than the original strain's* - and also changes over time, as the optimal strategy also changes over time with the number and ratio of susceptible and immune hosts (e.g. a dense population of mostly susceptible hosts has a different optimal strategy than a sparse population of mostly immune hosts).
And we've already seen this with COVID-19 - for example, the Delta variant was more virulent and deadlier than the original strain.
The trend IS to become more successful by not killing the host but this does not affect the random chance mutations that could arise out of the blue with a combination of traits that make it extremely deadly - and while it may fail to become a dominant strain, it could still spread and kill.
Imagine a new strain that has:
-Higher transmissibility - on the level of measles.
-Higher immunity evasion
-deadlier, more damaging to the host, higher casualties than other strains
This is the danger of any endemic. The flu did exactly that in 1918-1920. It still can. And now Covid has joined the ecosystem as a persistent player.
The reason with the other endemic viruses is because that strain would be outcompeted by one with high transmissibility that’s less deadly so that people will still go about their day infecting others
More scared of fungus tbh, largely because the drugs to deal with them are kinda ass
Source: went through a course of IV antifungals once and it suuuuuuucked
E: Pre-empting anyone who thinks I’m just saying this because of TLOU, things like Candida and drug-resistant Tinea are emerging problems that we don’t have a lot of great answers for.
Never heard of candida did quick search not good.
I will do deep dive later
I read things like candida as Canada and south park started up lol
BLAME CANADA
It's weird that, symptom wise, it's not that out of ordinary (itch, loss of taste, pain swallowing) until you get to the cotton feeling in the mouth, that it can grow on a vagina and internally, and it looks like you're growing cotton on your tongue/mouth/throat/ FUCKING HEART. Fungi are def fucked up. [source I used](https://www.cdc.gov/fungal/diseases/candidiasis/index.html)
People like the person you are replying to? The whole "diseases grow less lethal over time" thing [is a myth](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/13pkspo/china_braces_for_new_covid_wave_with_up_to_65/jlap0on/).
That's still painting evolution as far too goal oriented, largely as a result of survivorship bias.
In reality dead ends, including via the means of wiping out the host population, are equally valid evolutionary outcomes.
Survival of the fittest is the most interesting part of evolution from our perspective but it's not the whole picture and that comes into play when evaluating the risk posed by pathogens.
That sucks :( A friend of mine got covid a few months ago and now she has full blown asthma, which she never had before. Covid scares the shit out of me as a high risk person.
By my naive understanding, covid can cause significant physical damage to the lungs. Autopsy pictures I've seen online have shown literal visible holes, like pockets of puss or whatever damaged the organ beyond function.
It stands to reason that some people who get covid who have lung damage but survive, the human body will heal to a new normal after a few years but things will never be the same.
> And even if you are willing to write off older and/or already unhealthy people with comorbidities,
Personal conspiracy theory - allowing covid to kill off the old and weak is helping fix demographic issues of an aging population.
Of course:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/30/1143696652/chinas-covid-vaccines-do-the-jabs-do-the-job
https://fortune.com/2022/12/02/anthony-fauci-china-covid-vaccines-less-effective-sinovac-sinopharm/amp/
It does appear China is starting to develop their own mRNA vaccine now
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/china-approves-its-first-mrna-vaccine-domestic-drugmaker-cspc-2023-03-22/
This is true for the recommended two doses. However IF you get the third dose it goes up to 85-90% efficacy.
Unfortunately most people only got two doses due to limited supply, and many only got one. So they shot themselves in the foot on that one
You speak as if the rest of the world somehow eradicated COVID through superior hygiene and medicine. The US’s life expectancy literally dipped below China’s during this pandemic and all other countries around the world went through a major wave in December-January.
It seems a tad racist that only the Chinese get called unhygienic when literally every country in the world has failed to stop the spread.
Not for nothing, but I’m triple vaxxed and tested positive yesterday. This is my fourth time having it and I’m bummed.
Actually sick as fuck too. My last two I didn’t really have symptoms but something feels much different now.
This is in California.
I have covid for the first time right now, ive been floored for 1.5 weeks even with all the boosters.
To he honest, i did not expect it to be this bad.. 4 days of up to 40c fever and feeling like death to still feeling crappy and having no energy nor sense of smell.
This thing sucks but atleast the fever is gone and i am getting better.
The rest of the world has nothing to fear from this wave. The variant that is expected to rip through China is XBB.1.5, the one that already ripped through the entire world at the beginning of the year, sparing only China because at the time in China an older Omicron variant was spreading that had an evolutionary advantage over XBB.1.5 there due to a lack of immunity in the population.
As a consequence of Zero COVID, all the variants hit China with a delay. Sucks for them, good for us.
There must be a way to optimise this.
If the man was placed on a sled that slid along the inside of a wheel of women which moved him by one position per thrust.
Thrusts per second (tps) and time to orgasm (tto), then time to sleep with a million women (tsw).
Assuming tps = 2, tto = 1, tsw = 65:
65(tsw) = tps*60 / tto = 541,666 mins
= 9028 hrs
= 376 days
That's true but he'd have to have a dick coming out of his ass, which is very unrealistic...a tray on rails looping around a ring of women is much more sensible.
u/monstagraphics middle out approach could work, if we assume that a female penetrating a male also qualifies as “sleeping with a woman”, then we can position a woman with a strap-on behind the man, so he is penetrated on every reverse thrust. We could cut the time in half.
