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Comment by morvita | Hacker News Reader

Given that the EU and US are both seeing around 100,000 new cases daily, no, I don't think the world has moved on.

In the US and Canada (can't speak to other countries), we've collectively agreed to pretend that COVID has just disappeared and return to normalcy because we're tired of dealing with it, but in spite of pretending it's gone away people are still getting sick and dying from this disease every day.

I caught COVID for the first time in July and my "mild" case knocked me out for five days. It was the sickest I've been in ten years and I'm a fit, healthy thirty-something.

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He didn't say covid disappeared. He says that he "moved on" aka thinks that covid is here to stay or at least we didn't found something to get rid of it in the near future.

I actually don't see anything in the OP's comment to indicate whether they are pretending COVID has gone away or accepted that it has become endemic, it's clear that we both interpreted their statement through our own biases.

If we take your more charitable interpretation, I still think it is fair to ask whether we are ok just accepting 100,000 new infections/day of a serious respiratory illness as a normal thing in the summer months, a time that we usually see lower infection rates for this type of illness. For every endemic disease, there is a number of infections that are considered acceptable and public health measures are taken to keep the real infection rates at or below that. I, for one, do not think 100,000 daily is an acceptable number of infections in the US and we should be speaking out to say so. We can collectively do more to bring that rate down, but we don't want to because we're tired of wearing masks on the bus and for some reason have tied protecting yourself personally to a political ideology. We can do better as a society and should be demanding as much from our leaders, not encouraging them to do less.

> we don't want to because we're tired of wearing masks on the bus and for some reason have tied protecting yourself personally to a political ideology.

This is so incredibly rude and dismissive. It's straight up bullying. It requires a serious amount of privilege to think people should hunker down in some kind of "new normal" like the die-hard zero covid people suggest.

Perhaps the vast majority of people are well aware of the actual risks of covid and have decided that there are thousands of problems in their life that have to to take priority over one single respiratory illness with a vaccine. To expect the entire world to live this kind of myopic covid-centric lifestyle for years on end with zero defined end-state is complete and utter nonsense. It is scary to me how long society managed to get fooled into playing along.

This might come as a shock to some of the more hard-core covid people but there exists millions of other problems in the world besides just COVID.

"Moved on" is an English idiom meaning "we don't think about it anymore". GP's interpretation was the correct one.

> a time that we usually see lower infection rates for this type of illness.

We're still mass-testing, which is drastically inflating the numbers compared to all other viruses, which we don't mass-test for. Nowhere near that many people are actually getting sick.

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