Of course, a lot more people are still working remotely, something I consider to be a plus but that I suspect venture capitalists like the author do not. So when I see someone like that advocating “unlearning many of the behaviors we’ve learned in the last two years” I'm immediately suspicious.
> We’ve got other pressing matters to deal with. [...] We have other health care challenges to tackle.
One of the most pressing issues with healthcare today is the sheer number of COVID patients overwhelming the ability for a hospital to do anything other than treat COVID. Yes, even with the milder Omicron variant. Again: if anything this suggests that this lack of obsession has come too early, not too late.
And has any call to "stop politicizing" something ever worked? That's simply not the world we're living in (these days, at least). The vaccine is politicized. Masks are politicized. You can’t just wish that away.
You are lucky if you have not been exposed to this propaganda very much yet.
You might notice that the editorial reads as if the word "Covid" refers to "that time when the government told us to wear masks and get vaccines and all that stuff." I'm not sure if people actually hold this view or just pretend to, but it's not uncommon.
It's trying to give off the aura of "Oh, remember when all those silly people told us to wear masks, it was just a silly thing that happened one time, why are we still talking about it, we should just forget it ever happened."
People with attitudes similar to the author are the reason there is still a COVID-19 pandemic, in the developed world at least. I'm surprised you don't have experience with them by now.
This line of thinking is crazy: variants are getting every 3-6 months more contagious, sure less harmful, but at the same time more evaise of vaccine. I have some friends who had 3 doses and still had hard time with omiron. At some point all the population will have had some sort of covid in the future, probably multiple time if you think on a decade length of time.
Saying "the pandemic is still there because because of the crazy ones who don't want to confine for a year" is just nonsense. look at australia who had the strictest rules ? They are taking the current wave right in the face.
While it's important to protect old and fragile people, i'm really convinced most young people who were not in contact with old people should have not confined. The risk was super low, upside was to get natural immunity and not kill the economy. Half of the world (the < 40) bowed to fear for exactly 0 positive consequence imo.
Bitter lesson from last 2 years: no one cares about other’s misfortune at cost of self’s convenience.
Your statement makes it sound like hospitals are devoting 50%+ to Covid, that is just not even close to reality frankly anywhere in the world.
Is it?
I mean, I’d like that to be true too.
…but are things not still a bit too screwed up to be pretending everything is fine quite yet?
> The current 7-day moving average of new deaths (1,749) has decreased 0.3% compared with the previous 7-day moving average (1,754). As of January 19, 2022, a total of 856,288 COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the United States.
(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...)
EDIT: all parts of each country are not equal. In the Bay Area, the hospitals are doing (mostly) fine.
What exactly do we unlearn when he quotes, "unlearn many of the behaviors we’ve learned in the last two years"? What hardships are we going to go through if we continue to wear masks a little longer than necessary? Do I really need to shake your hand when we greet? Believe it or not people don't want to stay at home, not be able to work and they definitely don't like being sick and dying. Know when we'll go back to normal? When people stop dying so much.
This is going to have massive long term effects and I'm not talking about anything from having worn a mask. I'm talking about the long term effects of the virus. I'm positive you'll be seeing advertisements for the next 40 years for "Covid treatment centers of America".
If this person really wants to get back to normal maybe we should start by passing legislation now to deny Mediare benefits to anyone suffering from Covid complications who refused to be vaccinated. I'd be happy to support conservatives in saying, "Why should I be taxed to pay for the results of your decision?" or allow covid complications be be considered a preexisting condition for unvaccinated. Why should I have to pay through my insurance premiums for your ER visit?
I'm sorry, but it isn't over yet. I wish it was. However wishing it or asserting it doesn't make it true. This was a sensible argument to make in July 2021 when vaccines were more effective and cases were literally 1/10th as prevalent.
I encourage the "over it" crowd to talk to the parents of young children, a cancer patient, or literally anyone who works at a hospital.