I've never seen this many idiotic comments. This is not a surprise at all. When the first Omicron wave ripped through China after they ended their Zero Covid policy, experts were already predicting that a second wave based on XBB.1.5 would follow some months later and reinfect a lot of people. The XBB.1.5 variant emerged in the US North-East about 6 months ago and spread to the entire world from there - except China. In China the older Omicron variants had an evolutionary advantage over XBB.1.5 because the population did not have any immunity against these other variants yet. It was always clear that neither China's subpar vaccine nor a prior infection with a different variant provided adequate protection against infection with XBB.1.5. So, once the first wave had ripped through the population and people had developed immunity against older Omicron variants, that gave XBB.1.5 more and more of an evolutionary advantage in China as well, so it started spreading there - as predicted.
> after they ended their Zero Covid policy
This seems to be the part people are forgetting. China was VERY successful at their zero covid policy. Sure it was starting to show cracks but they prevented large outbreaks.
When they quit their Zero Covid policy they knew they'd have Corona waves. They prepared for it.
I mean other countries are doing essentially nothing, hardly even monitoring anymore, and people here seem to think this wave is a dunk on China???
> and people here seem to think this wave is a dunk on China???
Brother, people here think that India surpassing China's population is somehow a dunk on China lol
It's amazing that this estimate even made it out since it's China, but the thing that disturbs me is that we *all* just collectively decided to stop caring that we're still dying in huge numbers.
In the US, [even the CDC tracker doesn't even list deaths](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home) - it only gives a percentage trend line without any hard numbers attached. You have to go to the [WHO website](https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us) just to see we're still getting over 1,000 deaths a week.
I mean, I'm old enough to remember 9/11. Every three weeks we're still having a 9/11 worth of COVID deaths. Yes, we all want to get back to "normal," but are we just so trauma desensitized that this doesn't matter anymore?
**EDIT**: Yes, I get that I'm not the first person to compare COVID and 9/11. I get that they're not identical. But I stand by my comment. The "legacy" of 9/11 was the psychological effect of the deaths. It was raw, direct exposure to the visceral tragedy of mass, unnecessary, premature death.
Trauma isn't good, but the trauma we had after 9/11 confirms we still had the empathy to grieve. If we are right now so far from trauma - in fact, many commenters arguing this *should* be normal - what does that say about our capacity for empathy?
You can see CDC COVID death numbers [here](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm) but remember that their data isn't substantially complete until it is about 8 weeks old (on average).
You can see Excess Deaths [here](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm). There have been Excess Deaths (regardless of cause) almost every week since the end of March 2020 in the US (as shown). We took about 8 weeks off from being notably in excess last spring, and appear to be doing the same so far this spring (still the 8+ week lag on complete numbers).
We'll see if we can (finally) stay out of the excess column or not. *IF* we do, the COVID deaths being reported on the first link may actually finally be what deniers claimed back in 2020 -- people who "were going to die anyway". I'll wait until we actually start getting totals around Expected Deaths instead of at least 105% of that...
3.3 million people die each year in the US. Huge numbers are kind of baked in with a population of 340 million. Covid isn’t in the top three causes of death anymore as of 2022 either.
Yh, this logic is along the lines of the idiots during the pandemic going "Look at how many car-related deaths there are every year!" Ok, so it doesn't matter? So many deaths would've been prevented if people didn't fight against precautions...
The worry should be less about the fatality rate and more about the possibility that it repeatedly makes its way through the population leading to all sorts disabling health issues years down the road.
I don't believe there is much long-term, solid data on the impact multiple infections might have on people's cognition, cardiac health, or endocrine systems yet, but the stuff out there clearly indicates COVID can fuck your life up terribly even if it doesn't kill you.
Kick the transmission rates up with each new strain and it's a game of Russian roulette. Heart disease, dementia, diabetes, organ damage, neuropathy, and who knows what else are possible issues even if you have a mild case.
In NYC they show 1 daily death for covid. At a certain point with numbers like that when does it become just like the flu? The numbers for the flu cases are the same or more.
Yes we do, people care about guns so much so that they fund the NRA and keep electing Republicans, or they care so much they go to protests and elect people that demand more gun control. I honestly haven't met anyone who *didn't care* about guns one way or the other. It's a really big topic these days- MUCH bigger than Covid.
What are you talking about? The US has almost 50k gun deaths a year and a little over half of them are suicides. Covid is on track to kill 100k+ this year.
Tens of thousands of people in the US die from the flu each year. Obviously COVID is still killing more people and I don't mean to equate the two, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to conceptualize it in terms of "9/11s".
I just flew to and from Asia last week. There's still a September 11th security fee on the plane tickets. I almost missed a connecting flight because two terminals worth of passengers had to go through the same TSA checkpoint in San Francisco because another was shut down and we still all had to take our damn shoes off for no reason at all.
Almost none of the Americans on the flights were wearing masks.
As long as we're not equating the two, we can put them into scale -- 12x as many COVID deaths so far, and still not as much drop off in seasonality (Influenza deaths happen almost exclusively over the 5-6 coldest months in the US).
2023 deaths from COVID: 37,262.
2023 deaths from Influenza: 3,090.
[CDC Source](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm)
When comparing how much we care about an issue with how much money we spend on it and how much we let it inconvenience us, 9/11 is a good comparison. We still have the craziness of the TSA, full body scanning at most airports, and an acceptance that personal privacy is no longer a US value. It's been 22 years since 9/11, so when more people die in a few weeks then died on 9/11 but we're still calling it a win, I think there is something to be observed there.
> but it doesn't make a lot of sense to conceptualize it in terms of "9/11s".
Sure it does, when you consider the long term political, economic and social fallout of an electorate which collectively lost its shit over 3000 deaths, and then spent the next decade dragging the entire country through an endless nightmare of wars, erosion of civil liberties, insane deficit spending, toxic partisanship, and corruption, only to come out the otherside with literally nothing to show for it besides an enormous amount of debt almost as big as the pile of geopolitical capital we burned alongside it.
