Well, Ukraine cured covid.

That's a good way to remind oneself how much our perception of a problem is manipulated by the news. That works both ways. They can blackhole a major event, or put a giant microscope on top of a tiny event. You may decide to trust or distrust the news, but you can't decide to hear about something you don't know is happening, and likewise, even if you think another "it's the end of the world" coverage is bullshit, it will still occupy the debate, and therefore your mind.

That's one theory. Another is that people just have a finite amount of emotion they can spend worrying about something before they go back to their lives. Even if objectively there is still something worth worrying about.

More like 95% of people have caught covid and are vaxxed so at this point they’re just not interested in letting it dictate their lives. Much different place this year in terms of immunity and exasperation than prior years.

No grand conspiracies are needed.

If this is the case, it’s interesting that people are apparently now not bothered by an excess death rate near that of COVID peaks.

The things they show you on primetime news is what will bother you. ;)

Turns out uninformed is better than misinformed. That way, at least you are free to make your own opinions and decisions based on your observations and lived experience.

I agree. We had 3 years of narrative shaping and statistics.

That’s a big oversimplification of what people were worried about during the prior years.

While taking substantial precautions to limit the spread there was that many deaths and hospitals were on the brink of collapse. More spread would have started a terrible rationing of care leading to a much higher spike in excess mortality, especially in immune naive populations.

Now despite almost everyone moving on from precautions, due to substantial immunity, we’re no longer on the precipice of spiraling out of control.

Yeah it’s not nearly as newsworthy because we’re not on the edge of a cliff anymore. It wasn’t just the death rate, it was the way it could have exploded.

That’s a hard argument to make, at least here in the UK, because it looks like the strain of restarting normal healthcare with a 2+ year backlog of untreated health issues will doom the NHS.

Also - you can argue that fewer covid precautions may have resulted in a collapsed healthcare system. However, in reality, the NHS occupancy rates for 2020-2021 were double-digit less than previous years.

In America, more people have already died of covid in January than normally die of the flu in a whole year. At some point "baseline" is going to rise to incorporate this new thing.

I recall watching a video years ago about coffins for some reason. It mentioned how in the US the coffin industry has to make much bigger coffins since people are much bigger. The reporter somewhat jokingly asked "Is there a coffin season?" like chocolate is for Valentines/Hallow'en or toys for Christmas. The owner of the coffin business said "Yes flu season is our busy time." their sales double. That documentary was years before COVID hit.

it’s been about 3x as bad as flu in January: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

edit: which is higher than some recent annual flu totals they have, but considerably lower than estimates of annual flu deaths I’ve seen elsewhere? I feel like I’m missing some context for interpreting these numbers.

In many countries, including the US, death reporting is a bit of a mess. Those numbers will likely continue to tick up as numbers come in.

In Ireland, at one point in the pandemic, a lot of attention was paid to rip.ie, an obituaries website, because the non-hospital official death count was _months_ in arrears; the mechanisms around death reporting were just not designed for realtime analysis.

I’m just used to seeing annual flu death counts that look more like this: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html. My first guess would be that it’s an issue of “confirmed” vs. “estimated” - and I’m sure actual covid-related deaths can similarly be estimated to exceed confirmed these days - but I don’t know exactly what the methodology is for each.

Ah, yeah, these are estimated numbers. Estimated numbers aren't usually used for covid (or at least weren't during the pandemic; this may change); really everything was a bit too uncertain for decent estimates for the first year or so, and there would be political sensitivities to using an estimate as a headline figure.

For some sense of the scale, the WHO estimates 15 million deaths globally by end 2021, vs 5.5 million confirmed in the same period. But generally the WHO uses the confirmed figure; the estimate would rile up conspiracy theorists. I'd expect, given the situation in the US, that the CDC would be even more politically sensitive.

CDC has always provided estimated excess deaths throughout the pandemic. They have correction factors for each jurisdiction by week, according to the typical delays in reporting.

Measures to mitigate COVID are also effective (arguably more effective) on the flu. So the years where society was trying to stop COVID had much lower than usual flu rates.

The most consistent / comparable stats over time seem to come from the wastewater monitoring. Those graphs are currently scary for the US and in multiple states they're going through the biggest outbreak since the beginning.