And that the deaths dropped almost to zero after the vaccine became available....

Equal to the number of Americans who died in every war combined.

People are still being disabled and dying from it because the virus never went away, leaders just sacrificed caution because of a lack of political will. They don’t talk about it bc then they’d have to address the current threat they pretend is over. We need masks, clean air, and updated vax access

It’s also weird how the government and media consistently downplay the long term harms of COVID and focus on or only mention the short term, acute stage. And I’m talking about 2020 through to now.

Many of whom would have lived if they would have listened to the scientists at CDC like Fauci.

We really do live in a stupid country. People accept every terrible thing that happens to them. We whine for a minute and then move on like it never happened. In between school shootings, complaining is all that people will do. Nobody wants to take any risks to fix it.

Seventy-seven million Americans voted to elect a narcissistic con-man to be President a second time. We are an indisputably ignorant nation.

Among other things, this is intimately tied up with the post-Cold-War perception of being The Greatest Country In The World. Meaningful solutions to real problems imply that we have real problems, and we can’t have real problems if we’re The Greatest.

and counting.

This has always stuck me as not just weird but unhealthy--almost everyone couldn't turn the page fast enough. This is another area where the "return to norms" faction of the Dems did us no favors.

I got in an argument here with a lady who wanted to defend Biden and blame Trump entirely for everything that’s happened with COVID. We lost 400K under Trump to COVID & 800K under Biden. But that’s all Trump’s fault, apparently. 😒

Um... trump actively spread false information about covid, claiming it wasn't that serious & promoting harmful 'cures.' Biden did what he could but by then, there was a ton of antipathy toward vaccines, masks, & shutdowns and people could not be forced to do the right thing.

They believed Trump’s lies and didn’t get vaccinated and died. So yeah, it’s Trump’s fault, ma’am.

Yep - convinced his minions to ignore science. They are still at it.

The fact that we're still debating whether trump is entirely responsible or Biden was also responsible says it all.

Trump unleashed ignorant conspiracy theory on traumatized nation - that, combined with his full frontal assault on medical science - his defiance of the simple act of wearing a mask to prevent the spread, is why the death rate from COVID in the US far exceeded other industrialized nations. His fault

Exactly. He claimed it was no worse than a cold, lied about his own case (which was far more serious than he let on), and promoted fake 'cures.' Biden did what needed to be done but could not force stupid people to get themselves & their kids vaxxed

Yup, and it was awful that he politicized public health like that and convinced half the country that we should just abandon any attempt to take care of one another. But when Biden embraced the same idea, that became bipartisan, and now there’s almost no one wearing masks or doing anything else.

It was bad enough when Trump made it a partisan issue, but now most people talk about COVID as if it’s over and not an ongoing crisis that’s still killing hundreds of people just in this country every week and permanently disabling who even knows how many more, and that’s on Biden.

And Trump managed to expedite those 400k deaths in less than one year into the pandemic, letting the virus to do its thing and leaving the already sick to die on his successor's 4 year watch. If we want to be coarsely reductive about this,Trump's kill rate was twice as high.

😪

this topic might be radioactive forever, tbh

Donald Trump’s team did a survey and learned people didn’t like the Covid-19 pandemic, and they translated that to, people want us to pretend the pandemic isn’t happening rather than, people want us to end the pandemic outbreak. And of course the first one is much easier to do, so there you go

It isn't a number that the media ever talk about is part of the problem. When they do they get challenged by the right and Cuckoos.

I'm still 100% convinced that Trump's proclamation that COVID was "the new Democrat hoax" put the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans squarely on him. His worst crime by a long shot (that we know of) yet he'll never face a single indictment for it.

MAGA Republicans will tell you it never happened. Or that masks killed people because they couldn’t get enough oxygen.

How did surgeons operate all those years without dying?🙄

The same thing happened after the 1918 pandemic when 2% of the US population died. It’s sometimes called the forgotten pandemic for that reason. It’s as if we’re engaging in mass avoidance because of the pain.

My dad is dead. So I talk about it. Feels bad that no one seems to care, though.

I’m sorry for your loss. My dad is dead too

I am so sorry for yours. May his memory be a blessing.

And more coming because of the meritless MAGA JFK, Jr’s stupidity, cruelty, and hatred of facts and science

It's super weird. Goes to show you how the right-wing controls the market on conversation. The only topics that gain traction are from the right. I think it's because it's so easy to tear things down. Easy to bitch and very hard to be responsible and optimistic. That's all I can think.

Try living with someone who didn't believe COVID was any worse than the flu and it was all a government conspiracy. So long douch bag.

I talk about it. I talk about lots of things, but the population as a whole, doesn't. They should talk about how Trump, allowed it to spread as fast and far as it did and then refused to send medical supplies to Democratic states. Michigan was one of the hardest hit as a result.

People wanted to shy away from the horror of it, and the GOP gave them the excuse they needed: "comorbidities." Now we're seeing that same logic to explain away dead Gazan children.

