Covid is endemic and increasingly less scary.

> I find that very scary, close to a "giving up" mentality.

Everyone can have a vaccine, there are multiple highly effective therapies and even the risk of death without intervention to the majority of people (under 55) is already astronomically low.

To put it in perspective, if you’re under 30 with asthma, your risk of death from the original covid variant (not the less lethal variants) is the same as being struck by lightening.

We haven’t given up, we’ve successfully mitigated fatalities until we have effective treatments and a vaccine. Now it’s time to move on.

I'm 40, and last month I caught some bug from the kids, was in bed for 36 hours with a high temperature, but then was fine after that. PCR tests say it wasn't covid.

This this month I did catch covid. I'm not even sure I'd class it as a bad cold, it was far less debilitating than the bug I had in November - although seems to be lasting longer (4 days of coughing so far). My last vaccine was in July (went positive literally the morning by booster was due).

I suspect most people have either had covid or know someone close who has, and see that the main problem is the effects of restrictions -- not going to work while waiting for results (leading to public transport cancellations for example), kids being kept off even though they feel fine. (One symptom of covid is a headache, but that's because I've been trapped in a house with 2 very energetic very excited children for the last 10 days)

Throw in the constant disregard for the rules that the government has shown, and I can't see the acceptance of restrictions surviving in the UK past January.

The brexity type people I'm 'freinds' with on facebook began covid all in favour of restrictions and vaccines. They are fortunatly still in favour of vaccines, but are increasingly shifting to being anti restrictions. Further restrictions will push them more into the Piers Corbyn echosphere, and that's a bad thing.

> brexity type people I'm 'freinds' with on facebook began covid all in favour of restrictions and vaccines

My brexity friends started covid feb 2020 - "There have been no white people die of Covid, white genetics are superior to chinese genetics and immune to covid - this is an EU conspiracy to punish the UK for brexit" - since then a few died of covid, most lost parent / aunt / uncle / family member.

Its still 100% an EU plot to destroy brexit.

I think dying from COVID is the least scary part. The long COVID is way more common in my area. People stay ill for longer or lose fitness. We have one acquaintance that now has issues finding the right words. Personally I lost a few points of eye sight in just the three weeks. (Coincidentally we measured just before I got ill.) other friends just are tired quickly all the time.

So I think preventing all that loss of quality of life is also worthwhile.

How do you propose to prevent it? The virus will be around forever and everyone will occasionally be exposed.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

I’m not sure we can completely prevent it. But maybe we can keep a significant portion of the population unaffected while the strains decrease is lethality and effect.

Whether that is a net benefit over the economic consequences of lockdowns and secondary effects of that I don’t know. I wouldn’t even know how to begin answering that question.

I assume increasing poverty in the world would also count in that equation. I was just watching a travel show today, and the guy said Cuba went from 4 million visitors/year to almost none this year. Can you imagine how much poverty that loss of tourism income brings to an already poor population. And poverty quickly translates to increased excess mortality.

This is absurd. You lost eyesight and you think it's because of "long covid"?

I admit that the statements could have been sharper but I don’t directly relate losing eyesight to long covid.

I’m just trying to say that there are other effects than death which seem more likely and impactful for longer for youthful people as they are more likely to get one of the other effects than they are likely to die from COVID.

In this case my eye care provider has seen more cases where patients lost eye sight after covid. Typically this amount of loss of eyesight is not observed over a single period of three weeks.

It's a thing as is erectile dysfunction.

> we’ve successfully mitigated fatalities

Mitigated, how exactly?

>Everyone can have a vaccine, there are multiple highly effective therapies

Well sorry to say that with Omicron that all bets are off. Two out of 3 mAbs don't work and the third isn't so great. And the covid pills are still a long ways off.

You think that stopping contact tracing is a low risk option? I am less sure, given the news about infection rates in the NT which has much lower vaccine uptake, and in a population with co-morbidities.