Something funny is going on in a few states. In most states, as case rates decline, so do deaths, a few weeks later. In Florida. Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina, reported cases are way down, but reported deaths are climbing.
[1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&are...
Polling shows people are done with it.
Trust in the related institutions is at an all time low.
No politician is going to get in front of this bus.
> Everyone would still be done with it
Hospitalizations and deaths have been so low for so long that as soon as people stop paying attention, it is over. We've been out of the pandemic phase and crossed over into endemicity for most of a year. Time to get used to it.
Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020 [1], with much worse drops for minority populations (3 years for the latino population) and 10 years of progress of equalizing white and non-white life expectancies has been reversed.
Is this an acceptable steady state for society? I don't think it should be. This is all preventable and we otherwise spend lots of resources on improving these metrics.
What you are saying sounds like people being done with lung cancer and start smoking again.
We've not only decided that's an "acceptable steady state", but actively embraced it.
> Life expectancy in the US dropped by a year in 2020.
In other words: it dropped around 1/10th as much as the difference between today and 1970.
Do you think the average person in 1970 would have accepted 10x the invasiveness of the measures we've had for the last couple of years to reach parity, or were they just used to the "normal"?
You can argue that we should or shouldn't do something, but claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd.
Another way of putting it: We're back to where we were as recently as 2007.
Or, to put it another way: Life expectancy peaked in the US in 2014[2], while it kept rising in most peer countries. That certainly made the news, and something was being done about the root causes of that, but by and large it was being ignored politically.
Again, none of this is an argument for or against any particular COVID measures. I'm just pointing out that it's a particularly egregious case of historical blinders & end-of-history thinking to think that human beings as a species can't get used to the relatively small (in a historical context) rise in risk the world has seen in the last couple of years.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe... 2. https://thesoundingline.com/in-brief-us-life-expectancy-peak...
World war 2 lowered life expectancy by 3 years. Is 1.5 ok for COVID?
I’m not sure what you mean by that but nobody I know thinks it’s perfectly fine to have half a million people per year die unnecessarily.
> claiming that human beings aren't fine with perpetually dealing with this level of risk is rather absurd
People are dealing with those risks all the time. About ~90% of people were voluntarily wearing mask when I went grocery shopping earlier today. People had their seat belts on on the roads there. Their kids were in child seats even though it’s quite inconvenient to put them in there. We do lots of things to mitigate risks. Some of them are pure theater (letting the pilot go through airport security), others are really effective (having a co pilot in the cockpit).
People SHOULD update in light of new evidence. Right now I think I am quite safe from crime. If I get robbed twice next month, I will absolutely re-evaluate that statement.
That said, the most recent spike was vastly milder than previous spikes, so it would be extremely surprising to suddenly have The Worst Spike Ever
What you are saying is: "Society thinks it is now ok to have ~1000 deaths from this disease per day" as a steady state. The problem with that is that the health infrastructure to deal with this amount of disease on top of other seasonal diseases like influenza just isn't there in most places.
People being done with it will change again when tumor removal surgery and other procedures need to be postponed and general quality of life is suffering.
There is also the aspect that lots of people will still take precautions like not eating out in crowded indoor spaces when seasonal infection rates are high. This will change business environments in the long run, whether we like it or not.
Yes, but there are concrete reasons it didn't end: new variants showed up, and in the case of omicron in particular it was able to overwhelm resistance established by previous strains.
That can absolutely happen again, but increasing vaccination rates across the globe mean the odds of a new variant are lower.
deaths up because you can't not report a death
That's not to say those kinds of NPIs weren't very important at earlier phases of the pandemic.
Primary immunization with two doses of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 vaccine provided limited protection against symptomatic disease caused by the omicron variant. A BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 booster after either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 or BNT162b2 primary course substantially increased protection, but that protection waned over time. (Funded by the U.K. Health Security Agency.
Don’t get me wrong they oversold the vax. But what I quoted are the key words here. If Trump’s vaccines turn COVID into a literal cold for all but the most compromised of individuals… it works.
Note that immunocompromised people are still protected by vaccines and some are not even higher than average risk; maybe they need a second booster and that's all.
On social media I've noticed they all think they're going to die but that's because they get all their news from irony poisoned podcasters.