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Comment by KerrAvon | Hacker News Reader

This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.

edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible to have a hope of a return to normality. Death is not the only issue with COVID. Too fucking late now, but anyone who supported that is a quack and should have been stripped of their license.

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> The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.

SARS-CoV-2 is certainly with us to stay, so in that sense it's not over. But beyond that, I don't see how "we are so, so fucked" as you say. Covid is no doubt taking a small nibble out of life expectency, and yes there is some long Covid still taking its own nibble out of productivity and life satisfaction ... but it's not that big a part of the big picture. Covid is killing less than half as many people in the US at this point as lung cancer, and those deaths are overwhelmingly amongst the elderly. I don't want to be overtly callous, but knocking a few years of life off people well into retirement is hardly going to bring the country to its knees. There are essentially no Covid deaths among people under age 18, and among the working age population, cases requiring hospitalization or leading to long term debilitization are rare.

Those who suffer, of course, suffer. We shouldn't be unsupportive of them in their trials. But Covid as a public health crisis is largely over.

This isn't how the math works.

The reason why life expectancy is going down is because middle age people are dying. People dying in their 80s has almost no impact on life expectancy calculations

Isn’t life expectancy an average? If so, then reducing any input values (people dying earlier than they otherwise would) would reduce the average. Doesn’t matter in which n-tile the reductions occur.

Wouldn't a person dying 40 years early have a tenfold impact on the average compared to someone dying 4 years early. Early being compared to the expectancy calculated without them.

Numbers/source please. 1 middle age or young person dying drops the life expectancy but is obviously just a drop in a bucket.

Each time you catch COVID, you risk the chance of getting long COVID.

You pretend that it's not a big deal, but those numbers are going to pile up into a giant ball of health issues for a lot of people as the years progress. And for many of them, those issues are happening far outside "old age." Go get something that fucks you up for life in your 30s and then get back to us about how it's no big deal.

THAT's the point.

> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.

I love doom more than the average person, by what I would say is a quite significant margin... but I don't see this at all.

I've had covid at least twice, including some awful symptoms a month after recovery that had me convinced I had long covid as well... a few months later (now years) not so much.

While I do know many people of who have lost loved ones from Covid, I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms.

To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists. But I'm very skeptical, based on my own observations, that "we are so, so fucked" and covid of all things is the source of that "fucking". Personally I think a lot of the post-covid strangeness is because, for a variety of other reasons (not the least of which is rapidly progressing climate change), people are under tremendous stress and at the same time can't quite articulate what that stress is, nor find relief from it.

A lot of people (not me) did believe there was going to be a return to normal post-covid, and the increasingly obvious impossibility of this is causing people to have tremendous mental health problems. But long-covid itself being the source is something that I just don't see anywhere.

And, as I said, I'm not afraid of being labeled a "doomer", so if you have some good sources to read up on, I'm all ears (er, eyes).

> I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms.

You are fortunate. I know several who have those symptoms (ranging in age from my own - mid-30's - to my parents' - early 60's), and have had several friends relate their own observations of loved-ones. If Long Covid isn't real, there's an astonishingly-coincidental prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source, which is correlated with those who (from my own observations) took less precautions regarding Covid and/or who caught it more often.

I recognize the irony of responding to your anecdata with my own. No, I don't have any hard data to provide - though given the partisanship observed in the reporting of COVID _itself_, I have somewhat lost faith in the availability of trustworthy data about public health.

I don't doubt the symptoms, but I think there's always been a percentage of the population that suffers from these types of symptoms. They get rediagnosed as the latest thing every so often, and the latest one is Long COVID. Even if COVID is a trigger (and really any illness could be), there's probably something else underlying all of these.

> If Long Covid isn't real

I'm not arguing that long covid isn't real (in fact I explicitly state "To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists"), just that I'm not convinced that we are "we are so, so fucked" (to quote parent).

Your anecdata is appreciated since I share your lost faith in data about public health.

> prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source

I personally think anxiety and unspoken stress regarding climate collapse and other forms of society degradation we're experiencing and seeing accelerate are responsible for a good deal of this. Everyone I know certainly seems more tired, more stressed out, and with fuzzier thinking, but I don't think that is a byproduct of long covid. People can't even openly talk about this seriously, even though nearly everyone is clearly feeling it. There are also plenty of people in aggressive denial about this which makes it even harder to discuss.

