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Comment by bugglebeetle | Hacker News Reader

People care because it impinges on the mass denial all of all the death and harm inflicted during the pandemic, as well as the ongoing dangers and unknowns of our new, post-COVID reality.

This isn’t uncommon in history, but it unfortunately tends to take a few cycles of mass death before humans adapt their culture and social behavior to the world as it exists (vs. how it was before or they wish it could be). We’re still early in this reality for COVID. It took decades for the reality of HIV/AIDS to change behavior around things like testing, condom usage, prophylactic drugs etc. Comparably, we’re in the like mid-1980s of COVID, even though it’s killed more people than HIV/AIDS did in the past 40+ years.

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Some of the more concerning research this year has been the immune dysfunction showing the same CD4/8 inversions and progression towards immune deficiency. Initially the goal was to look at the immune systems of Covid Long haulers but they had a hard time finding controls as a lot of the people who were apparently well were also developing immune issues. Both of the studies I read had to pay people who have never had Novid and put in substantial mitigations to ensure they didn't catch it to participate in the research.

This might not be all that dissimilar to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in impact on the sufferers other than the immune effects are showing up faster and its airborne and 95% of the population has had it. I sure hope it turns around at some point and it doesn't become C-AIDS, but it explains why Flu and RSV and sepsis et el are going crazy at the moment, immune systems are in bad shape.

Very few people are dying of COVID-19 anymore. There's no valid reason to change human culture and social behavior just because we now have five endemic coronaviruses instead of four.

I’m not sure why you think this. It’s on track to kill another 200K people this year. Before it’s emergence, this would’ve been considered quite bad for any other disease:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths...

It's on track to kill 200 thousand people this year in the United States alone. It's likely that millions will die this year worldwide, and tens of millions will become disabled to some extent by long covid. The usual response is "this is a small number compared to the total population," but it's still millions upon millions of people. Health care systems around the world are already stretched thin, and the increased burden caused by covid will only make things worse.

Completely agree. Compared to the response to other diseases that have killed far fewer people, its quite wild how much this has been normalized.

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