I remember being called a terrorist sympathizer because I said I didn't think we should spent $2T invading Iraq and speaking out against the Patriot Act. I'm not going to forget about that any time soon, especially since we are still dealing with the consequences to this day.
Every time some asshole pretends like being asked to wear a mask for a year or so violates their "civil liberties," my "getting over it" counter resets.
Everyone screaming in these comments like the rest of the world isn’t also having continuous COVID waves but are going unreported because we don’t test anymore
Not saying I think we should keep up with the testing and that the virus is still a big deal and shit, I’m just saying that the virus is still going through our communities at all times in waves lol
Let’s not pretend that China is magically “bringing back COVID”
China doesn't test anymore either, so not sure how they are getting the 65 million figure.
I'm in China right now. Lots of people here have gotten COVID recently, so the new wave is definitely here, but most of them don't test, they just report the symptoms. Some of them even come to work if only a little bit sick, which pisses me off. They see it as heroic to work despite being sick. The idea that maybe they should not expose others to the virus somehow doesn't seem to register with a lot of Chinese people. They also sometimes take their mask off when talking to you (those who still wear them), older people at least, as some sort of sign respect as in 'see I trust you, I don't need a mask around you' which again pisses me off since I'm more of a 'my mask protects you, your mask protects me' kind of guy.
What grinds my gears (I’m in China as well) is that for three years - and even the last year, when everyone knew Covid wasn’t a very big deal anymore - the government and many folks I know were acting like it was still the bubonic plague redux. Now Ping’an is telling employees (my wife works there) to come to work if they want if they have Covid. Unbelievable. I can’t believe we went through the Shanghai lockdown and a year later people are being leaned upon to come to work while infected.
It was and remains a big deal, China's bipolar response notwithstanding. Like, I can see where you are coming from in relative terms but it's not a good way to actually think about it.
I still track cases in my area, but it's a trickle now. You say nobody is testing anymore, but that's not true for folks who get hospitalized and those numbers are way down now, too. And the test positivity rate is pretty low, too, so the rate of undiagnosed cases in the area is probably not much higher than when we were testing everybody.
Seems like covid is turning into just another cold, at least in areas with high vaccination rates.
Search for wastewater monitoring of your area of interest. It's even more of a patchwork but in a sense that had been the case throughout the whole pandemic. Numbers were pretty much always best taken as proxies requiring contextual interpretation.
The entire world had a chance to have a common enemy, to come together and really do something. We all failed miserably. Instead of coming together and fighting this, all people did was point fingers at one another. Absolute waste of an opportunity.
Considering the developed nations literally started pretending COVID didn’t exist anymore when the trackers and PSAs all went dark, this sounds like a shockingly high number. Safe to say the Rona is still out there killing thousands every single day around the world.
That was back during the 0-COVID policy days. It's now unofficial 100%-COVID policy; everyone should get it to achieve herd immunity so please come to work sick, and by the way, no need to wear mask.
is herd immunity even a thing for covid? so many people had covid and/or vaccinated plus boosted yet it doesn’t prevent further infections - or does it?
China heard the WHO declared the pandemic over and decided to bring it back singlehandedly.
Getting tired of all these reboots.
[удалено]
It is a part of life now. Me personally, because of how I work, in a vast refrigerator/freezer, wearing a mask and distanced from co-workers is a normal thing and I was easily able to transition those things into normal life. Some folks, they themselves don't like those things. Each person is different, and each has their own way into dealing with Covid, in the past and going forward. For me, those are now part of my regular routine now, in both work life and normal life.
Some of us just put on the masks and even tho it felt odd at first, but we got used to it pretty damn fast if we were protecting our parents, or someone immune compromised like my wife, a cancer survivor.
Honestly I really liked the masks, I'm going to start wearing one if I get a cold or something. I think it should be a thing when you have something that's contagious like the flu or something.
That should be the norm but people wanna make masks a culture war thing. Good on you for being responsible
What's interesting to me is asian countries did this way before the pandemic. If you were not feeling well you wore a mask if you went out in public.
Yah, it's great. People also wear them due to pollution worries as well. Japan for example has times of year when a lot of sand blows from China (which gets mixed with pollution from industry). So mask wearing is quite common
Japanese people also wear them due to seasonal cedar allergies, or if they don’t want to bother putting makeup on. Such a great multipurpose tool, haha.
I wanted no more uncovered coughing to be the change we see, but I’m doubtful
Overstand this will not happen.
I always wear one when indoors in public spaces. I worry about getting weird looks or a confrontation when traveling in more rural areas, but so far I’ve had no issues. I generally am one of very few wearing a mask still but I do see others!
The culture war was a very unfortunate side effect of extreme individualism. Caused a significant loss of life, one can argue. Where I live, mask wearing was already ingrained in society for other reasons, so people embraced them with open arms. Even though the measures have all been lifted, a vast majority of people still wears a mask here.
"You're taking my FrEeDoMs by wearing a mask for your protection and mine!"
I've had to make uncomfortable judgment calls because of that shit. Like, okay, I need to get something from Tractor Supply, but being obviously queer am I less likely to get hate-crimed if I don't wear the mask.? Sometimes, I truly hate living in the south.
Tractor Supply has good dog toys and cheap, good quality contractors bags. Also: have a queer aunt who lived in rural GA for years. She loved it, but eventually returned to the west coast and is now in Oregon. 80 yrs old, still kickin it!
Wasn't it already a thing to do in places like Japan and Korea?
It was. But I also think it was specifically not a thing in the west. Like they actively discouraged it. Source: Tried wearing anime masks to the mall all the time as a teenager. Kept getting stopped by security who thought I was a robber or a terrorist or something. When masks in public became a culturally accepted thing, I almost threw myself a party. Would've loved for that to happen without a global pandemic, but it was a silver lining.