> I personally think anxiety and unspoken stress regarding climate collapse and other forms of society degradation we're experiencing and seeing accelerate are responsible for a good deal of this.

That's a fair point.

I don't know enough to comment on long Covid, but I think an element of it is that for a long time we've denied that sometimes illnesses require substantial recovery time.

I remember reading a lot of old stories as a kid where someone would get the flu or a generic fever and take multiple months to recover. Industrial society made that economically infeasible but our biology didn't change.

I don't think it should be surprising to anyone that having a massive population of a virus in your lungs and elsewhere has long term effects.

> A lot of people (not me) did believe there was going to be a return to normal post-covid, and the increasingly obvious impossibility of this is causing people to have tremendous mental health problems

What is not normal in your opinion at this point? Covid still exists as another illness that goes around, but from my point of view everything else has been back to normal for quite a while.

I think the post you responded to is referring to non-covid stuff, like the economy still seems pretty weird, there are teacher and daycare worker shortages, and just service worker shortages in general, and there seems to be other weird stuff coming out of the era like a ton of shoplifting and a seeming pull-back by police forces.

It's unclear (to me) how real or unusual any of these things are, or whether they were caused by the pandemic or were already baked in somehow, but from an intuitive point of view, I do find myself frequently thinking "why isn't stuff working right?" more often than I think I was four years ago.

> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.

In what sense? I'm in a deep red state, and I haven't noticed much "devastation" in my community due to COVID. Seems like you can work yourself up about anything. Doomscroll enough Type 2 diabetes articles and you'll convince yourself that COVID is the absolute least of USA's public health problems compared to the complications resulting from that.

Why not both? COVID outcomes tend to be worse for diabetics and COVID infection increases the risk of developing diabetes as well.

I haven't read the specifics of the GBD, but isn't some of the "it was clearly quackery" confounded by:

1. In 2020 especially, and even now, the specifics of long covid and other side effects, as compared to other downsides of lockdowns on mental health/delayed treatments are hard to predict? We don't have the counterfactual of what would have been the 3-5-10 year implications of a multi-year lockdown.

2. Does the general directionality of that change in a world where it's obvious that global lockdown/elimination of covid wasn't feasible because there isn't some global government to impose it? As long as a large enough population wasn't going along with the elimination strategy, it makes it less viable and more costly for everyone else. If the "2 week lockdown and it all goes away" had happened, then absolutely that would have been right. If all of, say, Europe doesn't lock down and everywhere else does, then how long of a lockdown do you need in order to have it do anything, and at that length, what other major problems emerge?

At least personally, the point I somewhat gave up on elimination was when the first variants started emerging from South Africa and Europe. It seems like that's generally borne out too - I'd be curious what the infection/long covid rates in the more successfully locked down countries like New Zealand or Japan are at this point.

The problem is, even lockdowns weren't lockdowns.

There were endless people who had to work, just to keep water, power, food flowing. And those people needed transportation.

And past 2 weeks, transportation means parts for vehicles, maintenance, gas, oil, and food means transportation and food processors and....

It was a good idea at the time, but doomed to fail.

Agreed. There's a lot of animals that can catch and spread covid [0]:

> many if not most mammalian ACE-2 receptors are susceptible

> the virus has gone from humans to the animals and back again to human

> found signs of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in significant percentages of six urban wildlife species

> found signs of the pathogen infecting 17 percent of New York City sewer rats tested

> Exposure could also occur following interactions with pets such as cats and dogs

Lockdowns were never going to be able to eliminate the virus.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...

I'm not too worried about a random sick deer in the middle of some forest infecting a whole bunch of humans. The worry with animals is that they could mutate the virus into something much more nasty. Especially in factory farm settings where animals aren't properly cared for and are packed in like sardines while covered in shit and open sores, and where workers who are also treated terribly could end up getting exposed.

Lockdowns could do a lot to reduce spread and protect people from infection in large population centers, but certain areas are basically breeding grounds for disease and even before covid they were a risk for things like antibiotic resistant bacteria. Ignoring them was always going to be a problem.

I brought up covid in animals because the original poster mentioned the elimination of covid in the context of lockdowns.

The fact that covid can move between animal and human populations would seem to mean that lockdowns for the purpose of elimination will not work. Eventually humans would be reinfected from animals - mice, rats, pets, etc.