We were triple-vaccinated. Our kid had his first shot in early December. We spent basically all of December in lockdown. All of the little one's playdates were cancelled because everyone was freaking out about Omicron. And we still got sick. What was the point?
I'm absolutely done with the lockdowns, the masks, the strict controls, etc. The older people in my life are sick of it as well; they don't know how many years they have to live, and they don't want to spend the rest of their lives holed up inside a building. We have lives to live.
Hopefully, we as a race start taking into account quality of life in addition to length of life. We have a looming mental health crisis on our hands and it's exactly because of the fear-mongering; who knows how many years we're going to have to spend cleaning up this mess (it will probably be decades).
If you haven't gotten sick from COVID yet, you probably will. At this point it really is just a virus. The time for pulling out all the stops to prevent ICU overflows is over. This might be a permanant fixture in our lives and I'm more sick of the constant fear-setting than I am from the virus itself.
If ICU overflows are when we pull out all of the stops, can we pull out just some of the stops before it gets that dire?
It's already not great. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/overwhelmed-by-omicron-surg...
I was completely on board with the first year or so of all these restrictions. But I am done sacrificing my child’s well being to spare the elderly. If the vaccines work, then why are people still afraid? I believe they work, so I am not afraid. I don’t understand why even the most ardent vaccine evangelists are still cowering in fear if they truly believe in their effectiveness.
The case count has exploded so what? Just think how many people actually have it but never bothered getting tested because it was so mild. The death rate is the same/similar to when we had a fraction of the cases we currently have.
> kids are at statistically zero risk of covid unless they have cancer or something
At risk of what? Dying? What about passing covid on to others? Or covid symptoms that do not go away? What about merely needing to be hospitalized? That still seems pretty bad. My local Children's Hospital has more pediatric covid patients than at any time during the pandemic and the city has re-authorized crisis standards of care.
> the vaccines have been available for over a year now so you have had ample time to get one
Kids 5-12 have only had a few months and kids under 5 still have no vaccine.
> But I am done sacrificing my child’s well being to spare the elderly
That strikes me as rather cruel. What exactly are you sacrificing? Isn't every school in the country back to in-person? Is it having to wear a mask?
Look, I'm also tired of covid and don't want to have to think about it ever again. But the problems with the actual virus still far outweigh problems caused by our response to the virus.
Deaths/severity is not rising even though there are a lot of new cases.
Deaths ( = going down): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Severe cases ( small increase): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
While new cases > x 7 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...
Additionally, it should be noted that the severe cases with Omicron are almost all unvaccinated ( not even boostered). If you want to check stats, please try to find a source that seperates delta ( which is not gone!) from Omicron.
Edit: And since it's January. An honest comparison would be Januari 2021 with Delta because of family / friend gatherings. It's a pretty busy social time ;)
And deaths are in fact rising. According to your chart they were around 6000/day (7 day average) on Jan 1 and are 7600/day in the most recent data two weeks later.
We didn’t keep kids from school, we didn’t panic when hospitals were overwhelmed, we didn’t shut down businesses.
Where are you getting that number? CDC estimates 27k:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
which puts it below current COVID numbers by a big chunk.
> We didn’t keep kids from school
At this point schools are largely closed because there are too many teachers out sick to teach effectively. There isn't a particularly simple answer here.
That’s an order of magnitude difference.
That’s why the response was an order of magnitude more substantial.
I’m baffled you think this is somehow surprising.
2,000+ (and increasing) Americans are dying every day from this disease—as bad as the bad old days of Spring 2020. Why is this attitude so pervasive? It doesn't seem to be backed by anything aside from boredom of dealing with living in a pandemic.
> We have vaccines if you want them. We will have anti-virals if you need them.
> And you can wear masks if you are uncomfortable on the plane or the subway.
This is the individualistic thinking that's caused us so much friction. It's no different than "if you want to be a safe driver, don't drink and drive!". The drunk-driver and the unvacced/unmasked put all of us at risk. It's selfish behavior, and should be treated as such, instead of described as "personal freedom".
