The Great Surrender: How We Gave Up and Let Covid Win
terribleminds.com
terribleminds.com
There are a group of people who seem to be completely unable to process any of this, and while the rest of the world has moved on, they maintain a deathgrip on the fear and apocalyptic visions from 18+ months ago. Adapting to changing reality and refusing to entertain histrionics isn't "surrender", its what we would expect.
However, the infection count has skyrocketed (even amongst the vaccinated), and the incidence of long-term negative health consequences for those infected is roughly the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated, months post recovery of initial infection.
There's a huge negative impact here that society has not yet realized.
Applies to the writer too. Blue collar workers aren't getting paid enough, they have to go to work, pay for their rents and such. And yes they get Covid. Not everyone is a fancy writer who can sit at home self-isolating for months or years and work from there. Poor people never have, never had a choice, you either lose your home, your job or you get Covid and get with it. That's it
And even then you'd have to consider the serious long-term health affects that a multi-year hard lockdown would have on people.
Evidence? The "long-term consequences" of an ICU stay are nothing to sneeze at.
No fuss from me about wearing a mask, but my risk calculus adjusts as a function of my situation, and my situation in january 2022 is not even close to what it was in march 2020.
It was obvious as early as April 2020 that the pipe dream of "contain and extinguish" was never going to come to pass, and that the only likely endgame was that SARS-CoV-2 or a variant of it would become endemic and relatively nonfatal. You cannot realistically eradicate a disease when you're infectious 48 hours before you're symptomatic, so you buckle down and hang tight until therapies and vaccines become available; then you get those things, deploy them at as wide a scale as you possibly can; then you ease up. We did, and we did, so now we are.
Covid response has been entirely 100% political. Medicine/Science was never involved.
The division of lockdown or not to lockdown, wearing masks, etc. These have all came down nearly perfectly along political lines in many countries. It shouldn't be like that at all. There should be lots of right-wingers who gladly wear a mask and get locked down. There should be lots of left-wingers who would not.
It was also not risk assessment. If you are under 50, the risk of covid was always known to be far less than the flu. Meanwhile people who were scared shitless of covid are also the cigar smoking, drunk driving, 100km/h in a 30km/h school zone type people.
I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with yellow journalism. The yellow journalists have convinced their filter bubble group that covid is far worse than it ever was considered to be.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
For unvaccinated hospitalization risk, 2% of Democrats responded correctly, compared with 16% of Republicans. In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19.
Let's put it more accurately. 98% of democrats answered wrong with higher risk than is in reality. There is a <1% chance of hospitalization with covid if you're unvaccinated.
It's all political and the political divide in the USA has never been wider.
I have a friend who works for a Rugby team where they're all vaccinated. They've had 6 or 7 athletes with covid in the last week or 2.
The football team I root for has everybody in the team and the staff fully vaccinated. The pre-season has just started with 5 players off with covid.
That implies it's not statistically inexistent like you said.
I concede that I am just inferring at this point though.
Just because it was feasible (which I question TBH) to go without a single symptom for years, doesn't mean that is the norm or a desired state. A cold every now and then is quite normal at least here in Australia and not something I'm overly concerned about.
"Suddenly all of them got COVID...", they must be behaving differently from people I know or be in drastically different situations as I do know people who have contracted COVID, but it's far from the norm.
> vs the very real (to my mind, and others) downsides of extended periods in lockdown.
We certainly don't have to, and this thread was never about that. We were discussing OP's idea that COVID is statistically inexistent for vaccinated people.
Long covid is a thing, and an autoimmune disease that negatively affects every organ in your body is not something that's good for anyone, even if you can answer no to "but did you DIE????"