This has perhaps already happened. There is dna evidence that omicron evolved in mice and then jumped back into humans [0].

On the idea of lockdowns to eliminate the virus:

> The coronavirus’ ability to infect so many different animals, and to spread within some of those populations, is worrying news: It means there’s virtually no chance the world will ever be rid of this particularly destructive coronavirus, scientists said [1].

It would be a bummer to be locked down for months or years in an effort to eliminate the virus, and have to deal with the negative repercussions of lockdowns during and afterwards, only for everyone to become reinfected again from animals, and the whole thing start up again.

My apologies if I misunderstood your reply. You did seem to have a different angle than the original post. I just don't get it when people mention lockdowns to eliminate covid, when such a thing isn't possible.

I'm not sure what to say about your concern that animals can evolve a more dangerous virus. That seems like it can go either way. Animal evolved variants can also be less dangerous, like omicron, which is a good thing. Also locked down humans could be more vulnerable to more dangerous variants, their immune systems not having any prior exposure. How can anyone be so sure lockdowns always help?

[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicr...

[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-06-09/coronavirus...

Where I come from, “good ideas doomed to fail” are called “bad ideas”

I recall clearly, at the time, the first two weeks of lockdown. No one, anywhere, had a clue wtf was going on, except that some new virus was spreading like wildfire, that it spread before symptoms appeared, and it seemed like Italy had a crazy high death rate.

Blaming people with the knowledge of hindsight is just plain wrong.

Later lockdowns? Now that's a different conversation.

Quebecs lockdowns continued for 2 years and were far more draconian than the rest of North America.

As far as I understand this was mostly a factor of our public hospital systems being absolutely over capacity and the government doing whatever it could to keep up.

Needless to say I’ve since moved away to a region with a more functional health care system and that allows families to gather together as desired.

Yeah, before we had any idea what we were dealing with anything but a lockdown would have been madness.

Yea, by october when the "maybe we shouldn't do a lockdown any more" talk was 6+ months in, it feels like it's clearly in the "there's a case to be made" zone.

The west did not go for a strategy of elimination through lockdown. Rather, the strategy was to delay the spread, initially only so that the health care system could keep up, and later in the hope that vaccines would arrive in time to curb the brunt of it - as they did.

The GBD is easy to find and a short read (https://gbdeclaration.org/), it does not refer to any elimination strategy - instead it discusses the costs of "Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available".

I don't see any quackery in the GBD. (Which is not to say that they were right.)

Yea, for sure. Mostly responding to the OP more than stating what happened. I think we generally agree - for better or worse, most of the world decided on some limited strategy, which made the prospect of doing any sort of elimination essentially impossible. In that light, balancing whatever success at delaying infections vs. the downsides of being even partially locked down is a non-quack question in my mind.

Eliminating Covid stopped being an option roughly around January 2020. The partial elimination you seem to be implying with "as much as possible" was never an option. It was always all or nothing.

and China tried really, really hard to eliminate it over the next 3 years. They couldn't.

Right, and they had the "advantages" of having no limitations on government power, and assigning no value to individual freedom. If they couldn't do it, it's lunacy to believe that anyone else could.

Even NZ gave up on our island defence once Omicron got in. We'd managed to stave off widespread Delta, but Omicron was far more transmissible, but also, far less lethal, and its arrival and spread came just after we started vaccinating.

So by then the cost/benefit analysis made it clear that reopening, while bringing more sickness, would ultimately cost less than not.

The isolation caused some havoc in our economy that we're still recovering from, but large amounts of excess deaths brings its own economic impacts that would likely have been far worse.

You seem to have lived through a different pandemic than the rest of the world.

It's hard to say the GBD was wrong when Sweden didn't lock down and they weren't exactly seeing bodies pile up in the street.

Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia.

I think the severity of long Covid might be more debilitating as it is my understanding that the long-term consequences of pneumonia is not as long lasting. I've not known of people that have had to change their whole way of life, and possibly their career, because of pneumonia or flu but have met a few that have had to do so as a consequence of long Covid.

Apart from having taste or smell affected, I don't know anyone with "long COVID".

I know a few people who are impacted by it. But they all, if I recall correctly, have confounding factors. For example, I know two people with MS where Covid has completely wrecked havoc -- and a year or so later are still largely devastated.

There's also the fact that for a lot of people, COVID isolation meant a precipitous decline in physical and social activity that lasted for years.