Or more.

Because damn near the entire world is in deep denial about just how bad covid was, is, and continues to be.

I lost a relative to one of those truly gruesome pre vaccine Covid deaths. I can’t believe this administration wants to bring that risk back. Maybe we need editorials and videos reminding people? The points to right more deaths during Biden acknowledge those were mostly in unvaccinated red states.

I think about this a lot. It's like we have a national amnesia or something. Of course it's also true that things have gone downhill fast recently and people are overwhelmed.

And more WILL die from disease now that the lead QUACK, RFK Jr., is in office!

Mostly on Trump's watch because he refused to tell the public about it until he had to

no, more under Biden

Only on your T.V. they did...there was another reason why.

That's just a warm up to what's coming. Any foreign entity could introduce a number of crippling diseases to our society. Our nation is at the weakest point ever. The Regime is attacking our own citizens. Vaccination rates have plummeted putting U.S. all at risk. Prep for the next health crisis.

Yes, under dumps watch!!!!!!!!

Soon to be 2 million.

With n-of-2 (this and Spanish flu) it seems it's almost more a feature of human (or maybe just modern) society, rather than something particular about 2025 American and COVID.

With Trump and RFK jr. in power, could be a drop in the bucket.

It would be a 20-story Vietnam War Memorial

Because we would then have to address the fact that certain communities were neglected by design.

Drives me wild. Someone will bring ups something happening (usually labor related) and I will say well, like 1.2 million people died. And I need to clarify what I mean! Never forget 9/11, but a 9/11 per hour and then per day for a while goes right in the memory hole.

COVID is the new Sandy Hook. People who die are suckers and losers apparently.

I still say the numbers where rigged. Globally as well as locally. They downplayed and undercounted how many they murdered through their lies, disinfo and bad policies. All intentional.

they are trying to give us a second chance

And how where we are now is because it collectively broke our brains. Not connecting anger towards inflation to COVID has been an absolute failure of our press.

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic"

2/3rds of them turned out to be Republicans lulled into false complacency about masking & social distancing, or scared by conspiracies out of getting vaccinated. Plenty of demographers posit their idiotic self-exterminations may be why Biden beat Trump in 2020. Can’t wait for RFK’s birdflu epidemic.

Lost my brother in law.

It affected the midterms (2020 and 2022)

The guy demanding a peace prize had a big hand in it.

I stopped 10 wars and saved a few lives. I let covid kill a million but I deserve the nobel.🙄

The MSM stopped reporting about it because it got boring (much like every prior weeks mass shooting). I swear it was the right that was paranoid about Orwell just a few years ago but now they can’t get enough of the memory hole approach to denial.

Repubs and the corporate media would rather talk about how Ashli Babbit deserves full military honors for being an insurrectionist.

Donald Trump is a massive murderer.

A massive collective trauma that seemingly everyone decided to ignore or deny can't be healthy

and hundreds still die every month from it

I think one under-covered aspect of that is that 700,000+ of those people died under Biden. If he had shown genuine leadership, how many of those people might have lived?

By the time Biden got into office, a lot of the damage had been done. The anti-science stance of the last year of Trump, the endorsement of people who refused to do anything to stop the spread, that all ensured it was seeded through the country and that the death toll would rise whoever won.

I agree to a certain extent, which is why I would never hold him responsible for all the deaths. But he absolutely did not just "follow the science." Biden followed the money, and deferred to corporate leaders desperate to force people to get back to work.

Not arguing that at all. There was more he could have done, but even if he'd been 100% correct on the things he could have done, the possibility of doing those things would have been severely impeded by the previous 10 months of malicious.

But most people on the left were still wearing masks until Biden told them to stop. If he had been honest and said we aren’t going to sacrifice disabled people and everyone’s long term health for capitalism, I think a lot of folks would still be wearing them.

Anti-mask stuff was ingrained by the end of 2024, just like "open the schools" was being pushed by ostensibly liberal organizations and media. I stopped wearing a mask despite being in risk categories, but not because of Biden, just because it gets old. But then I'm fully vaxxed and never had COVID.

Biden isn’t the only person to blame here, but he was the one with the most power to help or harm the American people. I think he really failed us, and not for the last time.

But would you have stopped if Dem leaders & the majority of folks around you were still wearing them?

I wore mine diligently for a long time. The better part of two years, I think. We’d all be better off if we had insisted that anyone with cold symptoms wear a mask.

We made a trip to NYC in December 2021, nearly two years after COVID hit the US. Masking was pretty prevalent. It was still required at the events we went to and in a lot of restaurants.

We should’ve stayed at that level much longer.

We wore masks in public places probably longer than a lot of the people around us. I had to look up when Biden told people not to wear masks because we were doing what we thought was safest, since a couple people in the family were immunocompromised. We were still wearing masks in December 2021.

