a friend who lives in Seattle visited over the holidays and then spent Christmas with his family in Minneapolis. everyone in the family tested every single day and suddenly almost everyone went from negative to positive... but only a couple had the mildest symptoms possible, the rest were entirely without symptoms. nobody got even as sick as I did the last time I caught a cold a few months ago! nevertheless my friend said they "all got covid," which is hard to square with seeing my multiple-comorbidities-having mother be the sickest she's been in the thirty years I've been alive, from having covid for ten miserable days straight back in 2020. obviously this is going to be an unpopular opinion but the cynic in me can't help but think that controlling the supply chain of tests (going from them being available everywhere to suddenly in-demand and available nowhere to now suddenly easy to obtain again) is being used as a means of controlling the current number of "cases" reported, making the pandemic seem like it's still ongoing and deadly and terrible when it's kind of pretty much over in reality, and has been for awhile now, at least out here (maybe major population centers are different, I have no idea).