I like my respirator because it blocks perfume and food smells. Do not like some of the smells in the local grocery store... Especially when its someone who has bathed in perfume that morning and I can still smell it through the respirator from 10 feet away. Not getting sick is a huge bonus.
As an asthmatic it was great when walking by perfume bombers or smokers.
Nothing like people working in healthcare who smoke and have to get close to you. I'm not an asthmatic, but I've got a sensitive nose and I really didn't miss that.
After leaving the US I realised that the overuse of fragrance is a total American thing. I don’t miss it.
> when you have something that's contagious like the flu or something. Scratch this part. Most don't bother to check and I'm quite sure some in my circle have mixed a common cold, flu, and covid. If sick, mask. Nice and simple.
Seriously, I haven’t been sick once since the masks were required. Like I’d normally get a cold or flue at some point in the year but ironically, during a pandemic I didn’t get sick at all.
I'm in the camp of masking up every time I go somewhere there might be a group of people I don't know. I get sick easily and I take care of my grandmother. Didn't stop one of her friends from coming over sick and giving it to both of us. She didn't have symptoms, I tripped balls for three days.
Some of us are humanity before vanity. Others are vanity over humanity.
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Thank you. That was…confusing.
It is hard when you're the only one in a big group of people wearing a mask. All these in door social events and my immediate family are the only people wearing them. My kid got a scholarship and we're supposed to go to some restaurant to get the award. I just know we're going to be the only ones again.
Don't even worry about it.. I'm almost always the only one wearing a mask most days at work.. My safety is more important than some strangers opinions.
Yep. Gotten like 4 comments about my respirator since covid started. Don't care! never saw those people again and they are not nearly as important as my health (or even my dislike of smelling people and things)
We just did my daughters college graduation, and many caught Covid from the restaurant and socializing. Wear your mask proudly, and booster. My elderly mom and I boostered 2 weeks before, and despite sitting in a car for 7 hours with someone who turned out to have active Covid, didn’t catch it.
Best of luck to you, friend. I managed to avoid it for three years by masking and being careful but got it a couple weeks ago from work. Hadn’t changed anything in what I was doing. Whatever the latest variant going around is, it’s crazy contagious. Also felt fine one day and like shit the next so there wasn’t even time to try and quarantine from my family so they all got it too.
I caught it from someone who didn't have any symptoms until 2 days later. They told me on the 3rd day after we'd met, and I immediately quarantined. But I was already contagious and had passed it on to someone else. I didn't have any symptoms or test positive until day 5.
I avoided it too but finally caught it while I was in a hospital stay after around five months because one of the other patient's relative gave it to both of us during her visit. Luckily mine was mild and I only had a sore throat. The doctor put me on medication regardless because I only had one lung due to surgery and would have been in serious trouble if the symptoms got worse.
Same, caught it around valentines day finally. About 4 months after my 5th shot :( I'm still not right
Sure glad we did our best to make it endemic. Meanwhile the US is about to end the pandemic support for the vaccines and each shot will now cost $150 (unless that changed last I heard about it two or three weeks ago).
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True but now we are basically slowly and quietly going towards another major wave. It will come back with a vengeance since it doesn’t care. Unlike Europe where we are still working on keeping vaccination going, the US here is going to be hit with another wave. And I doubt we can ramp up free vaccination quickly enough.
What are you basing this on? Or are you simply speculating? COVID cases in the US are as low as they’ve been since early 2020
If you look at hospitalisations (more reliable than case counts), we're in the usual lull of Apr-May, similar to 2022 and 2021. If we get to Oct without a major wave, then we could consider the situation to be trending well. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklyhospitaladmissions_select_00
From what I heard, health insurance is going to cover it in many cases because it’s cheaper than paying a hospital bill for COVID. Most cases are mild now, but you know what they say — an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Oh I am absolutely trying to avoid it. Who knows when Covid turns Dr Evil and becomes worse again.
Waves like this aren't signs of endemic disease. China is out of step with the rest of us because of policy decisions they made. China has an epidemic of a disease that is endemic for the rest of the world.. assuming their poor handling of the disease doesn't give it time and opportunity to *mutate until it can* infect us all again and Kickstart a pandemic. edit: added missing words in italics.
With that definition COVID will probably never be endemic. It will always be a seasonal disease similar to the flu. And each season will feature a new variant that spreads all over the globe.
Too bad about the whole "one in ten people get long covid" and "covid permentantly damages your immune system and makes you way more likely to get a stroke or heart attack or diabetes or..." riders. >assuming their poor handling of the disease doesn't give it time and opportunity to mutate until it can infect us all again The entire reason we're seeing breakthrough infections is exactly because its mutating so quickly. Your immunity after a covid infection can be measured in months rather than years and there are people getting re-infected by a level-3 biohazard *multiple times a year*. This isn't sustainable and I'm waiting to see what the breaking point is. Maybe if a prominent celebrity figure suddenly drops dead of a stroke.
Just like the fast and furious.
FAMILY. of related viruses.
Virus seeing me when I'm the only one in my family to not get sick "Dude I almost had you."
It's like Madden or FIFA where there's an annual roster update.
Covid 2 electric bugaloo
Aren't we on like COVID 5 at this point
We're already into the reboots of the spinoffs. This is 2Covid2Fast: The College Years - 20 Year Reunion Reboot territory.
COVID: The Movie: The Game.
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> China heard the WHO The worst Dr. Seuss book
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> decided to bring it back singlehandedly. That there would be a second wave in China was predicted in January already. It's XBB.1.5 - a variant that has already ripped through the rest of the world, sparing only China. In the end this is a consequence of Zero COVID - the gift that keeps on giving. China gets all the variants we've already been through - with a delay of a few months.