> We’ve normalized mask-wearing in the US now and that is a good thing.
Have we, though? Across the country, people will harass and threaten you, for no reason other than they've seen you wearing a face mask. I've been mocked in NYC—the bastion of progressivism in the US. What do you think it's like wearing a mask in Kansas?
Like any intellectual, they push to grow their knowledge and sometimes venture outside their area of competence. They don’t realize they’re living in a relatively healthy area of society surrounded by people with easy access to medical care and without comorbidities.
omnicron is less lethal than the other variants but it still threatens significant lives, takes icu beds and takes an enormous toll on the nurses working with a still steady stream of dying patients.
We all want to move on, and Omnicron looks to be peaking soon— the nature of the beast is omnicron has only affected half the people it will.
I guess I agree there’s reason to be optimistic. But I don’t think now is the time we stop talking about it.
We really need another warp speed project to produce these antivirals
Things look good now because omicron is mild, but no guarantee that all of the next variants will be mild . If one of them is severe we will really wish we had warp speeded the antivirals
(sarcasm, obviously, but unfortunately a common undertone with a lot of conversations in general but specifically on covid.
I keep up to date with the latest studies on Covid. Sars-Cov-2 is not a respiratory virus; it's a circulatory virus. And its long term effects on the body are not widely understood.
Everyone is acting like because Omicron doesn't make you cough that Covid is over. But scientists are finding deeply concerning long term effects - neurological effects, telomere and biological aging effects, autoimmune activation, long Covid, micro blood clotting - in a non-trivial percentage of Covid cases. Even asymptomatic and vaccinated individuals.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that having Covid will result in a lifelong disability for at least some percentage of survivors.
But we just ignore that so we can go back to normal? Because Covid is "endemic?" Endemicity was the failure state - it means we gave up. Covid should have never gotten to that point.
Please don't assume that future variants will be less and less severe. It's what we all want to hear, but this "covid is over" mentality is what will help produce the next, possibly really nasty, variant.
Can you back this up? It's my understanding that our actions now have almost no bearing on what happens with future variants.
The more cases the greater the chance of mutations. The more mutations the greate the chance of nasty variant.
I think this is simply about reassessing our risk calculus with the fact that the current Covid variant is mild enough that it can be gradually folded into the background noise of seasonal viruses that we deal with every year.
Future pandemic waves will be less and less severe.
It doesn't matter how virulent the variants are, they're all about the same within a factor of 2 or so.
The thing that moves the needle is the human immune system. >90% of the population everywhere has T-cells now one way or another. People who are boosted have T-cells that have gone through affinity maturation and been boosted which should be a mature immune response that will keep them out of hospitals permanently (barring compromise of their immune system of course, but that's a risk with influenza and everything else).
As the unvaccinated/antivaxxers manage to get mature boosted immune systems the hard way then the impact of each successive wave will be lower. Once we hit the point where the unvaccinated percentage in the hospitals roughly equals the unvaccinated percentage in the general population then the pandemic is probably over.
So with 90% unvaccinated in the hospitals right now with 64% fully vaccinated, then at some point another Omicron-sized wave of infections should result in only 15% of the overall hospitalizations. Of course it won't be perfect, but the trend of each successive wave should move the needle more to that level. Each successive wave should asymptotically approach that burden.
Eventually its likely that the waves become smaller as well, due to mature boosted immunity against infection and transmission.
And Omicron probably isn't significantly less severe of a virus, the studies in culture and in mice attempting to show that have large problems. The less severity of hospital burden in the Omicron wave is showing that the human immune system (and vaccination and boosting) works.
I don't understand why people are so against taking an easy W like this.
Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave.
I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get on with their lives.
Since the beginning we've known that Omicron is both less deadly and more transmissible. I don't know how anyone with an engineering background can not see the problem here.
