Agreed. But the sad state of the world now is that many are still trying to figure out how to score political points. The virus that hit us in March 2020 was bad, but it's not March 2020 anymore. We need to move on as a society.
Move on to what? Close doors at hospitals and deny help to those in need? What exactly is this place some people want to "move on to" exactly during a f*cking, unsolved pandemic?
Edit:
This also means unsolved to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjU6zwL_4GU
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-ra...
A small sample:
https://khn.org/news/article/ambulance-resources-911-demand-...
https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/news/2021/12/16/york-coun...
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2021/12/16/massachusett...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/health-care-workers-min...
https://www.wmur.com/article/new-hampshire-north-country-hos...
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2021/12/14/covid-sur...
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2021/12/15/covid-19-ov...
https://boston.cbslocal.com/2021/12/15/salem-massachusetts-h...
https://wsbt.com/news/local/memorial-hospital-overwhelmed-at...
> “Local public health workers are burnt out from nearly two years of round-the-clock contact tracing, a massive vaccination effort, nonstop demands for information and guidance from businesses, residents and town governments, and the stress of having mask mandates become a local responsibility, and much more,” Walker said.
This article is about health workers being exhausted for having to do things that they probably shouldn't be doing anymore now that vaccines have been generally available for almost a year and the latest variant is not more dangerous than the regular flu. Again, an argument that we need to move on.
After skimming the first 3 it doesn't look like I should spend any time on the rest.
Vaccines have been generally available for almost a year. That doesn't mean that everyone that could get vaccinated has done so. There are plenty of counties in the US where the vaccination rate is still below 50%. There are even plenty of counties where the vaccination rate among those 65+ is below 50%.
You are right that health care workers should not have to be doing those things anymore--we should have been at 90+% vaccination rate pretty much everywhere in the US by mid-2021. But we aren't, and so they do have to keep doing those things.
And as long as that keeps happening we can't move on, because people need hospitals for things other than COVID. Even those of us in places with good vaccination rates can be affected because the places that are overwhelmed are transferring the overflow to places that aren't.
If you're willfully unvaccinated, society owes you nothing.
+: And IC people, which is effectively involuntarily unvaccinated.
I assume (based on other countries data) that we’re basically accelerating deaths in the 80+ year old group, heavily weighed to the sick. So basically same as the flu in 2018 when 100,000 Americans died.
If 5 years from now we see a dip in deaths we’ll know we didn’t kill of a segment of health in population but rather accelerated the deaths of the morbid elderly by a year or two.
Not to say those deaths aren’t tragic but it’s very different than 800,000 deaths of people j the prime of their lives.
Sauce: https://alltrendsonline.com/what-was-the-population-of-the-u...
Your argument framed relatively instead of absolutely: "COVID has only killed a third as many Americans as the Spanish flu"
Might also help to remember that NYC built 10,000 ICU beds in five days (that were never used). Our ability to surge hospital capacity is unparalleled. We put men on the moon, FFS.
This is not what people mean by "beds". It's adequate staffing ratios. In March 2020, there were few hotspots in the country and it's not at all comparable to the situation today.
Also, you're being very obtuse and deflective in this thread, bordering on misinformation.
What is an "unsolved" pandemic?
And what statistical features of endemic equilibrium do you view as sufficiently absent to judge that this pathogen is still pandemic rather than endemic?
I call this unsolved.