I can see why people worry about this stuff given the deluge of fear-based messaging we’ve been subjected to, but suspect that the reality is far more boring.
2020: "It's no more severe than a cold"
2021: "Coronaviruses do not mutate" and "You won't catch it more than once"
2022: "Viruses become less deadly over time... so if we just bear with it a bit longer..."
> 2022: "Viruses become less deadly over time... so if we just bear with it a bit longer..."
I can't remember anyone saying that viruses don't mutate.
And nobody is currently saying "bear with it a bit longer". The media has just moved onto Ukraine as the next crisis fit for news saturation.
As long as healthcare systems are not being overwhelmed, there is no rationale for any further restrictions.
We just accept it as part of this risk of living, like using motorways, which are one of the biggest killers amongst younger cohorts.
In 2020-21 there were plenty of articles claiming stuff like:
"The coronavirus is not mutating significantly as it circulates through the human population, according to scientists who are closely studying the novel pathogen’s genetic code. "
You can google the phrase for the source.
That phrase quickly "mutated" into "Coronaviruses don't mutate" on social media. I have examples, but I don't know how to link them while maintaining privacy.
Risk is a fact of life. And arguably your wish for everyone to wear masks and have compulsory vaccinations focuses disproportionately on one particular, small, risk, in comparisons to other much larger risks, such as travelling on public roads.
Road traffic accidents are a bigger killer of young people, and yet no-one is calling for the speed limit to be drastically reduced.
I think the preoccupation with COVID comes from particular human fear of viruses (invisible, lack of control), rather than an actual measured response assessing all the risks we deal with everyday living normally.
Actually they have been, and fairly successfully - speed limits have been gradually and significantly reduced over the last few decades in built-up areas in many parts of the world. And I totally agree we need to do more to contain the risks of driving.
However, infectious diseases ARE qualitatively different from risks from traffic accidents, as the latter can't spread exponentially.
As far as there being "no reason" for any restrictions goes, the reality is there's no way to be sure the healthcare system won't reach a point where healthcare workers are constantly overworked just in order to be able to provide the extra care required for infected patients. If cases are not steadily decreasing (or at steady but negligible levels), that risk always exists. All restrictions/regulations have some balance of pros vs cons, and it's the job of governments to determine for which of them the balance is sufficiently on the "pro" side to enact and enforce them.
> However, infectious diseases ARE qualitatively different from risks from traffic accidents, as the latter can't spread exponentially.
Which is no longer the case for COVID, hence there no longer being a rationale for restrictions.
> there's no way to be sure the healthcare system won't reach a point where healthcare workers are constantly overworked just in order to be able to provide the extra care required for infected patients.
Then that's a case for increasing resources to a level of care that is deemed appropriate by society.
Not turning society itself into a sick patient.
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/what-to-expect-fro...
Published July 6th.
The only people saying this were vaxx aficionados and Covid certificate promoters who were trying to convince the public by claiming “you only need to get vaccinated once, the certificates will have unlimited validity”
Then all of a sudden “oops actually you need boosters, the virus magically mutated, literally noone could have predicted that!”
Remember what you want, but there’s less people here than otherwise would have been. And if you begrudge steps to reduce the spread of a very transmissible disease, well, that’s a bit cold hearted to me. Sux to be inconvenienced, but people probably prefer having living grandparents.
Would have had people singing a different tune if it turned into “sars but spreadable” and targeted those 30-50.
Of course, but it’s not like grandparents didn’t already have a habit of eventually dying. I’m a grandparent, and I full expect to die at some point. Seems like there are 1 to 1 odds of it.
There’s lots of hits when I google reefer trucks covid in both red and blue states.
3x flu deaths or so at the start. But nobody carries that much extra medical facilities so running out becomes a bad day.
Although frequently highlighted as a reason for alarm, ICUs frequently run at 95% utilization or more. That's a feature of major flu seasons too, press reports of hospitals getting overloaded. It's not great, but it's not something unique to COVID.
Nowhere ran out of ventilators, if I recall correctly. Demand for it vanished as doctors realized that the model projections were wrong, and that they'd been over-using ventilators anyway (and thus contributing to the initial spike of early deaths).
The San Antonio story you cite says this:
"We've got two slots at one of our bigger hospitals for people who pass. We need more than two. We had 14 die in the hospital this weekend. I don't want to alarm people, because they are not all COVID cases"
Again, the numbers we are talking about here are small even at the very start when doctors were unfortunately raising the death rate by over-using ventilators. A hospital needing assistance because it has a grand total of two places to put bodies is not a world-changing crisis that needed to wreck the economy, destroy people's lives and create the most totalitarian society seen in the west since WW2.
The COVID-19 pandemic has so far followed a similar trajectory to the 1889 "Russian Flu", which some believe may have been the emergence of human coronavirus OC43 (now one of a number of endemic common-cold-causing coronaviruses).