No, President Biden, the pandemic is not over | Hacker News Reader

No, President Biden, the pandemic is not over

washingtonpost.com

7 pointshintymad5 comments

I’m not sure how this particular argument has to do with the status of a pandemic, which is based on some defined objective criteria, or so I suppose: When the official emergency ends, some 15 million will lose Medicaid coverage; the reason for a student loan repayment pause will end; the rationale for Trump-era border restrictions, still held in place by a court, will disappear. All this policy transition must not be done carelessly or hastily.

The pandemic isn't as well defined as you'd like to think. The WHO doesn't officially define it at all. They have a Public Health Emergency, and it happens when a panel of experts decides that there's a disease going around for which cooperative action can help.

It seems that what really happened was that this novel coronavirus became just like the common cold: endemic and benign.

It's often said there is "no cure for the common cold", and millions get it every year, but they don't close schools because of it. The common cold is also a coronavirus, that was probably quite novel around 100 years ago, but now the vast majority of people have enough immunity to it that the only variants that spread are benign.

The United States is still experiencing about 500 deaths a day from COVID-19. That will put it in the top 10 causes of deaths, which is certainly not true of the common cold. It may be endemic, but it is not benign.

We seem to have decided, collectively, that we're willing to live with that. That makes it no longer a Public Health Emergency, the term that the WHO uses. It's still a pandemic, in the sense that it's a transmissible disease causing widespread harm.

And it will continue to, mostly among the unvaccinated. (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...). Ideally, we'd continue to encourage people to get vaccinated rather than risk the "natural immunity" that has a nontrivial chance of killing them.

If President Biden is not authorized to articulate the policy and goals of the US government, who is?

Every time he says something and there's a week of "he didn't say that / he didn't mean that / it's Trump's fault so it doesn't matter" news coverage; I wonder: who is making these decisions then? Why can't we have that person come talk to the reporters directly?

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