We know this stuff can fuck you up pretty bad both mentally and physically. Depressive symptoms and a steep decline in physical fitness is very much the expected outcome from that.

My brother has it. Persistently elevated heart rate and breathing issues, to the point that walking up a flight of stairs would leave him winded when he was suffering the worst. I believe he's gotten a bit better since, but not fully recovered.

His resting heart rate is up 20bpm, and it can take 10-15 minutes after exerting himself for it to return to that new normal. He's almost certainly at risk for a stroke due to whatever caused the change, and it left him more susceptible to being sick- he's gotten COVID 3 times despite the vaccines, while the rest of his family has only had it once or twice, on top of the usual flu and colds going around that his kids bring home from school.

Edit: noting the sibling comment, he also had no confounding factors, aside from being slightly overweight. Even our elderly parents have gotten COVID with no lingering symptoms.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying it's a lot, lot rarer than the COVID alarmists seem to think.

People also get post viral fatigue from other virii.

To be clear, you’re saying it’s a lot, lot rarer than Covid alarmists think… because you don’t personally know anyone with it?

Yes. That's how anecdata works. If enough people observe they don't know anyone either with or post long covid, it starts to move significance. I've known two people with ME over 50 years and it doesn't alter my sense of their personal anguish or its economic and wider health consequences.

I have no doubt long covid exists and will need significant funding in research and targeted health care. It won't need as much as, or return as much as the spend on paediatrics or obstetrics, per capita.

I’ve never known anyone to justify an argument explicitly using anecdata unironically. Amazing, no notes.

You don't seem to care that the COVID alarmists are only using anecdata as well. I think if is clear where your sympathies lie.

It's not the scientific method but if something is very common, and I have several hundred friends, relatives and work colleagues of various backgrounds and states of health then I should have heard of someone experiencing it, no?

I've seen no evidence on this thread that proves it's super-common so apart from funding my own research project, what do you suggest?

Well, of the ten people I know who have gotten COVID, one has long COVID. That makes my anecdatum a 10% rate of people developing long COVID.

Given the number of people who have been infected, that's a very large number of people with potentially permanent side effects.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist but I have no doubt we're going to see fewer people seeking a fibromyalgia diagnosis over the next decade.

There are certainly post viral complications like ards but we already have names for those things.

Psychosomatic illnesses are in fact quite serious, but they require psychological treatment, not lockdowns of society.

The incidence of heart attack and stroke increases significantly after COVID infection, so please spare us your appeal to “psychosomatic illnesses”:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8321431/

(I should get bonus points for this being a Swedish study as well, since every COVID denier loves to wave around their flag.)

"Results: Patients with post-COVID syndrome scored lower for emotional stability, equanimity, positive mood, and self-control. Extraversion, emotional stability, and openness correlated negatively with anxiety and depression levels. Conscientiousness correlated negatively with anxiety."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8870488/#:~:tex....

I think it's very possible there ARE occasional life-long consequences of the flu and other such infections that are so normalized we don't even notice.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-cov...

> Covid is now here to stay, ranking somewhere in severity between the common cold, flu or pneumonia.

I know it’s ideologically motivated, but it’s surprising people just bold-faced lie about the impact of COVID, when the stats are there for everyone to see. In the US, COVID is on track to kill ~200K people this year:

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

The cold and flu will not kill anywhere near this number, pneumonia is a consequence of respiratory illness, not a disease in itself, and before COVID, this would be considered an absolutely insane amount of deaths.

Is that tracking deaths from COVID or deaths with COVID? I have doubts that the numbers are not overstated (by how much, I'm not sure).

Looking at CDC data for excess deaths from Jan through July 2023*, excess deaths have averaged around 1.7%. Deaths reported as being due to COVID are running at 2.7%.

Annualizing and turning the data back to excess deaths, that means of the ~200K people that "COVID is on track to kill", only about 53.4K total excess deaths are expected, projecting from Jan-Jul, or projecting mid-Jan-Jul, excess would be only 31.5K.

Perhaps COVID is saving 146K-169K lives and then killing 200K this year?

* This is to avoid the recent data incompleteness. If I include more recent data records, my argument becomes stronger, not weaker. Setting aside the first two weeks in January, the average drops to 1.0% excess deaths overall.

