Covid is back on the rise across America | Hacker News Reader

Covid is back on the rise across America

ktxs.com

41 pointsmgh282 comments

I thought it never left in the first place? It's public knowledge that vaccine do not prevent the spread. It great reduced the severity and death rate, but the spread is another topic. There is no true effective way to prevent the spread on large scale anyway. The logical conclusion is that we r living with COVID.

https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/ has nice graphs. Positivity is about twice as high as beginning of the year but deaths are waay down - nearly a quarter of year start and an all time low

one small detail, public testing is pretty much dead those days. Entire Santa Clara county had 1 testing location available (downtown San Jose). So positivity might be actually higher but people either don't go to test because they think that they have cold or because it's just not convenient compared to previous testing arrangements

"We are living with covid" is no more actionable an observation than "we are living." People often, and you seem to, mean it as just carry on as if it weren't there. But "living with covid" could well mean masking, universal healthcare, paid sick time, building code changes around air circulation, mandatory testing and time out of school or work when ill with it.

Or it could mean that we carry on as if we were living with the flu, like back in early 2019. I don't really understand the point of your comment. If you want to argue for better healthcare, paid sick time, etc etc, don't do it from a COVID-centric point of view, but instead focus on the benefits that would fall on everyone who is sick.

IMO the pandemic potential of flu is still more serious than the coronaviruses.

> "We are living with covid" is no more actionable an observation than "we are living."

Why does it have to be actionable?

Living with COVID with effective vaccines is totally different from without effective vaccines and ongoing extra death. Sorry what is your point?

Vaccines are only one preventative tool we can use. We are hardly even using them (what is it, ~17% of us even bothered to get the bivalent shot?)

All the other stuff (masking, airflow, quarantining, etc) are additional tools we could also choose to use, if we cared about extra death.

Well it could, but it shouldn’t. There is no rational reason to restrain society in such a drastic manner for unclear benefits.

Read the list of changes I'm talking about here. You're making kind of a "what if we made a better world for nothing" argument don't you think?

But was anyone with the power to enact these changes talking about them at all? I’ve read about these changes but only on blogs. If we go back into covid mode it’ll most likely just mean masks and lockdowns, which nobody wants.

Because these chnages are costly for the business interests those people mostly represent. They will have to be forced. But that's no reason to limit our political/public health imagination to the realm of "lockdowns or nothing."

Who said it left? It's gone up and down at various points in time.

Im referring to the title which says 'it's back'. How is it back if it never left?

The title says 'back on the rise', it was falling before, and now it's rising again. Almost as if it has seasonality like other respiratory disease.

"Don't call it a comeback, I been here for years"

> It is not confirmed as to why the covid cases are going up, but factors such as huge crowds, hot weather, and traveling may play a role.

That's odd, earlier it was often stated that hot weather decreased covid.

Warm weather gets people hanging out together more

Outside.

People hang out together regardless of weather.

People don't hang out outside very much in Texas at this time of year unless you're at a watering hole or pool.

Huge parts of the US where people are definitely not spending time outside because it’s too warm.

This is a good point. Nobody goes inside to avoid the heat in August.

Buried:

“Due to the changes in the CDC, it is not easy to track the rise of covid numbers.”

Reality there is complex. There actually many hospitals that are doing a lot of testing and publishing numbers. Many states have data publishing programs for all tests done there. And on top of this many municipalities are regularly testing sewage and publishing the results. So the CDC has to some extent fallen behind nationally, but there is quite a bit of information out there for those who seek it out.

How would you go about aggregating all that information into a single national number? Without the CDC setting some kind of standard on the data, it wouldn’t be possible to integrate them.

Do you think we need a national number?

In the past the virus seemed to come and go depending on localities smaller than the entire country, i.e. Florida in the summer, NY in the winter, etc. Also much of the mitigations were applied at the state level, not the national level.

How do you say whether COVID is up or down without a baseline? If only our local numbers are useful, what is the CDCs role in publicizing local ones when your city/state can do that just as well?

I guess we could make a distinction between tracking covid deaths, covid hospitalizations and covid infections.

It seems to have become a lot less practical to track infections, at any level. People substituted take-home tests for the more easily tracked lab tests, more people with immunity experience milder infections that go unreported, there are still asymptomatic infections, etc. People don't even bother with covid take home tests if they're just experiencing a sinus tickle or other cold symptoms.

