Yes, that middle ground is stopping all required COVID mitigations and let people live their lives as they did before. COVID is here to stay. Time to start treating it like every other endemic disease.

ps Pretty sure the comment you responded to was sarcasm.

We should require ventilation improvements in buildings. Small cost that makes life better for everyone that uses the building.

Should also try to push back against a culture of going to work and similar when blatantly symptomatic (I don't want a cold, I don't care if it is mild, I don't want it).

> ps Pretty sure the comment you responded to was sarcasm

I think it was more mockery than sarcasm. It’s a pretty common insult to make fun of people that wear masks, quarantine, etc. as being afraid or weak. It’s not a constructive or interesting viewpoint.

>To an epidemiologist, an endemic infection is one in which overall rates are static — not rising, not falling. More precisely, it means that the proportion of people who can get sick balances out the ‘basic reproduction number’ of the virus, the number of individuals that an infected individual would infect, assuming a population in which everyone could get sick. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00155-x

covid isn't endemic

Except it is not like every other endemic disease. It is very contagious, systemic (i.e. more than just a respiratory infection), has a propensity to cause serious long term effects, and immunity against it seems to wane.

People lead their lives under all sorts of necessary restrictions (e.g. seatbelts, motorbike helmets). Unfortunately these extra restrictions highlighted that uncomfortable and inevitable fact. Some people have been able to deal with this better than others.

I stopped caring about any of this over a year ago, and more people are joining me every day. Nobody is going in the opposite direction.

Normal people will win through sheer attrition.

Win what? More sickness? You will care very much if debilitating long Covid happens to you. It is easy to be carefree when things are going well.

I think he's right. People are giving up on covid mitigations a lot faster than people are dying of covid. Every day I see fewer people wearing masks than before, and death rates are trending in the opposite direction.

That is pretty much what we have done in the UK.