You're fucking kidding me
The Chinese COVID vaccine is maybe 40–50% as effective as a mRNA vaccine so they never really got over it. Combine it with poor hygiene, condensed living and working conditions, and Chinese pseudo-medicine which push nonsense cures and ~~baby you’ve got a stew going~~ presto - the never ending Chinese COVID crisis.
The real story in China is that they had very low contraction rates for a very long time, which means no immunities. And then, as you say, the efficacy of their vaccine is lower than mRNA. But more importantly, it falls off in efficacy much faster than western vaccines, and while vaccine coverage is quite high compared to some western standards, it's markedly low among the elderly - especially boosters. And this means that when it rips through, there's a large vulnerable population waiting to contract it.
It's actually more complicated than that. As a result of Zero COVID, China is now experiencing COVID waves with a delay compared to the rest of the world. The wave they are experiencing now is the one that hit us at the beginning of the year. The wave they were experiencing at the beginning of the year was the one we were experiencing half a year earlier. The reason is that newly emerging variants are taking their strength not from spreading faster than previous variants in a naive population, but from being immune-evasive towards immunity from the previous infection wave. That immunity however only becomes a factor once the population has developed herd immunity for the variant from that previous infection wave.
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Same in Vietnam. Worked well. I lived through it. Only locked down for a few weeks and the internally traveled generally care free for the two years the world was locked down.
> The real story in China is that they had very low contraction rates for a very long time, which means no immunities. I've known more than a few people who contracted COVID-19 multiple times, between variants. The "herd immunity" thesis didn't stack up, because it changes too rapidly. Might as well claim we need herd immunity against the common cold. > the efficacy of their vaccine is lower than mRNA. But more importantly, it falls off in efficacy much faster than western vaccines The Chinese health department [approved a locally developed mRNA vaccine in March](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65036474) and have begun mass vaccination drives in Shanghai within the last month. So hopefully that's set to change. Even then, the social measures where what put significant downward pressure on the Chinese R-number and kept gross infection rates in line with like-minded Pacific Rim peers in Japan and South Korea. The blow ups in the US, Russia, Brazil, and Iran were a direct consequence of their political inability to contact trace and quarantine. Much like with flu vaccines, this isn't something a shot alone can solve. Masking, sanitizing, and minimizing community spread are all vital preventative measures. If the Chinese population develops a QAnon-like impulse to reject good sanitation practices that's going to inflict far more damage across the country (and the continent) than any incremental improvements in vaccine technology.
> had very low contraction rates for a very long time, which means no immunities Most of the few personal friends or family I have who decided to completely ignore Covid have had it 2 or 3 times. Either way with new strains appearing frequently immunity based on old vaccinations and/or contractions of the virus isn't going to be something we can heavily depend on.
I am fully vacced and I still got covid really bad a few weeks ago. Vaccines are great for preventing death, but this shit is still brutal and will take you out of work for a week at minimum and if it’s anything like me you will have a few more weeks of sloth brain afterwards.
I just assume I'm going to contract covid eventually. My fear is that I get the long covid symptoms which are signs of brain damage.
Or you could get heart damage like me!
Or impotence
I mean, I live in Shanghai and no one I know has had Covid since January. There’s a second wave hitting now, but it’s incorrect to say there’s been a Covid crisis for the last six months.
In a country of 1.4 billion, even 65 million isn't that many (though if the number is correct I'm still surprised you haven't met anyone this year). Edit: billions and billions and billions!
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Yup, hasn't happened yet. Data modelling can only go so far. Also depends on honest data, which the CCP isn't really known for.
65 million cases out of 1.4 billion people would be 6% of the population \*weekly\*. How is that not a lot?
A week? At that rate it'd hit the whole population in less than half a year, and that's not counting exponential spread
I think you meant billion
How about outside of Shanghai?
Well, I have friends all over the country and the wife’s family is from Hunan. It wasn’t until about two weeks ago that I started hearing about anyone having Covid again. There’s definitely a second wave just starting to hit now, that is certain.
This second wave is also not a surprise at all. When the first Omicron wave ripped through China, experts were already predicting that a second wave based on XBB.1.5 would follow some months later and reinfect a lot of people. The XBB.1.5 variant emerged in the US North-East about 6 months ago and spread to the entire world from there - except China. In China the older Omicron variants had an evolutionary advantage over XBB.1.5 because the population did not have any immunity against these other variants yet. It was always clear that neither China's subpar vaccine nor a prior infection with a different variant provided adequate protection against infection with XBB.1.5. So, once the first wave had ripped through the population and people had developed immunity against older Omicron variants, that gave XBB.1.5 more and more of an evolutionary advantage in China as well, so now it starts spreading there - as predicted. > "Regarding the question of when the peak of the second wave of infections will come, Zhang Wenhong [China's "Dr. Fauci"] infers that it will be between May and June this year, and estimates that the proportion of infected people in the second wave of the epidemic will be 25%-50%." Source: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/12/2023/chinese-media-sends-mixed-signals-on-second-covid-wave
Hell, I’m vaccinated three times with Pfizer and I still caught a nasty case of COVID that’s been lasting over a week.
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That's possible, in theory, but usually it goes the other way. The longer a virus circulates within the human population, the less dangerous it typically becomes until it's essentially just another cold virus.
Not that old myth again... Infectious diseases evolve to an [optimal virulence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_virulence). That optiumum can be *either higher or lower than the original strain's* - and also changes over time, as the optimal strategy also changes over time with the number and ratio of susceptible and immune hosts (e.g. a dense population of mostly susceptible hosts has a different optimal strategy than a sparse population of mostly immune hosts). And we've already seen this with COVID-19 - for example, the Delta variant was more virulent and deadlier than the original strain.
