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Variants descended from the Spanish flu still infect and kill people but that pandemic is not ongoing. The point at which it made sense to accept even very mild disruptions to daily life due to COVID has passed and nearly everyone understands that.
Another fun fact: Old-style radiators were developed so you could have heat and open windows, b/c ventilation and pandemics: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/apartment-radiator-pandemi...
What we have in covid reality today is a continued world with covid existing and a ton of irreversible changes that covid time made to the world. But that's not denied when people say the pandemic is over.
Anyway I just hope those are not the replies from Google's managers. If it is, then I'm done considering Alphabet as my dream place to work at in the near future.
I was believing that they were the crowd most likely to be very learnt into the scientific details of how covid acts on the brain, how symptoms appear or not, how (little) vaccine influence transmission, and what long covid is according to the last research.
Last but not least, I thought they would be among the first to realize that the covid infection numbers are down for the only reason that testing and tracing have almost stopped altogether.
Here's a recent overview article in Nature on long COVID:
"At least 65 million individuals around the world have long COVID, based on a conservative estimated incidence of 10% of infected people and more than 651 million documented COVID-19 cases worldwide1; the number is likely much higher due to many undocumented cases. The incidence is estimated at 10–30% of non-hospitalized cases, 50–70% of hospitalized cases, and 10–12% of vaccinated cases."
"Hundreds of biomedical findings have been documented, with many patients experiencing dozens of symptoms across multiple organ systems. Long COVID encompasses multiple adverse outcomes, with common new-onset conditions including cardiovascular, thrombotic and cerebrovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and dysautonomia, especially postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). Symptoms can last for years, and particularly in cases of new-onset ME/CFS and dysautonomia are expected to be lifelong. With significant proportions of individuals with long COVID unable to return to work, the scale of newly disabled individuals is contributing to labour shortages. There are currently no validated effective treatments."
There's now a working definition of the symptoms that distinguish long COVID.[2] Imaging studies are matching up heart, lung, and brain damage with reported symptoms. It's becoming clearer what the damage is, and, over time, what heals and what doesn't.
People can get COVID over and over, sometimes with cumulative damage. Immunity from both vaccines and infections is only 3-18 months. What is this going to look like in five years?
And companies want to cram people into bullpens again.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2
[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-02/how-comm...
The pandemic is over for people who are fully vaccinated (and have likely already had Covid on top of that).
Vaccines do make us less likely to spread Covid to others, but the crucial part is that they protect us. It's good for the public if everyone is vaccinated, but it's not a vital component of keeping ourselves safe. It's not like masking, where we needed others to use masks.
As for the immunocompromised, all companies should make a policy to allow those people to work remotely forever.