Feb 2022 is when they started transitioning from pcr's for everyone to home tests.
May 2023 is when they declared an "end to the public emergency" and ended the emergency and stopped requiring hospitals to test people.
This year they stopped requiring hospitals to report much of anything.
I guess this is just how it's going to be from now on, and we'll have to figure out what damage it's doing by analyzing excess death rates
BTW many parts of the US (Hawaii and SF, and my little town apparently) and world are experiencing a pretty sizeable covid surge at the moment. Most likely from the FLiRT variant, and there is also a different variant coming up called kp.3, so that's fun.
So COVID is literally just forever? It mutates too fast for vaccines. What the fuck. Is there anything that could be done at this point?
Lol we could still just do an actual lockdown (worldwide) for a few weeks and be in vastly better shape, but it would ruin capitalism.
If every country adopted China's zero covid policy we'd probably have been fine.
Also you would have like 20 chud shooters a day
If the US had an actual legitimate pandemic response like other countries, with checks and supplies being delivered on the regular, I think the chuds would be much more manageable. Of course, it would require any media pushing anti-whatever rhetoric would need to be taken to Central Park. But I think those first couple months of unified 'flatten the curve' discourse shows how powerful they are in shaping public response when they're not trying to commit social murder to make the line go up.
Obviously, this is never happening again under capitalism, which makes the anti-mask, 'back to normal', "leftists" all the more... mind-blowing.
You're not wrong
That's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
End capitalism, global co-operation, lockdowns, mobilise emergency forces and army to help, strict enforcement. Pandemic would be over in 3 years max
There's plenty of things we could be doing to make the world safer from covid (and other respritory viruses), but only very marginalized peoples are fighting for them. Better air filtration. Widespread use of Far-UV technology (UV lights that are harmless to humans, but absolutely destroy viruses and mold). Better sick time policies.
None of these are a solution, but we could probably live in a world with even less viral influence than 2019 if we really tried.
Yeah, the pandemic is "over", now it's just endemic, so you can get COVID randomly in the same way you can catch the flu.
even the WHO disagrees, you have been successfully propagandized and are now repeating it
From what I could understand, while it does indeed mutate very fast (like the common cold), it tends to select for milder symptoms.
There is no evidence that I'm aware of stating that milder symptoms reduce long covid susceptibility.
To add to this, the vaccines and (to a much lesser extent) prior infection immunity are reducing the dangers from a single infection. The virus isn't getting any weaker. And transmissibility is way up, thus your chance of getting covid is much higher. As research suggests that one's chance of long covid is 10% per infection, more infections are only going to increase one's risk of serious, long term problems.
instead of almost dying and then being handicapped now you get to not notice the illness and become handicapped
Which partially explains why even where it was taken seriously there's no alarms going off due to the new variant.
There's no selection process for milder symptoms. Think about it. Regardless of symptoms people aren't masking and long covid only manifests itself after months.