There's no way a collective can stay on alert for years.
My reaction was "well deaths are way down" but then I looked and we recently had a spike of deaths as big or larger than the initial wave.
So I think - if I'm being honest - it's as much a crisis as it ever was, we're just finding a way to live with it, no pun intended.
Part of the "crisis" feeling of the first wave was the unknown (and likely much higher) death count that could arrive if we didn't take action.
Now, though, you can have had up to four shots of vaccine and years of learning various mitigation efforts (masks, distancing, etc).
The risk profiles are totally different because of greater tools and information.
I remember when the only N95s you could get were counterfeit masks selling for $50 a mask.
1) Improved immunity (vax and/or recovery)
2) Improved treatment
3) Virus evolution
What else could it be (not rhetorical)?
As of a month ago, about 99% of their population has Covid antibodies. I doubt things are very different here.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Maybe. To me 800-1,000/day was in itself a crisis and pretty frightening. The fact that we didn't get to 2,000+/day is ... better? but in the moment of April 2020 there was plenty of imminent fear versus fear of worsening.
In fact, per the CDC Feb 1, 2022 was the deadliest single day, but if you went out into the world that day versus Feb 1, 2021, you'd experience two vastly different things.
The point isn’t to argue about who’s counter-factual is right or wrong, it’s impossible to say.
At this point everyone has taken a position as to whether the “mitigations” were ethical, legal, effective, or not. There’s no point discussing it anymore unless or until people in power try to re-impose them.
For USA though the excess deaths number is 17% so that model doesn't make sense at all. How many young people are dying from Covid in USA?
A significant proportion of people in the USA have problems with their blood sugar levels. North Americans eat too much, eat the wrong foods and don't exercise. They tend to suffer from blood-sugar disorders (which then cause cancer and, well, everything).
Blood-sugar disorders are so varied in their symptoms as to exhaust listing here. People so affected are best described metaphorically as "human shipwrecks". New York Times had an excellent series on diabetes years ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/nyregion/nyregionspecial5...
Skip to the section "Shortages and Shipwrecks", read it and weep: this was years before Covid and we had an epidemic that nobody was paying attention to. Covid is leaving and we still have a diabetes epidemic.
https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
I'm not even making a claim re: death rate, I'm taking GP's word for it.
I’m outside the DC halo, so I’m not sure what it’s like in MoCo. But here in Biden/Hogan country COVID is over. Even in the most progressive-leaning spaces which had been extremely careful with masking throughout the pandemic (school, church).
I think you're right. The phrase new normal has been batted around a lot since the pandemic began. Often it was used by people thinking masking and social distancing were going to be the new standard for being in public but now it's about living with the disease and accepting that hundreds of deaths every day is now normal.
I read somewhere that the definition of a pandemic being over is not when it's not dangerous anymore, it's when it stops being unpredictable.
Your initial reaction was correct, national deaths (and hospitalizations) are way down (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home). There may be localities that are near crisis, but this is a national poll.
The peak in February was the second worst in three Feb/Mar of the pandemic and had the highest single-day death count.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm