Hell yeah let’s bring back Covid discourse I missed this stuff

given the relatively low level of testing this is difficult to say data-wise, but they're almost definitely low-low or they'd be obvious in bulk statistics

Wastewater data has it about half as high as the most recent winter surge, which strikes me as an improvement but not so low that we never have to think about it again.

Looking at the local data for Boston it looks like the last Winter surge was roughly equivalent to the previous year's summer surge, so half that is pretty good honestly.

i'm not arguing with the core point i basically just don't like the numbers methodologically

The low levels of excess mortality, as best you can estimate the counterfactual anyway, also suggests that the people it’s killing now are in bad enough shape something else would get them soon anyway Which is still not great but is a notable change from 2020

yes, it's specifically the covid v flu comparison where i don't think data quality is actually high enough to resolve this. but also, "it is difficult to tell if this is worse than flu or not" is vastly better than the previous state of affairs

Also worse than not having another flu floating around but like They’re not proposing serious attempts to get rid of respiratory viruses, they’re proposing the virtuous wear a hair shirt

This is also where the emphasis on repetitive speech is coming from in the original quote. One must *say the words.*

If yelling about covid went along with a laser focus on advocating for indoor ventilation standards and UVC lighting and vaccine research I wouldn’t find it nearly so annoying

I do think there were two real containment tragedies: the failure to achieve SARS 1 with SARS 2, and the failure for vaccination to achieve smallpox-grade or even measles-grade eradication. Things might, in fact, have been different; they might have reached a clearer endpoint.

They didn’t, tho.

Woops!

i think the zero-covid folks almost represent a mirror version of MAHAism in that both believe what they do primarily due to having been insulated from the reality of how disease has worked for all of history for the majority of their lives by the power of modern medical science.

It's this, it's exactly this. They view the existence of contagious disease as a genocide directed against them by Joe Biden

like, the underlying impulse of both is the basic belief that health is the natural and normal condition of humanity, and that there must, surely, be some Solution that will bring it about. The idea that there can be something that harms you and that we can’t stop is incomprehensible to them.

>>>The idea that there can be something that harms you and that we can’t stop Historically, that has been the local regiment

Hello there www.amazon.com/1618-1648-St...

these folks are on an island in the pacific in 1989 praying to the emperor

I do not understand this impulse man. It’s embarrassing for the ostensibly ‘pro-science’ side

I honestly think part of this stems from the acute phase of the pandemic leaving a ton of unresolved psychological damage in its wake. It's obvious with the people who never made it past denial, less so when it's people still halfway stuck in that time.

It seems like a lot of them were under the false impression that the point of the lockdowns etc. was to eliminate covid altogether and feel like everybody else callously betrayed that goal, when it was simply never the goal to begin with.

Entertaining COVID zero was a mistake. I'm not an epidemiologist, but everything reputable I've ever read on the subject suggests the opportunity to eliminate COVID ended after it stopped being a regional Chinese thing, at the VERY latest.

I remember Ralph Baric saying on an episode of TWiV as early as like March 2020 that we would probably have a "three year pandemic" until we achieved protection from serious illness either through natural transmission or through a vaccine.

It was clear to me from the outset that the idea of all the interventions was to slow transmission to (1) keep the medical system from collapsing and (2) buy time for a vaccine. I thought everybody else shared this understanding, but apparently some did not!

I think there was a real thought that we could eradicate the condition with lockdowns and an adequate vaccine. Unfortunately it didn’t work out. Those other things were important given lack of PPE and morgue trucks though

Virtue signaling.

I mean, yeah, but this just begs the question of how and why this became a ‘virtue’ that people thought they should promote and publicly express fealty to, over and above like, for example, something like the Asian norm of masking when ill.

Like. The data does not support the idea that continuing to mask makes sense or is effective, nor does the continued presence of the disease in any numbers whatsoever mean that the pandemic never really came to an end. So what?

The best I can come up with is “misapplied sympathy for more vulnerable populations leading to doctrinaire insistence on ineffective measures to contain a disease that’s effectively become milder than influenza”

They classify Dr Fauci and other public health experts into the same boat as RFK Jr and other covid deniers now.

long covid is debilitating and a huge burden on our society, especially to children

it is hard to say "at the height of the pandemic." That's seven syllables and isn't even specific. Covid Era is four and tells you exactly when.

I understand and am (sort of) sympathetic to the desire to communicate with people who are still affected with long covid, etc but at a certain point this is just miscommunication and so divorced from what ppl are experiencing they'll discount the person communicating this way entirely.

Vibedemic

You have to understand that deaths aren't the thing for these people, it's the idea that COVID is a uniquely debilitating disease "airborne aids" which also fucks with your brain and makes you a fascist/not worried about COVID

The research from 2020/2021 that they cite to argue as much has external validity issues: no one at the time had much exposure to strains of this virus, and now (at large cost!) ~everyone does You’d expect different, presumably less severe, effects

Vaccine-derived and natural exposure btw, some of this shades into antivaxx

That was also true in 2019 and look what happened. LOOK. WHAT. HAPPENED.

My personal experience: as a hospital worker, I’m masking primarily because of the flu, not covid (But I’m ultimately masking because of both)

If I’m delivering drugs to the ER, hell yeah I’m masking up. Idk what funky diseases people are bringing in.

and is death the only bad outcome? attack rate of longcovid is >>> that for long term symptoms of flu and polio

comparative studies between COVID and flu for post-acute illness complications have been extremely mixed, e.g. this study from South Korea that compared people infected in 2020 (with no prior immunity) to flu and found higher rates of complications in flu. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I’m not trying to cherry pick here - there are studies that find a higher rate of post covid conditions than post flu, but it extremely depends on your case definition, sample set, etc. it is not as simple as “covid has indisputably and remarkably higher rates of post viral illness than flu.”

I tend to err on the side of “what do we have for those hit by it?” rn neurological and GI symptoms appear to linger more after COVID than the cardiovascular effects after flu and for both cases we have approximately nothing available for patients besides doctors dismissing their issues

The issue is that helping people who continue to suffer is not necessarily related to the covid advocacy that insists that covid is as severe a crisis now as it was in 2020-2021.

that is a fair point there’s good work coming out of Putrino and Iwasaki labs regardless of the zerocovid crowd I should prob organize my thoughts on this sometime—main thing I’m surprised by is the glacial pace of antivirals development

12. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

6. www.neurologyadvisor.com/news/covid-1... 7. www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/iss... 8. www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/va-...