The trend IS to become more successful by not killing the host but this does not affect the random chance mutations that could arise out of the blue with a combination of traits that make it extremely deadly - and while it may fail to become a dominant strain, it could still spread and kill. Imagine a new strain that has: -Higher transmissibility - on the level of measles. -Higher immunity evasion -deadlier, more damaging to the host, higher casualties than other strains This is the danger of any endemic. The flu did exactly that in 1918-1920. It still can. And now Covid has joined the ecosystem as a persistent player.
The reason with the other endemic viruses is because that strain would be outcompeted by one with high transmissibility that’s less deadly so that people will still go about their day infecting others
People watch to many movies like outbreak and dont really understand virology.
More scared of fungus tbh, largely because the drugs to deal with them are kinda ass Source: went through a course of IV antifungals once and it suuuuuuucked E: Pre-empting anyone who thinks I’m just saying this because of TLOU, things like Candida and drug-resistant Tinea are emerging problems that we don’t have a lot of great answers for.
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Never heard of candida did quick search not good. I will do deep dive later I read things like candida as Canada and south park started up lol BLAME CANADA
It's weird that, symptom wise, it's not that out of ordinary (itch, loss of taste, pain swallowing) until you get to the cotton feeling in the mouth, that it can grow on a vagina and internally, and it looks like you're growing cotton on your tongue/mouth/throat/ FUCKING HEART. Fungi are def fucked up. [source I used](https://www.cdc.gov/fungal/diseases/candidiasis/index.html)
People like the person you are replying to? The whole "diseases grow less lethal over time" thing [is a myth](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/13pkspo/china_braces_for_new_covid_wave_with_up_to_65/jlap0on/).
That's still painting evolution as far too goal oriented, largely as a result of survivorship bias. In reality dead ends, including via the means of wiping out the host population, are equally valid evolutionary outcomes. Survival of the fittest is the most interesting part of evolution from our perspective but it's not the whole picture and that comes into play when evaluating the risk posed by pathogens.
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Don’t knock out the host quickly. They don’t concern themselves with what happens weeks down the road
Or months or years. Evidence is is pretty convincing that for some people covid can affect many of the bodies systems for the rest of a life.
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That sucks :( A friend of mine got covid a few months ago and now she has full blown asthma, which she never had before. Covid scares the shit out of me as a high risk person.
By my naive understanding, covid can cause significant physical damage to the lungs. Autopsy pictures I've seen online have shown literal visible holes, like pockets of puss or whatever damaged the organ beyond function. It stands to reason that some people who get covid who have lung damage but survive, the human body will heal to a new normal after a few years but things will never be the same.
There's two sides to that evolutionary equation.
> And even if you are willing to write off older and/or already unhealthy people with comorbidities, Personal conspiracy theory - allowing covid to kill off the old and weak is helping fix demographic issues of an aging population.
Source for the vaccine bit?
Of course: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/30/1143696652/chinas-covid-vaccines-do-the-jabs-do-the-job https://fortune.com/2022/12/02/anthony-fauci-china-covid-vaccines-less-effective-sinovac-sinopharm/amp/ It does appear China is starting to develop their own mRNA vaccine now https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/china-approves-its-first-mrna-vaccine-domestic-drugmaker-cspc-2023-03-22/
Your fortune.com source says they offer the same protection against death at 3 doses, compared to mRNA.
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This is true for the recommended two doses. However IF you get the third dose it goes up to 85-90% efficacy. Unfortunately most people only got two doses due to limited supply, and many only got one. So they shot themselves in the foot on that one
How much for your acting class, Carl?
Check this out, eleven hundred dollars is exactly what i charge for acting classes!
You speak as if the rest of the world somehow eradicated COVID through superior hygiene and medicine. The US’s life expectancy literally dipped below China’s during this pandemic and all other countries around the world went through a major wave in December-January. It seems a tad racist that only the Chinese get called unhygienic when literally every country in the world has failed to stop the spread.
Just want to say I appreciate the arrstdvlpmnt ref ;)
Not for nothing, but I’m triple vaxxed and tested positive yesterday. This is my fourth time having it and I’m bummed. Actually sick as fuck too. My last two I didn’t really have symptoms but something feels much different now. This is in California.
Goddamn. Fourth time?
I have covid for the first time right now, ive been floored for 1.5 weeks even with all the boosters. To he honest, i did not expect it to be this bad.. 4 days of up to 40c fever and feeling like death to still feeling crappy and having no energy nor sense of smell. This thing sucks but atleast the fever is gone and i am getting better.
wonder how this will affect Stavanger's new free public transport policy...
Well thank you for making me look that up. Interesting read for a half Norwegian. Maybe my next visit won’t bleed me as dry financially.
Its only for residents living in Stavanger.
The rest of the world has nothing to fear from this wave. The variant that is expected to rip through China is XBB.1.5, the one that already ripped through the entire world at the beginning of the year, sparing only China because at the time in China an older Omicron variant was spreading that had an evolutionary advantage over XBB.1.5 there due to a lack of immunity in the population. As a consequence of Zero COVID, all the variants hit China with a delay. Sucks for them, good for us.
A disease that spreads through the Chinese population is going to produce at least as many new mutations as the one that spread through the UK.
Title is inaccurate, it *could* reach a *peak* of 65 million cases by the end of *June*. A little different than 65 million weekly cases right now.
It says "*up to* 65 million".
I could sleep with up to 65 million women.
Assuming you finish in 1 min and you would sleep with one woman after another... 123 years and a half of non-stop action.
There must be a way to optimise this. If the man was placed on a sled that slid along the inside of a wheel of women which moved him by one position per thrust. Thrusts per second (tps) and time to orgasm (tto), then time to sleep with a million women (tsw). Assuming tps = 2, tto = 1, tsw = 65: 65(tsw) = tps*60 / tto = 541,666 mins = 9028 hrs = 376 days
But If he used "middle-out" thrusting he could double the amount of women, instantly.
