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.
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.