There is a balance where less deadly x more transmissible == more deadly x less transmissible, ie the total deaths during a wave are the same. We can't really control the death rate of omicron, but we can to an extent impact how transmissible it is. If we fight to reduce the transmission rate we have a much greater shot at lower overall deaths. But if we actively encourage people to ignore safe behavior and "live their life" we end up increasing the transmission rate therefore increasing the total number of deaths.
0. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths
Of course, more severe variants can always develop. Holds same for flu, HIV, ... not just COVID.
Often that selection pressure works towards less dangerous variants because that gives them more opportunity to infect others.
Sometimes a virus kills off everyone who is susceptible to it. So it's now less dangerous to those who remain.
In the caae of Covid, it is infectious long before it kills, and so there is no great selection pressure for it to become less dangerous.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...
That's probably only in the case where the disease is so severe it kills the host before it can spread very easily, not some general rule.
Let's say you have a virus that's super contagious for two weeks with no symptoms and nearly everyone who gets it dies within a month. What evolutionary pressure would it be under to change as long as it has fresh hosts to infect?
I do think it's time to start thinking about what the end of the pandemic looks like:
1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever. People will continue to get sick and die from it.
2. There will be more peaks on the infection and death charts. These are real people with real families. It will suck for them.
3. At some point one of the peaks will be the highest. 6 months or so after the highest peak is reached, the pandemic will be over. We'll only see this in hindsight. It may take a year to tell that the last peak was the highest. The disease won't be over, but it won't be the single most important thing in everyone's life. It will drop from the #1 or #2 cause of death down to #10 or #20, eventually. This may be different around the world. Countries that have had low numbers of infections and deaths may have huge spikes of infection and deaths.
4. There will be more variants, and they are not guaranteed to be milder, especially to individual infected people. There may be variants that affect children more. I personally don't think that is likely, but there are no guarantees.
5. Early in the pandemic, there was a lot of judgment on people who got sick. We'll have to let go of this. Speaking down to people doesn't help. Judging people doesn't help.
6. Some people will continue to wear masks for a long time. Some people won't feel comfortable in groups. Give them time. Don't force the issue. Give them space. I will probably wear a mask in crowded public places for a long time (grocery stores, airports, public transport).
7. We'll be learning about this disease for a long time. Hopefully government bodies learn how to plan and communicate better. Hopefully we step up our disease vector surveillance and tracking efforts
8. We won't get common understanding back unless people work for it. Dividing people with moralistic and righteousness-based messages is currently a winning strategy. I won't call this a "both sides" thing, I call it a "human nature" thing. I don't really understand why some people are standing on "their rights" - I guess it plays better than saying "I'm scared"
1. Sars-Cov-2 will be around forever because the population votes for it to be that way.
I wish it were otherwise, and maybe in the future it will be so.
I really hope he's right and it's normalized, but I do fear that many people will go back to not staying at home and not wearing masks when they feel sick. And people who do wear masks, will do so catching lampooning gazes from others.
My understanding was that mask-wearing was mostly to protect others. Has that changed?
I like them, they provide privacy from people and cameras, while also increasing protection from many viruses and bacteria (provided you don't take it off to scratch your nose).
Common cold and the flu has gotten way less common since 2020. Freaking amazing, since the symptoms can literally incapacitate me for a week or two. I hate the cold and flu.
C-19 is still very fresh in our minds. Let's use that to drive action to learn from it and try to ensure the next one is less catastrophic. If we turn our attention away too quickly, this won't happen.
Even as we speak, we have school districts in the US closed indefinitely* and many nations around the world without testing, vaccines, antivirals or proper healthcare. The future may be here (let's hope that this is the beginning of the end while being healthfully paranoid that it may not be), but it is definitely not evenly distributed.
* https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/01/21/flint-public-schools...
The unwinding of the Covid trade doesn't necessarily correlate with that, but it's a reasonable proposition.
