I want to ask you this in good faith-- at what point do you think we can "stop worrying" about covid? Is there a particular statistical benchmark or qualitative indicator that you believe will show the covid pandemic is over?
I'm curious because you've responded to multiple people pointing out that the death toll & long covid metrics are lower than ever essentially saying that isn't enough to stop caring. So in your view, what is?
The benchmarks professionals have listed throughout the pandemic have yet to be met. If we could hit a single one, that would sure be nice. I'd stop worrying about covid if we could hit about 20,000 infections a week during a seasonal peak with reasonalble vaccine uptake (~70ÙȘ or higher) of a vaccine that provides both mucosal and sterilizing immunity at reasonable levels. We're averaging around 20,000 infections a day in the 3-4 valleys we get a year right now, and that's without widespread wastewater testing from coast to coast and extremely low lab testing, so we know that those cases are an undercount. Not even 18% of Americans got the latest booster this fall, and the current vaccines neither induce mucosal immunity nor provide decent levels of sterilizing immunity (vaccinated people can act as unwitting asymptotic carriers of the virus) and (especially mRNA) vaccine efficacy drops rapidly after an antibody titre peak at around 2 months post vaccination. Current expert estimates for xmas day show us hitting more than 1,000,000 infections a day. A million infections a day would only take the national level into the CDC's new "medium" category. It's higher than both the Alpha and Beta waves. Of they were pandemic, so is this one. To act otherwise is to bury one's head in the sand and go "LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" and that is our current public health response. Even if covid's death rate remains ~1%, that's 1% of a minimum ~20,000 a day even when we're not in a peak. One in five of each of those cases will develop lingering viral disease that mirrors HIV in its viral persistence and immune damage. If any of these things I mentioned can be reasonalbly addressed and substantially lessened, and these waves stop happening globally every 2 to 4 months, we'll stop being in a pandemic. If the government stops stifling data collection and acting like public health is a personal choice, I'll relax just a bit, because then I could actually do a risk assessment and trust that my community has mitigations in place like air filtration, masked staff, daily tests for staff, etc.
The death toll isn't the only metric to look at, and those deaths shouldn't be dismissed just because we're no longer stuffing corpses into reefer trailers. Each infection is a threat to someone's life and health in the long term, and we're refusing to look at that reality and adapt. Ignorance and bluster are not a public health response, and y'all should be pissed that's what the government is doing, not going out for mimosas even though "I've had a 'really bad cold for 5 days'."
The effects are cumulative and ever growing. To act like those effects just dissappear or don't matter is eugenics.