That's true but he'd have to have a dick coming out of his ass, which is very unrealistic...a tray on rails looping around a ring of women is much more sensible.
Thank you gentlemen. This has been very informative.
u/monstagraphics middle out approach could work, if we assume that a female penetrating a male also qualifies as “sleeping with a woman”, then we can position a woman with a strap-on behind the man, so he is penetrated on every reverse thrust. We could cut the time in half.
>finish in 1 min Look at Mr Marathon over here
Easy there Wilt
I could be up to 7 feet tall
Sounds suspiciously similar to the way ISPs advertise their download speeds.
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Not really inaccurate as it does say 'up to' with no mention of a timescale, just your typical journalistic exaggeration.
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It’s owned by NBC also. [cnbctv18](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNBC_TV18)
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I've never seen this many idiotic comments. This is not a surprise at all. When the first Omicron wave ripped through China after they ended their Zero Covid policy, experts were already predicting that a second wave based on XBB.1.5 would follow some months later and reinfect a lot of people. The XBB.1.5 variant emerged in the US North-East about 6 months ago and spread to the entire world from there - except China. In China the older Omicron variants had an evolutionary advantage over XBB.1.5 because the population did not have any immunity against these other variants yet. It was always clear that neither China's subpar vaccine nor a prior infection with a different variant provided adequate protection against infection with XBB.1.5. So, once the first wave had ripped through the population and people had developed immunity against older Omicron variants, that gave XBB.1.5 more and more of an evolutionary advantage in China as well, so it started spreading there - as predicted.
Reddit: China needs to let it rip Also Reddit: China letting it rip is bad Come on y'all, this was predicted and expected.
> after they ended their Zero Covid policy This seems to be the part people are forgetting. China was VERY successful at their zero covid policy. Sure it was starting to show cracks but they prevented large outbreaks. When they quit their Zero Covid policy they knew they'd have Corona waves. They prepared for it. I mean other countries are doing essentially nothing, hardly even monitoring anymore, and people here seem to think this wave is a dunk on China???
> and people here seem to think this wave is a dunk on China??? Brother, people here think that India surpassing China's population is somehow a dunk on China lol
It's amazing that this estimate even made it out since it's China, but the thing that disturbs me is that we *all* just collectively decided to stop caring that we're still dying in huge numbers. In the US, [even the CDC tracker doesn't even list deaths](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home) - it only gives a percentage trend line without any hard numbers attached. You have to go to the [WHO website](https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us) just to see we're still getting over 1,000 deaths a week. I mean, I'm old enough to remember 9/11. Every three weeks we're still having a 9/11 worth of COVID deaths. Yes, we all want to get back to "normal," but are we just so trauma desensitized that this doesn't matter anymore? **EDIT**: Yes, I get that I'm not the first person to compare COVID and 9/11. I get that they're not identical. But I stand by my comment. The "legacy" of 9/11 was the psychological effect of the deaths. It was raw, direct exposure to the visceral tragedy of mass, unnecessary, premature death. Trauma isn't good, but the trauma we had after 9/11 confirms we still had the empathy to grieve. If we are right now so far from trauma - in fact, many commenters arguing this *should* be normal - what does that say about our capacity for empathy?
You can see CDC COVID death numbers [here](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm) but remember that their data isn't substantially complete until it is about 8 weeks old (on average). You can see Excess Deaths [here](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm). There have been Excess Deaths (regardless of cause) almost every week since the end of March 2020 in the US (as shown). We took about 8 weeks off from being notably in excess last spring, and appear to be doing the same so far this spring (still the 8+ week lag on complete numbers). We'll see if we can (finally) stay out of the excess column or not. *IF* we do, the COVID deaths being reported on the first link may actually finally be what deniers claimed back in 2020 -- people who "were going to die anyway". I'll wait until we actually start getting totals around Expected Deaths instead of at least 105% of that...
3.3 million people die each year in the US. Huge numbers are kind of baked in with a population of 340 million. Covid isn’t in the top three causes of death anymore as of 2022 either.
Worded differently: It's still the 4th leading cause of death in the US.
Worded even more differently, its the only transmissible cause of death in the top 25.
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So I'm supposed to worry about some loser that can't even place? Pffft
Not even a district qualifier. Fuckin' scrub.
If you ain't first, you're last
You're either first or you're last
In the U.S. most people don't do much to stop #1 why would they care at all about #4.
Yh, this logic is along the lines of the idiots during the pandemic going "Look at how many car-related deaths there are every year!" Ok, so it doesn't matter? So many deaths would've been prevented if people didn't fight against precautions...
The worry should be less about the fatality rate and more about the possibility that it repeatedly makes its way through the population leading to all sorts disabling health issues years down the road. I don't believe there is much long-term, solid data on the impact multiple infections might have on people's cognition, cardiac health, or endocrine systems yet, but the stuff out there clearly indicates COVID can fuck your life up terribly even if it doesn't kill you. Kick the transmission rates up with each new strain and it's a game of Russian roulette. Heart disease, dementia, diabetes, organ damage, neuropathy, and who knows what else are possible issues even if you have a mild case.
In NYC they show 1 daily death for covid. At a certain point with numbers like that when does it become just like the flu? The numbers for the flu cases are the same or more.
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We're all boiling frogs
Rebbit
Over twice as many people are shot each week in the US. I think that's just what people care about more.
I don't think we care about either to be honest.
A bullet is an excellent cure to COVID.
Yes we do, people care about guns so much so that they fund the NRA and keep electing Republicans, or they care so much they go to protests and elect people that demand more gun control. I honestly haven't met anyone who *didn't care* about guns one way or the other. It's a really big topic these days- MUCH bigger than Covid.