Most of the other stuff is opinions and I agree with the sentiment of many of the other commenters: You might be right, and I certainly would like you to be right, but there's little hard evidence that you are, and June 2021 was a nice cautionary tale that you very well might not be.
It's certainly an interesting thought, but why would it be true?
Given that there are two possible scenarios for the origin of COVID; natural transmission or lab origin, I find the former to be a far more terrifying prospect. If it were a lab outbreak, that's a protocol problem that can be addressed to prevent it in the future. If it was natural transmission, why hasn't this happened before? Why isn't it happening again right now? Why isn't there 10 different viruses at once, that are much more deadly? What happens when that occurs? If this happened naturally, it will happen again. And I just pray that we are prepared.
That's for "interesting" viruses, by the way. "Boring" viruses probably get transmitted all the time. Most things are boring.
Currently 2000 people a day are dying in the U.S. from COVID. That's an annualized rate of 730,000 deaths per year. The CDC estimates that the worst flu season in the last 10 years was 2017-2018 and that Flu caused 52,000 deaths.
That puts the current death rate of COVID at 14x where a bad flu season would be.
Perhaps it is his judgment that the level of attention COVID is getting is still not warranted, but one must start with the basic facts correct in order to make this judgment.
Unfortunately our education (comparing US and UK) are both not going to be solved by increased tech imo (not in the sense of tablets for all). But as I've said for years we should be seriously looking at airflow in educational establishments, as well as improved buildings.
Having been on both sides of the lecture hall and teaching environment, a well ventilated room helps huge amounts for concentration and informed debate. Air quality can drag down the room and atmosphere as well as being unhealthy.
I think this post gets something else wrong.. The economic story. The claim in the post is "covid is over, so everything will reset to precovid levels." I think there's a much bigger correction happening potentially that will be worse than "we're right back where we started".
- Omicron is comparable to a really bad cold for most people
- The vaccines reduce the risk of death for only a very short time, then the effect wears off, and they have unknown long-term sequelae
- Living like it's 2020 is not sustainable
If there's one thing predicable about the the pandemic, it's that it is unpredictable. I, too, hope that omicron is the much-hyped final wave, just like delta was supposed to have been. But to declare that it definitely, totally, is the final wave right now seems a bit premature.
1) Natural immunity is quite robust: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
Now, that is according the CDC whose governance has sought to give the impression that natural immunity is not so great (perhaps for generally good reasons). But now they see fit to give the impression that natural immunity is pretty substantial, clearly giving much more immunity weight than vaccine alone. So that is some clear signal just reading between the lines.
2) Seroprevelance indicating natural exposure is quite high overall in the U.S. and especially so in some regions, see for yourself what that looks like in your own region: https://covid19serohub.nih.gov/ (nucleocapsid is proxy for exposure and recovery)
Now, you might look at those numbers and see only 30% or so, but realize this is end of October statistics. Many (dare I say all?) regions in the U.S. have seen en exceptional wave since those statistics were collected. I would be confident to say 50% - 100% increase in statistics of recovered.
edit: I'm just some guy on the internet so if you think this stuff is wrong or misrepresented, call my ass out. If you are not capable of parsing the references I give you, assume I have bad intentions.
I'm not very optimistic about that one.
This has nothing to do with employer thinking and trying to predict covid.
This is all about some managers feeling lonely. And even as it sounds cynical, I really mean it and think it is factor in this. The other factors are also some management feeling less in control or thinking it will be more productive. But imo, them feeling lonely, especially those who have no real social life outside of work, is a factor.
People love to pretend that companies and management are all about rationality, but they are not. Their emotions influence their actions a lot (so are developers emotions etc).
Every time restrictions relax, and we rush back to capital-N Normal, cases rise, deaths rise, hospitals fill up, and it’s nothing but “Surprised Pikachu” faces from politicians! We keep not learning, over and over.
I don’t know what it’s going to take to snap us out of this trance and accept lifestyle changes. A “9/11 quantity of deaths” every 3 days is apparently not enough.
