i think i saw something about how the spanish flu pandemic basically lasted for about 6 years before it became just part of the normalized, endemic millieu of diseases that seasonally flare up and kill many thousands per year, especially in communities without sufficient public health infrastructure or support. 61,000 people died in the US in the 2017-2018 flu season, which was a bad one.
this should also be a lesson for people to get their flu shots, wash their hands, and generally be hygienic because a big pile of people do get sick and die from preventable bullshit every year just because every host in the chain linking them played it fast and loose.
my ecological understanding of diseases is that selection pressures for less lethality to the host and spread more easily/quickly among hosts. so my vision of the future is one where the flu shot has a corona shot that comes with it (BOGO). if you don't get the flu-rona shot, you'll probably get sick as a dog from some asshole bringing it into your workplace, your household will get it from you, and like somebody you barely know's grandma will get pneumonia and die.
but the hospital ICU's won't be packed, everything will be open, and the spice will flow so it will be an acceptable, background level of human suffering.
Bill Burr is a huge mixed bag but his take here was pretty funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znI046F4FKg
that's exactly what all the stupid posts by dead idiots on r/hermancainawards look like.
Probably, yeah. The vaccine coverage needed to eradicate it isn't going to happen.
That being said, it's still possible to get COVID well under control without eradicating it. Zero COVID probably isn't possible, but Very Low COVID is.
Good piece on endemic COVID: https://twitter.com/KatherineJWu/status/1440401550426263559?s=20
I think this is absolutely the trajectory—endemic but less deadly.
I mean, there are so many breakthrough cases in the US alone that I think it’s simply unrealistic to not expect vaccine-resistant strains to evolve and spread. Even if the percentages are small, the raw numbers are big enough that I expect, ultimately, “escape”— whatever that means. Vaccination is obviously good, but I don’t think it could ever have been sufficient in the US; there are simply too many pressures and too little will to actually stop the spread, that vaccines as the main defense realistically never had a chance.
I don’t think it’s the end of the world or anything, nor do I trust any western states to act responsibly in any way. So, I think it’s ultimately for the best to earnestly attempt to eradicate. But it’s here to stay and any realistic strategy needs to take that into account, IMO. It’s just a shame that this can—and has been—so easily twisted into “acceptance”, ultimately functioning as something that will be used to absolve states of responsibility, in the popular mind.
I’m still masking up like fucking crazy when I’m in class with a bunch of college students for several hours a day, I don’t want one of the bad cases of covid, with the not-terribly-unlikely possibility of long term consequences. But it’s clear to me that significant risk will be present for quite some time, and that we won’t get any “clear” thresholds, only lots of slight, continuous changes.
Not sure if it works this way exactly, but it will probably be worked in to the annual flu vaccine at some point.
only as long as humans and other large mammals exist, then it'll adapt to something different so that it can live on in millipedes and teratogen-warped rats
Yeah, probably. Best hope is that vaccination and antivirals keep the death and hospitalization rate down while everyone gets exposed, and that selection favors more easily transmissible but less dangerous variants over time. We may eventually get to a point where the descendants of SARS-COV-2 are just another source of common colds. Of course, things could go the other way, too.
None of this is going on the capitalism death toll of course, vaccine inequity is not due to capitalism.
West got a taste of the new variants though which I wasn't expecting... we are all in this together after all (some more so than others) :P