The death from/with covid distinction is only relevant here if there is a systematic difference in over/under reporting of covid deaths between red and blue states. If it's a constant bias regardless of state, it would not change the conclusion of the article. And it could only change the conclusion of the article directionally if covid deaths in red states are significantly overreported compared to blue states.

GP was claiming COVID was on track to kill ~200K in the US this year *

If that's the case, it seems reasonable to compare that claim to the total excess deaths in the country. Nothing to do with red or blue states.

* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37729830

> COVID is on track to kill ~200K people this year

Where are you seeing this? I'm eyeballing cumulative deaths in the linked data tracker, it's about 50k through September 23.[1]

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

The statistics are that Covid is much worse than seasonal flu and that’s after vaccination. To say otherwise is to ignore reality.

people have been desperate to paint Covid as no worse than the flu from the beginning of the pandemic, and it seems like no amount of time or facts will stop them.

> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.

Some fraction of us are fucked, but surely not “we” as a whole. The vast majority of people I know have had Covid (many multiple times), and the vast majority are now perfectly fine.

> We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much as possible

This was already impossible by Feb. 2020 when it was spreading like wildfire in China, Iran, and Italy.

> to have a hope of a return to normality.

We have already returned to normality, so reality doesn’t back up your assertion.

You have to stack long COVID against the long term mental health and social effects of lockdown, including but not limited to the atrocious loss of learning in school children, domestic abuse situations that spiraled, and an already alarming teen mental health problem that Jonathan Haidt has been documenting for about a decade.

Lockdowns did make sense initially, especially during the dominance of the Wuhan strain. But some countries like Taiwan and SK with experience dealing with respiratory virus pandemics opened up way sooner, smartly, and did not suffer tremendously for it.

> The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked

You're right by way of the literature available to evaluate this claim. (Even jobs numbers are starting to note that some amount of the worker shortage is likely related to long COVID) Most of the "oh i got it [a few times] and i'm fine" posts are ignoring the long tail risks here.

Unfortunately, it will take 5-20 years for many of the worst long tail consequences of mass spread of sars-cov-2 to become imminently clear. (Enjoy access to your medical specialists while you can! There's not enough slack in the system for doubled-or-worse hazard ratios for most serious conditions, lol!) Decision makers broadly prioritized public dining over prudence. For this choice, we get at least an entire generation picking up sars-cov-2, likely yearly, and our reward will be a horrifying number of early deaths and disability.

This tragedy is so senseless and so avoidable. Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy; "Let-er-rip" (and the GBD by extension) is anything but rational.

Poz rates in NY state have been sitting near 60ish percent, don't forget your well fitted respirator, usps is doing another round of free test distribution (RATs but better than nothing), and good luck out there. solidarity.

> Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy

How? The vaccines are mediocre at best and are nowhere near good enough to get R < 1 (except maybe in a population where most people already had COVID, and that’s a big maybe). Masks might be effective enough if everyone wears a good one correctly, but good luck — even if you convinced people, people like eating indoors. And seeing each other’s faces, etc. And the antigen tests are not terrible sensitive.

>This tragedy is so senseless and so avoidable. Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy

That statement is beyond ridiculous. Zero COVID was a pipe dream (as in: flat out impossible to achieve by any realistically implementable policy) by the time Omicron appeared, which really means: by the time it was spreading in Africa and India.

>This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms.

And to your point, it is about everyone else who couldn't get the care they needed because COVID overwhelmed our infrastructure.

These numbers vindicate the GBD - the change here isn't big enough to justify the society-level responses, coercion or mass human rights violations. We're seeing that the vaccine didn't even bring COVID down to sub-exponential growth. If a 3% risk of death in West Virginia justifies parking up society then a 1% risk of death in Vermont would. Neither does.

If the outcome lands on people who choose to take risks, there is no need for the police to step in.

That is misinformation. The risk of "long COVID" has been widely overstated.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2023-112338

Most any serious viral infection can potentially cause post-viral syndrome, but there is nothing particularly dangerous about SARS-CoV-2. And there is no realistic possibility of eliminating that virus. There is no sterilizing vaccine. It is now endemic worldwide through humans and multiple animal species. It's time to move on.

The notion of punishing people for exercising their freedom of expression is horrifying. That is unacceptable in a modern liberal society.

It isn't misinformation. Here is a study that basically rebuts every implication of the study you linked: https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/17063329657922727...