The article mentioned changes at the CDC related to covid tracking, but didn't specify what changes. I'm under the impression they don't track all diseases all the time. Maybe covid is not enough of an actionable problem anymore for them to dedicate funding to tracking it the same way, especially now that it more difficult to track, and it's not as dangerous as it was. It's more of a known quantity now, like a lot of other endemic illnesses. Maybe they don't care about infections, if hospitalizations and deaths are within the expected range.

Does it even matter? If we had those numbers what would we do with them?

Purely anecdotal story, but I will share:

This week was the first time I have gotten COVID, and it hit me pretty hard. Admittedly I have not been especially careful in trying to prevent myself from getting it, so for a while I wondered if I only got it asymptomatically or if the vaccines (I got the OG one plus two boosters) were enough to not get a serious infection.

I sort of wonder if there was a mutation that has evaded the vaccines, and that is what is going around?

it almost certainly is mutated at least some to further evade the vaccine. by the time the vaccine came out, COVID had already mutated enough to reduce the effectiveness of the vaccine. Which is why the original predictions that it would keep you from getting or spreading COVID turned out to be overstated. That's not to say it doesn't reduce the chances, but it seems likely as the virus continues to mutate, the effectiveness will reduce until it gets updated.

Just had my third case a few weeks ago, and it was definitely of the "just a cold" level of severity. Then my roommate caught it (almost certainly from me) for his first case and had a real rough time, major fatigue and a day or two of some minor breathing issues.

We had a visitor from out of town - later discovered that the kid had Eris variant.

We had the Moderna booster - just the usual cold symptoms.

The virus is mutating but it is also losing its lethal nature.

> The virus is mutating but it is also losing its lethal nature.

In one of the first articles I read on covid, in Feb 2020, the experts stated that they expected this to become endemic, either like the other common cold coronaviruses, or something a bit worse like the flu [0]:

> I think there is a reasonable probability that this becomes the fifth community-acquired coronavirus... settling down to something like the other four coronaviruses.

> What we may be seeing “is the emergence of a new coronavirus … that could very well become another seasonal pathogen that causes pneumonia,” said infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota. It would be “more than a cold” and less than SARS: “The only other pathogen I can compare it to is seasonal influenza.”

This has probably happened before. The Russian Flu epidemic of 1889-1890. It looks like it was a coronavirus that jumped from cattle to people. That pandemic was one of the deadliest of that century. Now that same virus is one of our common cold bugs [1].

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_coronavirus_OC43

Let's hope people have learnt the lesson that masks don't work so we don't have to wear them this time.

Wearing masks outside is almost always pointless but in a hospital it is vital and they do work just not 100%.

Are you not going to use a condom because it doesn't work 100% of the time?

I mean let medical professionals wear them, sure.

But at the population level, there is no evidence they work. A better analogy than condoms would be "just pulling out" as a method of birth control.

During fire season, masking outside is my new norm.

Non-woven fabric surgical masks (with randomly oriented fibers) work (to some extent) as source control. They help reduce the risk that you will infect others, not that others will infect you. Properly fitted and worn FFP3 masks reduce the risk of the wearer becoming infected, but they are not a panacea, and "properly fitted and worn" is harder than you think. Cloth masks may provide a tiny bit of source control, but not nearly as much as a surgical mask, and they may even make things worse as they can cause large droplets to split into smaller droplets which are harder to filter and remain suspended in the air longer.

They might work in a lab but there is no evidence they are effective at a population level for all the reasons you cite plus having to wash your hands before you adjust it or touch your face in any way.

I've read old reports on the 1918-20 flu pandemic. They all noted that mask mandates had no apparent positive effect, so shouldn't be used "next time". It was that history US public officials had in mind when they initially resisted mask mandates. But the public pressure to enact tangible measures was too great. I don't see what could be done to avoid the same happening again.

"Something must be done. This is something, so it must be done."

Perhaps, but it's good to distinguish though between N95 masks and cloth masks.

The thing is n95s might work in a lab, but if you gave a million people n95 masks a lot of people wouldn't use them properly and follow protocols about anti-baccing before touching your face etc.

You (generic you) might be the exception that uses them properly and stays uninfected but most of the population won't.

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