There were two main points—Apr 2021 he said anyone vaccinated could unmask because vaccinated people couldn’t spread Covid (false). Then in late 2022 on 60 minutes. Immunocompromised folks were dying at the rate of 500-1000/week. And today more and more folks are getting disabled by long covid.

I only tested positive for Covid once, but I'm pretty certain I had it for about six weeks at one point a few years ago. Ever since, I have had pain in my upper respiratory area when I do anything strenuous, at least until I get warmed up. Not the worst symptom, but I believe it's long Covid.

MAGA brings it up often, to remind us that it was "All Biden's fault".

Meanwhile, MAGA resisted not only the vaccine but every standard public health measure to control the spread of Covid, and the economic support which helped people stay alive with covid, and especially post-covid, was not continued by the Biden administration.

I will always remember the morgue trucks, the mass grave in NYC. I feel the super quick vaccine development contained that fire before things became Spanish Flu esque

It’s still one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. It still kills hundreds of people a week. And as good as the vaccines are at preventing the worst outcomes from acute infection, they don’t stop infection and they do little to prevent Long COVID. COVID may still be worse than the 1918 flu.

And we talked about the 3000 who died on 9/11 for at least a decade. The cultural response to COVID has been really fascinating and awful

And probably about half of them completely unnecessarily, purely as a result of mostly right wing anti vax hysteria.

Everyone knows someone who died of it but somehow they still want to say it's no big deal and just a cold. Olympic gold medal cognitive dissonance.

and the response was over done.

Question: Can anyone name a large, well known memorial to the victims of Spanish Flu? That thought occurred to me years ago during lockdown. I can't think of one in any large city I am familiar with.

Here in Spain there so many COVID memorial plaques, whether on the front of historic government buildings in the capital or this little churchyard in the Pyrenees.

Beautiful. We will never forget them. ♥️

Or the hundred or so who continue to, every week

It's a lot more than that.

To me, trumps failure to lead us TOGETHER thru that bizarre experience - his weaponization of ignorance - his blaming of others deeply exacerbated the trauma and the obvious hatred magats have for the rest of us. It sealed our fate as a divided nation.

Why would people who live in a culture of death talk about any specific deaths or groups? We are steeped in death, mostly violent or preventable or both. Needless death is the background radiation of our lives. We are completely inured to it.

I knew at least two. How about you?

I feel lucky to only have known one, and that briefly - the husband of my mother-in-law's cousin, I think.

Weird how we pretend that we are suffering no aftereffects of that fact.

This is a top down thing.

They’re denying it. They’re trying to say that people who died from it really just died of their preexisting conditions. And they LOVE to spread the lie that hospitals received bonus government dollars for saying people died from covid. In other words casting doubt on each diagnosis of covid.

Excess deaths show that not only were deaths not over reported, they were under reported.

I’m sure. I hate their disinformation. I consider Trump to be a mass murderer

They're also saying that it's not Netanyahu's fault that children (and all living beings, btw) are starving in Gaza because they had preexisting conditions.

Well yeah.That’s a given.I can be outraged by many horrible things simultaneously and still want to save democracy

Is anyone surprised that the cowardly media is not mentioning it? Quite sure that among all of the threatening letters they have received from the WH, Covid is high on the banned words lists. Just above polio and the measles.

Coping mechanism. Sweep it under the rug and memory hole it.

Great point. Are there any memorials?

Sadly it seems people have collective amnesia about anything of relevance. The administration has a military takeover of the capital, a likely pedophile and known rapist is in the White House, ice continues to violate rights unhindered, gun violence is still an issue, and so on.

Another thing that’s not talked about is that according to John Hopkins and the WHO, the death toll was 2.5% - 3% which makes Covid as lethal as Spanish Flu. The official US figure is .8% but that’s nonsense. Someone’s lying and it’s a fair bet who. They debated the difference >

between died with way and died from. Now we are finding out that Covid causes all sorts of additional issues. Covid related appendicitis, strokes and heart issues. A lot of those died with, or died from; died because of Covid. The systematic obfuscations of medical data is extraordinary…

Sone of the confusion is because it was new, they errant sure how bad it was going to be. They got vaccines on line and the worst of the bell curve was negated. The right interpreted that as Covid not being a serious issue. Fing is!

bsky.app/profile/heal...

And those numbers collapsed after the vaccine was finally and properly rolled out by the Biden Administration. Another Biden accomplishment we never hear about. Not even from the Democrats.

incorrect, twice as many died after the vaccine than before.

Incorrect. Actually we hit 700,000 dead by the time the vaccine was fully available and fully distributed with another 400,000 dead afterwards with the vast majority of those being unvaccinated folks.

do provide the data

Play the vids showing millions infected with C19 waiting for respirators, lining hospital hallways, bodies piling up in morgues. The fat lying criminal grifter pedo is using lying weirdo worm-brained grifter #RFKJr to stop us getting C19 vax to kill us, to stop protests Release the #EpsteinFiles

People memory holed the Spanish flu epidemic as well. I used to wonder why, now I don't.