Another link questioning the process behind the entire study itself: https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-an-ana...

Interesting read, but as far as I can tell, this has not been peer-reviewed. At a casual glance, it didn't seem to be a survey or a summary of peer-reviewed research, either.

In other words, if I'm right, this is an opinion piece.

in what ways have we not already returned to normality?

I think we’ve returned to a new, more callous form of reality, where mass injury, illness, and death are normalized, and any real concern for public health or intervention, including that which was considered entirely rational before COVID, is now greeted as impossible or insanity.

Yea, this is one of the sad long term consequences I've taken away from COVID: I used to think that when a crisis happened, we would all pull together and rely on each other to do the right thing and collectively act to help.

Now, I know that when the next crisis happens, half of the country is going to whine and complain, deny, protest, defy, and belligerently do everything in their power to deliberately make it worse. I've totally lost faith in humanity.

Well flu vaccination rates are down from pre-covid levels, I'd guess more antivax sentiment's also impacting other common vaccines.

This inanity is impacting even vaccination rates for rabies in pets! https://time.com/5538926/dogs-vaccines-antivaxxers/

I think it very much depends on where you live. Rural America returned to normal a long time ago. Many cities, like San Francisco and Atlanta, have not and are still feeling the effects to varying degrees.

Urban American returned to normal a few months later than Rural America, but we're talking like, April 2022. SF is still suffering from some dynamics that started during COVID but it's not like there are still lockdowns or compulsory masking or anything like that.

> we're talking like, April 2022

Masks were mandated on the subway in New York until September 2022. I'd consider this to not be "normality".

Sure, my figure comes from the west coast — NYC a few months later. I don’t think that detracts from the overall sentiment.

Fair enough.

I lived in Atlanta for most of my life and commuted downtown daily for over a decade. For unrelated reasons, I moved away in July of 2020 during the lockdown.

I returned this past week for work and the city certainly did not seem back to normal. The areas around Broad Street and the intersection of Baker and Peachtree are usually bustling during lunchtime, it was a ghost town.

If your definition of normal is not lockdowns or mask requires then yes we're back to normal, but in large cities it's a new normal and certainly not a pre-pandemic normal.

Good news then that long covid is probably not a real issue

> None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.

Humans used to be "so, so fucked" when...

- the volcano on the island erupted,

- the harvest failed for the third year in a row

- the neighbouring tribe learned to ride horses and started a campaign for domination

- some strange curse fell upon the land killing ⅓ of the population which left the fields unworked and the land barren

We're still the same species with the same instincts for survival, the same alarm mechanisms for detecting impending catastrophic situations and the same urge to act upon impending disasters. Modern society has - especially since the introduction of antibiotics - largely done away with those traditional doom scenarios. We're no longer starving, no longer dying in droves from infectious diseases, no longer totally at the mercy of nature... but our alarm mechanisms are still in place although they are differently tuned in different people. In some people - you seem to be one of those - these mechanisms are so finely tuned that they pick up minute signals which are amplified until they trigger the 'impending catastrophic situation' alarm (we're so, so fucked) where those same signals do not even register for others. The same is true for other triggers like 'climate change', 'migration', 'systemic ...-ism' and others where some people are completely taken over by their alarms going off where others don't even hear a single bell. Many of these triggers - 'systemic ...-ism' and to a lesser extent 'migration' being prime examples - are intentionally amplified because those who do the amplification stand to gain power (and money) by doing so, others - 'climate change' - are being used by third parties for monetary gain ('greenwashing' and the multitude of 'green' scams like 'carbon offsets'/'carbon credits') or political power.

Are we 'fucked'? That depends on who you ask. Ask me and I'll say "only if we want to be". Is SARS-2 going to be with us for the foreseeable future? Yes, most likely. Is that a big problem? No, not really since it has rapidly mutated to become 'yet another Corona-related upper airway infection' while our species has developed a form of natural immunity which has taken the edge off the disease. Upper airway diseases are annoying and lead to a loss in productivity, sure, but they tend not to mail or kill. What remains is the long tail of the initial pandemic and even more of the (over)reaction to it, especially in those countries which had strict lockdown regimes. Recovering from the damage caused by those measures will take a lot of time and money and it can only be hoped that a lesson will be learned from this experience.

As to returning to 'normality' I can safely state that we have done so quite a while ago here in Sweden [1].

[1] https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...

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