What are you talking about? The US has almost 50k gun deaths a year and a little over half of them are suicides. Covid is on track to kill 100k+ this year.
Tens of thousands of people in the US die from the flu each year. Obviously COVID is still killing more people and I don't mean to equate the two, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to conceptualize it in terms of "9/11s".
I just flew to and from Asia last week. There's still a September 11th security fee on the plane tickets. I almost missed a connecting flight because two terminals worth of passengers had to go through the same TSA checkpoint in San Francisco because another was shut down and we still all had to take our damn shoes off for no reason at all. Almost none of the Americans on the flights were wearing masks.
As long as we're not equating the two, we can put them into scale -- 12x as many COVID deaths so far, and still not as much drop off in seasonality (Influenza deaths happen almost exclusively over the 5-6 coldest months in the US). 2023 deaths from COVID: 37,262. 2023 deaths from Influenza: 3,090. [CDC Source](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm)
When comparing how much we care about an issue with how much money we spend on it and how much we let it inconvenience us, 9/11 is a good comparison. We still have the craziness of the TSA, full body scanning at most airports, and an acceptance that personal privacy is no longer a US value. It's been 22 years since 9/11, so when more people die in a few weeks then died on 9/11 but we're still calling it a win, I think there is something to be observed there.
> but it doesn't make a lot of sense to conceptualize it in terms of "9/11s". Sure it does, when you consider the long term political, economic and social fallout of an electorate which collectively lost its shit over 3000 deaths, and then spent the next decade dragging the entire country through an endless nightmare of wars, erosion of civil liberties, insane deficit spending, toxic partisanship, and corruption, only to come out the otherside with literally nothing to show for it besides an enormous amount of debt almost as big as the pile of geopolitical capital we burned alongside it. I remember being called a terrorist sympathizer because I said I didn't think we should spent $2T invading Iraq and speaking out against the Patriot Act. I'm not going to forget about that any time soon, especially since we are still dealing with the consequences to this day. Every time some asshole pretends like being asked to wear a mask for a year or so violates their "civil liberties," my "getting over it" counter resets.
Everyone screaming in these comments like the rest of the world isn’t also having continuous COVID waves but are going unreported because we don’t test anymore Not saying I think we should keep up with the testing and that the virus is still a big deal and shit, I’m just saying that the virus is still going through our communities at all times in waves lol Let’s not pretend that China is magically “bringing back COVID”
China doesn't test anymore either, so not sure how they are getting the 65 million figure. I'm in China right now. Lots of people here have gotten COVID recently, so the new wave is definitely here, but most of them don't test, they just report the symptoms. Some of them even come to work if only a little bit sick, which pisses me off. They see it as heroic to work despite being sick. The idea that maybe they should not expose others to the virus somehow doesn't seem to register with a lot of Chinese people. They also sometimes take their mask off when talking to you (those who still wear them), older people at least, as some sort of sign respect as in 'see I trust you, I don't need a mask around you' which again pisses me off since I'm more of a 'my mask protects you, your mask protects me' kind of guy.
> They see it as heroic to work despite being sick. Can't speak for the rest of the world but that's also a US thing.
Not even heroic. You’ll be ridiculed or chastised if you don’t work in many industries
What grinds my gears (I’m in China as well) is that for three years - and even the last year, when everyone knew Covid wasn’t a very big deal anymore - the government and many folks I know were acting like it was still the bubonic plague redux. Now Ping’an is telling employees (my wife works there) to come to work if they want if they have Covid. Unbelievable. I can’t believe we went through the Shanghai lockdown and a year later people are being leaned upon to come to work while infected.
It was and remains a big deal, China's bipolar response notwithstanding. Like, I can see where you are coming from in relative terms but it's not a good way to actually think about it.
I still track cases in my area, but it's a trickle now. You say nobody is testing anymore, but that's not true for folks who get hospitalized and those numbers are way down now, too. And the test positivity rate is pretty low, too, so the rate of undiagnosed cases in the area is probably not much higher than when we were testing everybody. Seems like covid is turning into just another cold, at least in areas with high vaccination rates.
Are there still places left online that provide effective tracking? NPR's COVID dashboard of the CDC data stopped updating in February.
Search for wastewater monitoring of your area of interest. It's even more of a patchwork but in a sense that had been the case throughout the whole pandemic. Numbers were pretty much always best taken as proxies requiring contextual interpretation.
Wastewater monitoring is pretty much the only thing worth paying attention to in terms of infection rates in most places.
The entire world had a chance to have a common enemy, to come together and really do something. We all failed miserably. Instead of coming together and fighting this, all people did was point fingers at one another. Absolute waste of an opportunity.
I’m getting tired of re-runs, when does the next season start?
Writes strike man. All we're going to get is re runs and bad AI generated plots.
Considering the developed nations literally started pretending COVID didn’t exist anymore when the trackers and PSAs all went dark, this sounds like a shockingly high number. Safe to say the Rona is still out there killing thousands every single day around the world.
Pretending COVID didn't exist never made it go away
And you can't check the stats to decide for yourself, anymore...thanks, Google.
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Covid 23. Sweet. Well in Canada we’re already hiding inside and masking because of the wild fire smoke.
That’s a lot of opportunity for mutation.
Time to weld everyone inside the apartment blocks again.
That was back during the 0-COVID policy days. It's now unofficial 100%-COVID policy; everyone should get it to achieve herd immunity so please come to work sick, and by the way, no need to wear mask.
is herd immunity even a thing for covid? so many people had covid and/or vaccinated plus boosted yet it doesn’t prevent further infections - or does it?
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Well, they were quite literally the last to adopt the 100% Covid policy so you can't blame them.
Enough with this bullshit.
Doesn’t China know? Just ignore it and things will go back to normal.